ABSTRACT
Deciphered after the imprint of its mediating sources, Genesis is then contested in its supposed affirmation. This myth o f origins is what the Enlightenment thinkers suspected all myths were: naive fictions making irreceivable monotheistic nonsense out of metaphysical conundrums on the provenance, finality and the nature of the soul. In the - pre-reflexive - Garden of neo-scholastic Catholic orthodoxy, the Serpent stands as subversive farceur: delighting in paradox and preferring his own dark lucidity; yet taking care to cloak himself in Bossuet’s cadences (‘Celui qui regne dans les cieux’ [‘He who reigns in the heavens’]), and to wear the language of jesuitical casuistry (‘Pour cueillir ce que tu voudras/Ta belle main te fut donnee’ [‘To gather what you will/Your beautiful hand was given you’]). Globally, his dissidence displaces from the human garden the traditional religious science of ontotheology (referrable to ‘L’Etre vieil et pur’), and actively replaces it with a ‘neuve science’ of autonomous divinity, representing the affirmation (‘ Je suis! je serai! ’ [ ‘I am, I will be’ ]) of modem times; a science of the self-cognisant human mind and spirit, subduing the world, bearing the burden and the grandeur of its own idealisations (‘songes’) according to its own - Hegelian - dynamic of upreaching transcendence.
