The Serpent Was Right And That’s Why It Was Brought Low
“God, the LORD, commanded the man:
You may eat from any tree in the garden,
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
On the day you eat from it, you will surely die.”
(Genesis 2:16–17)
This foundational prohibition has been read for centuries as a simple moral fable about disobedience. But what if, in reality, it were not the first “no” in history, but the first word of desire? Taken seriously as a founding myth, the story of the Garden of Eden reveals something deeper: a reflection on limits, knowledge, and the way human beings learn to desire the world.
1. The tree as structure, not as punishment
The center of Eden is not the serpent, nor the woman, nor sex, nor even the forbidden fruit. It is the limit that the Other establishes over what is permitted. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil functions as a symbolic boundary that states something essential: not everything is possible without consequences.
In Lacanian terms, the limit is not there to suffocate desire, but to produce it. And the rabbinic tradition reinforces this reading. According to the rabbis, God knew the limit would be crossed. Even the presence of the serpent is not accidental, but structurally necessary in the staging. Without a voice that questions the prohibition, the limit would remain mute. The law was not established to prevent the fall, but to make possible “the passage”: from innocence to responsibility, from eternity to time, from a given existence to an assumed one. In this context, the “death” announced does not designate an immediate biological death, but the death of the illusion of completeness, of the fantasy of fusion with the divine.
The so called “curse” of the serpent has traditionally been read as a moral sanction. However, the Hebrew text uses the term “arur”, which does not refer to a judicial punishment, but to a reconfiguration of position: to lower, to limit, to shift within the order. There is no interrogation or trial directed at the serpent, only at the humans. What occurs is a reordering of the world after the limit is crossed.
The serpent fulfills its function by introducing the question and making desire speak. But when its word promises to abolish all mediation and offer total knowledge, it can no longer occupy an elevated place. It is not annihilated, because desire needs provocation, but it is displaced so that this voice does not become the law itself. This is not punishment, but the consequence of a structural transformation.
As long as the limit exists, desire can circulate: it circles the object, skirts it, imagines it. Desire is sustained by distance. When the limit is erased or one attempts to abolish it, desire turns into jouissance, an excess that no longer orients, but consumes the subject.
The expulsion from the Garden was not a moral punishment, but a structural consequence. It was the entry into time, work, and responsibility, but also something more radical: the birth of the divided subject. They do not die biologically; what dies is the illusion of completeness. The fantasy of fusion with the world is lost, and language, sexuality, and history are gained. From that moment on, desire no longer aims at the fruit as an object, but at the lost Thing it represents. Without limit, there is no desire.
2. Not all limits are the same
To understand our relationship to the law, it helps to distinguish different levels of limit, which do not operate on the same plane and do not serve the same function.
First, there is the limit imposed by the Other that structures desire. It marks an object as inaccessible yet representable. It does not forbid everything; it introduces a distance and creates a symbolic “outside” toward which desire can be oriented. The tree of knowledge in Eden belongs to this category. It does not block desire; it sets it in motion.
Second, there is the limit that sustains the symbolic order of the social bond. Commands such as “you shall not kill” do not organize desire nor point to an object. They are not meant to be desired or transgressed, but to make coexistence possible. Their function is not erotic, but structural. Abolishing them does not liberate desire; it destroys the very field in which desire can exist as human.
Finally, there is a third level: the limit that regulates drive and access to jouissance. This limit does not organize the social world nor orient desire toward an object; it operates inside the subject as a barrier against the excess of “the real.” Although it may rely on the idea of an Other, its efficacy is internal. In Lacanian terms, the function of the “Name of the Father” acts here, not as external authority, but as a symbolic inscription that introduces a cut in the face of “deadly” jouissance. Without this limit, the subject does not enter into conflict with social law, but becomes trapped in loops of repetition, addiction, or senseless violence.
The difference between these levels is decisive. The first limit sets desire in motion. The second makes the common world possible. The third preserves the subject from the excess that disintegrates it. Confusing these planes leads to frequent errors. Not every limit oppresses. Not every prohibition eroticizes.
These levels are not theoretical abstractions. They are embodied again and again in the stories humanity has used to think itself. Let us look at their anatomy in some fundamental myths.
3. The anatomy of the limit in mythology
The structure revealed in Eden is not an exception, but a psychic archetype that repeats across many founding myths. In all of them, the limit does not appear as a moral prohibition of the kind “this is bad,” but as a structural principle that orients action so that it does not become self destructive.
Prometheus: the limit of ritual time
Prometheus, a Titan allied with humankind, steals fire from the gods to give it to a defenseless humanity. Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock, where each day an eagle devours his liver, which regenerates at night so that the torment is endless.
Here, fire represents technical knowledge in its pure state. Prometheus’s fault is not the theft, but the abolition of the interval. He delivers knowledge without any process of waiting, learning, or mediation that would allow it to be inscribed within a human order.
The liver that grows and is devoured again and again is the image of deadly jouissance: a cycle of consumption and regeneration without end or purpose, not unlike contemporary addictions or toxic productivity. The myth does not condemn knowledge; it warns that knowledge without time turns against the one who holds it.
Icarus: the limit of material conditions
To escape confinement, Daedalus builds wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son Icarus. He warns him not to fly too high, where the sun would melt the wax, nor too low, where the dampness of the sea would weigh down the wings. Icarus, intoxicated by the experience of flight, ignores the warning, approaches the sun, and falls.
Icarus’s error is not moral, but structural. He confuses the tool with omnipotence. The limit defines a corridor of possibility between fusion with the divine and dissolution into the formless. The fall is not punishment, but consequence. The limit does not repress flight; it makes it possible.
Orpheus: the limit of symbolic patience
Orpheus descends into the Underworld to rescue Eurydice from among the dead. Hades imposes a single condition: do not look back until both of you have come out into the light. Just before succeeding, Orpheus turns around, losing her forever.
The prohibition against turning back does not protect a secret; it preserves the time of waiting. Orpheus’s error is not doubt, but impatience and the anguish of not knowing whether she is following him. By demanding immediate visual certainty, he loses what could only be sustained in symbolic time. Some thresholds can be crossed only by respecting their rhythm.
The Watchers, Book of Enoch: the limit between orders
In the Book of Enoch, the Watchers abandon heaven to unite with human women and transmit forbidden knowledge. This is not a punctual excess, but the deliberate abolition of the boundary between the divine and the worldly.
The result is not liberation, but chaos. When the limit between the divine and the human disappears, the world becomes uninhabitable. The limit appears here not as an oppressive barrier, but as a condition of integrity for the world.
4. The contemporary paradox: the freedom that empties desire
Today we live under a paradigm opposite to that of ancient myths. The dominant command is no longer “You shall not,” but an expansive and unceasing “Do whatever you want.” Yet by removing the structuring “No,” the absolute “Yes” does not open a space of freedom, but an insatiable void that the superego rushes to fill with new demands.
Enjoy. Have fun. Fulfill yourself. Be the best version of yourself.
This imperative does not liberate the subject; it exhausts it. The contemporary superego is more voracious than the old one: it no longer punishes disobedience, but insufficiency. If guilt once arose from transgressing the law, today it arises from not enjoying enough, from not being happy, productive, or fulfilled to the expected degree. The serpent of Eden no longer whispers a temptation; it has turned into a life coach that demands constant fullness.
In the face of this dispersion, the function of ritual reappears. Not institutional or religious ritual, but everyday ritual. Ritual does not impose meaning from the outside nor promise salvation; it introduces a cut. It reduces the field of the infinitely possible so that something can persist: a desire, a practice, a bond, a way of inhabiting time. Where everything seems permitted, ritual gives back an edge. And with it, the very possibility of desiring.
5. Inhabiting the limit, everyday ritual, and desire
Living the everyday as ritual restores something the contemporary world tries to erase: the dignity of the ending. In a context that idolizes the new, the immediate, and the limitless, accepting an ending is an act of symbolic resistance.
The Garden of Eden is not a lost paradise, but the map of a dangerous fantasy: jouissance without lack. Maturity does not consist in abolishing all limits, but in learning to live within those that make existence habitable.
The limit is not the enemy of desire; it is its condition of possibility. It is not a wall, but the frame that makes the picture visible. Only where there is a shore can there be a sea. And only where desire accepts not to demand everything is where it can begin to breathe the only freedom that belongs to us.
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