The mediation by the serpent was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man. {##}
Franz Kafka
You'll never make me stay
So take your weight off of me.
I know your every move
So won't you just let me be.
I've been here times before
But I was too blind to see
That you seduce every man.
This time you won't seduce me.Michael Jackson
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.
Camille Paglia
We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil. For without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil.
Niccolo Machiavelli
"Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence — unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference — something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to — not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of... we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others... we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps — but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given.... ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come — who knows?"
Thomas Pynchon
Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: "I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you." Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: "Let me seduce you"
Jean Baudrillard
Kafka, Franz
Kagan, Elena
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