A Bicorp—Who I Was: How Many Head Phylacteries (Tefillin Shel Rosh) Should Conjoined Twins Wear?

The paper renegotiates two regnant and interconnected modern assumptions, a reduction of forgetting to memory loss, and insistence on a self-remembering individual as the social atom, from which one builds molar and molecular social structures. In the article, a critical conceptual retrieval of the notion of bicorp extends beyond the doctrinal frameworks of rabbinic and patristic traditions to afford a heuristic scope in which to access the significance and limitations of a modern individual as an atom of the society. The main result is a detection of the central rather than marginal role of bicorp in creating legally imputable and responsible individuals in society. This result is accompanied by a connected detection of the long-term reversal, in which memory, including the memory the individual has of oneself, becomes primary and forgetting plays a deceptively secondary role of a memory loss in society.