Edmond Jabes Research Articles

EDMOND JABES AND THE QUESTION OF THE BOOK

Following 'Reading Edmond Jabes', (Literature and Theology, 1995) this second article exercises a secular homiletics to examine Jabes writing on the book (ecriture) and the Book (Ecriture) as authoritative absence, the authority of the question and the blank page as desert. In his writing, remaining true to what is not (that is, God), Jabes dreams with the kabbalists of'an absolute book' of perfect readability, to the absolute absence of which poetics can only begin to allude in the sacred duty of writing. The book remains a mystery and an indefatigable deciphering of the

Le rythme et le chiffre : Le Livre des questions d'Edmond Jabès

Rhythm and Number : Edmond Jabès' Book of Question The words attributed to Hölderlin — « all is rhythm » — suggest the indefi- nability of rhythm ; but intuitively, rhythm is about the repetition of the same, and numbers. Thus, exploring the relation to numbers in Jabès' work leads to the discerning of a rhythm of numbers despite its fragmentary writing.

The Strangeness of the Other and the Otherness of the Stranger: Edmond Jabes

The Strangeness of the Other and the Otherness of the Stranger: Edmond Jabes

Edmond Jabes and the Poetry of the Jewish Unhappy Consciousness

When Derrida invokes Hegel and identifies unhappy consciousness as Jewish, he appears to endorse dialectic wherein Judaism would be incorporated in and by discourse of a postmodernism that essentializes Other as negative image of logocentrism. In pages that follow, I wish to investigate this Hegelian reading of Jabes. We should keep in mind that Derrida's Hegel is not only philosopher of Absolute Idea, the last philosopher of book, but he is also the first thinker of writing (OG 26).2 This status of Hegel is, I will argue, applicable

Between Exile and Return: S. Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (review)

Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 129 Reviews and the Jesus of the Gospels, understand and proclaim that the sacrifice of human and animal victims is connected with violence. The Gospels, indeed, completely uncover this relationship. This discovery or revelation represented by the biblical texts is at least partially obscured by Hobbs. Perhaps this is because he does not give enough attention to religion, myth, and sacrifice in the biblical texts and traditions. An adequate hermeneutic should be able to delineate how deeply rooted ancient Israel was in older sacral or mythical concepts which were the basis of the cultures out of which it emerged. At the same time this very hermeneutic will show the uniqueness of Israel's breakthrough, a breakthrough which is usually unknowingly assumed in our religious and cultural heritage wherever and whenever we comprehend the arbitrariness of persecution and scapegoating and support the rights of victims. James G. Williams Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13244-1170 BETWEEN EXILE AND RETURN: S. Y. AGNON AND THE DRAMA OF WRITING. By Anne Golomb Hoffman. pp. 236. Albany: State University of New York, 1991. Cloth, $16.95. Anne Golomb Hoffman walks a delicate tightrope in providing the student of Agnon with new and complex tools of psychoanalytic and comparative literary analysis while not subjugating or sacrificing Agnon to her hermeneutics. Agnon remains in the foreground even as Hoffman advances intriguing views comparing Agnon with Kafka, Jabes, Thomas Mann, and Joyce. She does this with the help of Freud, Lacan, feminist theory, and much more. Of significant help to Hoffman in keeping her delicate balance is her ample utilization of the more traditional critical apparatus of Shaked, Kurtzweil, Band, Barzel, and Holtz as well as her full attention to archival minutiae, her novel treatment of Agnon's voluminous, posthumously published works, and her erudition in ancillary fields of Jewish thought and textual study. Framing Hoffman's study, moreover, is a metaphorical leitmotif which singles out in Agnon themes of writing, authorship, discontinuities and tensions within the text, and a mythicizing of books. All of these Hoffman interprets as a kind of Jewish cosmic reflection of avant- Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 130 Reviews garde cultural ideas. The net result is a unified and clear-if somewhat labyrinthine-intellectual midrash on Agnon, yielding luminous insights into Hoffman's individual case studies of Agnon's work and an amazing demonstration of his embrace or approximation of so many modernistic tendencies. Introducing her first section, entitled "Comparative Agnon," Hoffman analyzes both Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and Agnon's "The Legend of the Scribe" as "dramas of inscription." Both authors depict for Hoffman the risky adventure of "becoming one with the text." She assesses in both, as well, a daring reversal of sexual archetypal roles, as when Raphael embraces his wife's dress in the ecstatic ending of Agnon's story. Agnon's scribe's famous characterization of the religious fervor necessary for writing the Torah scroll as "standing in icy water on a snowy day" Hoffman reads as a "narcissistic" immersion in text. She interprets the haunting mirror of the story and Raphael's "falling" into it as equally narcissistic, and she views the conclusion as a negation and correction of this self-centered and stereotypical outlook. At the same time, Hoffman adopts a reading of the Kafka story as "a high-tech rape of the condemned man whose position is essentially female as the 'stuff' that is written on," and she merges Kafka with Agnon in concluding: ''The gender of writing as a masculine engraving of a female body is undone in each of these stories through dramas of inscription that demonstrate the fluctuating positions of the participants, precluding any stable identification of them." Hoffman further pursues the analogy to Kafka in comparing "The Hunger Artist" to the hunger in Agnon's "A Whole Loaf." She utilizes Avraham Holtz's theory of the "open-ended" parable in "A Whole Loaf' in assessing the indeterminacy of this hunger and the many discontinuities of the vexed metaphor of Agnon's tale. All of this she frames with a discussion of Edmond Jabes's virtuosity in inventing and exploring quasi- "rabbinic" models of textual and intertextual dialogues...

Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book

The ethnographic study of Jews remains anomalous as a specialty within the profession of cultural anthropology in America, which is still largely organized according to the paradigm of culture or studies. Critical examination of this situation reveals the need for a re-examination of the area studies paradigm; the linkage between the history of anthropology and the unequal dialogue between Christians and Jews over the centuries; and textual/anamnestic alternatives to an anthropology rigidly grounded in spatialist categories. The work of the contemporary French poet Edmond Jabes is examined as one model for a possible postmodern Jewish ethnography. [Jews, area studies, postmodernism, orality, textuality]

From The Book of Resemblances

From The Book of Resemblances This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol12/iss1/3 From THE BOOK OF RESEMBLANCES* Edmond Jabes Paris ' ed, or the First Mist But there went up a mist, 'ed, from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (Genesis, II, 6) Preparing to create man, He made the mist rise from the abyss up into the heavens to wet the earth, and man was created in the way a baker adds water and then kneads the bread. (Rashi's Commentary on Genesis II, 6) MOMENT OUTSIDE THE BOOK (`I exist because you know me, he said. I owe you my likeness. What is but the imagined death of all thoughts sacrificed to its name, Likeness examined through the questions it raises when it becomes but the distance covered by insidious likenesses? To think resemblance, does that not mean thinking the complex relation between thought and the word that prints or deletes it? We are praised or despised by our brothersfor how we resemble or dissemble. Thought is a glimmer spied before sunrise. At noon, light is at its apogee. All shadows are alike, all letters in search ofthe same word, you said. 13 1 Jabes: From The Book of Resemblances Published by New Prairie Press 14 STCL, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall, 1987) one. The word strips off likenesses, intending to favor a single God cannot be written.)

Review. The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabes. Edited by Eric Gould. Jabes

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Edited by ERIC GOULD. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 1985. ix + 252 pp. ANDREW BENJAMIN ANDREW BENJAMIN WARWICK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XL, Issue 2, April 1986, Pages 238–239, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XL.2.238 Published: 01 April 1986

Signs and Wonderings

READERS WHO KNOW the work of Franz Mon, Helmut Heissenbiittel, Philippe Sollers, and Edmond Jabes will think of concrete poetry and systematic experiments in the case of the two Germans, of novels in which not much happens, or of an effort to connect literary and social revolutions in the case of Sollers, and of rabbis speaking in strange images, the holocaust, the problems of writing in the case of Jabes. They will wonder what these four writers have in common beyond a reputation for being avant-garde. But for all their differences they share a premise and a preoccupation: the premise that the world partakes of the nature of language and the preoccupation with the double nature of the linguistic sign. Their different responses are nearly four paradigms of sign-conscious writing. When Franz Mon says that only the formulated is real ... the real world is invented by us, artificial through and through1 or when Sollers speaks of the coded function which sensations take on2 we realize that we are far from the old topos of the world as book. Only Edmond Jabes can use this metaphor of the book as well as that of its implied author, God, though he complicates their relationship. Just consider the stunning last sentence of Le Retour au livre: L'homme n'existe pas. Dieu n'existe pas. Seul existe le monde a travers Dieu et I'homme dans le livre ouvert. But even Jabes sees the world as a scattering of potential signs rather than a closed system, closer to Derrida's aphoristic energy, his 'criture, than to the book.3 Any language is a grid which activates certain of these potential signs. Using a language means reading the world. Mon is explicit about this: Reading is a more encompassing process than the deciphering of

Edmond Jabes and the Impossible Circle

Edmond Jabes and the Impossible Circle