7

Kabbalism After God

What will my book become but a little ash on the pages of His?
Jabès1

Introduction

In this final chapter I will give the co-ordinates of "a reading claiming
priority." The purpose of the thesis will then have been fulfilled. The route
taken has been as follows. From the outset I took Jabès's writing as concerning
essential matters of being. In Chapter Two I drew out the ontological nature of
his work. In Chapter Three I dissociated Jabès's writings from the claims of any
particular philosophy or theory. Jabès's freedom in this respect I said was not
just one of disorientation after the disaster, but an equivalent sense of being
after metaphysics and at the end of philosophy. Then in Chapters Four and Five
I took up the subjects of death and disaster which I had introduced in Chapter
One. I have shown that not only is Jabès's work pitted against death and
disaster, but that these are integral to his writing. Jabès's writing searches for
words which might suffice to the fate worse than death and the utter
disorientation of disaster. In our time I said this disorientation was
metaphysical and that this left the writer and the Jew cut off from the deep
words of life in which, traditionally, they had recognized themselves. In
Chapter Six I showed that Jabès uses an inter-related symbolism and imagery to
create a myth of the book. The book is the place of words which will suffice to
the disaster and to the absence of God. The book cannot be written, it will only
be resembled. For Jabès, writing means resembling the sacred Book in the
book. Each word is a self-sacrifice in which the writer discovers the creative
grounds of the self in the ultimate ground of God's absence. Finally, this
chapter discusses the formative influence of Kabbalah on the writing of Edmond
Jabès. While the subject of Kabbalah is taken up in an introductory way and
1Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.47.
only insofar as it bears on the writing of Jabès, my line of enquiry follows from
Jabès's question of the book.

Judaism After God

The idea of Kabbalah after God is based on Jabès's statement that his kind
of Judaism is "Judaism after God." Speaking of Judaism after God elsewhere,
1

Jabès writes:

It is true, the word, 'Jew,' the word, 'God,' are metaphors for me:
'God,' the metaphor for the void, 'Jew,' the metaphor for the
torment of God, of the void. In parallel, I also try to close in as
much as possible on the historical sense of the words, 'Jew' and
'God,' joined in one and the same becoming. Do creature and
creator not prepare, together, the coming world?2

Further on in the same piece, Jabès writes:

Whether God exists or not is, in fact, not the essential question. It
is first of all to himself - and our tradition has always insisted on
the importance of free will - that the Jew must answer for the fate
of the values he has pledged to spread.
Approaching it on this level, we find what I would call
'Judaism after God.'3

I say Kabbalism after God to specify what, from within Judaism, is to be found
at the organisational core and deepest intuition of Jabès's writing. This means
"the level where the reader rejoins the creator who comes to the intuition of the
book the further he enters into writing"; and, "the site around which the pages
he is reading organise themselves." In short, I take it that Jabès's understanding
4

of Kabbalah is formative for his writings and for the "reading claiming priority"

1Jabès, BQ..II.142; Elya, p.39.

2Jabès, "My Itinerary," tr. Rosmarie Waldrop, in Studies in Twentieth Century
Literature 12:1 (1987) p.4; the final words of this quotation, "the coming world"
[my italic], is my replacement for Rosmarie Waldrop's "the new world order"
which, in my view, has inappropriate overtones with respect to American
politics of the Reagan and Bush eras.
3Jabès, ibid. p.5.

4Jabès, DB. p 82; DL. pp.118-119.

over his books. The meaning of these little quotations from Jabès will become
1

gradually clearer as I proceed. Betty Rojtman has previously drawn attention to

the affinities of Kabbalah to the most obviously Kabbalistic of Jabès's books, El,
or the Last Book. She does not go into the meaning, as I have, of Jabès's saying
2

that this last book comes first; nor does she investigate the meaning of the
Kabbalistic parallels she finds, as I do in this chapter. Nevertheless, I uphold her
basic stance, which is captured in her statements that Jabès underlines rather
than derives his own ideas from Kabbalah; and that, for Jabès, Kabbalah offers a
structural model and helps him organize his metaphysical premises, as well as
being a means of giving specific sensible coherence to universal problems.
Gershom Scholem, the most renowned scholar of Kabbalah this century,
recounts that, in 1924, a learned friend of his went to Jerusalem in search of the
true oral source, if one could be found, of Kabbalah. Eventually he found that
the Kabbalist transmission had been kept alive. There was a binding condition
put upon contacting it: that the disciple ask no questions. From this Scholem
deduces that Kabbalah is distinguished by its being shaped as narrative. While
3

Jabès takes up the famous passion of the Jew for the question, seemingly in clear
contrast to Kabbalistic forms of narrative and myth, we need to remember that
it is a questioning beyond the traditional faithful vision of God in His presence.
There may seem to be no narrative in Jabès's writings, but this lack of
narrative is composed with just deliberation and becomes, therefore, an
antithetical narration, even in its form: the continuity of fragments, side by side,
narrating brokenness beyond either a narrative thread on the one hand or a
stream of commentary on the other. In this regard, Jabès's writings exemplify
what Heidegger esteemed as a "shattered" writing; and it is the narrative thread
4

and the stream of commentary which are shattered. They are shattered by the
likes of Auschwitz: "that utterburn where all history took fire," as Jabès's literary
colleague, Maurice Blanchot, described it. The narrative of history, history as
5

narrative, is shattered by an event which must interrupt all our preoccupations.

Jabès does not develop a narrative or myth in any traditional sense, but lets the

1Jabès, DB. p.85; DL. p.122.

2Betty Rojtman, "La Lettre, le point," in Jabès, le Livre..., ed. David Mendelson,
p.96.
3Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.87.

4For Heidegger, "a thinking that is shattered" was the hallmark of thinking

(Denken) at the end of philosophy in the metaphysical sense exposed by the

question of being (Seinsfrage). "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, p.223.
5Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p.47 [italic in original]. This work also

exemplifies "a thinking that is shattered."

disaster have its myth: an anti-narrative of rhetorical questions and decapitated
meditations.
The Kabbalah remains for Jabès the most nourishing source of the
questions of writing and the book, or the Book. Jabès was well read in
Kabbalah, and if, apart from the events of his life and the autonomous processes
of the imagination, we were to think of a literary influence upon him, I believe
this would be it. In interview, on the background to his work, Jabès has said:

I believe I did find my way back to a certain tradition insofar as I

immersed myself completely in the Kabbalah and the Talmud. I
also read much about these books, as they are works one obviously
cannot, at first, approach all alone. I also read, in translation of
course, most of the Jewish spiritual masters.
Being neither a mystic nor a gnostic, it is clearly not the
letter of those texts that marked me, but the shape of the thinking,
their spiritual depth, particular logic and inventiveness - I am
thinking here of the Kabbalah. Those books were in complete
harmony with my preoccupations as a writer. Not only did they
stimulate my own questioning, they also seemed to prolong it into
an immemorial past. 1

Jabès "immersed" himself in Talmud as well as Kabbalah. Although not much

attached to the content of the Talmud, Jabès admired the crookedness of its
logic and the imperturbability of its authority. His immersion in Talmud came
2

after starting The Book of Questions, "as if wanting to check the intuition I had
regarding a certain Judaism..."

I must admit that I felt an unexpected pleasure, faced with this

incomparable text which blends the quotidian and the sacred so
intimately that the most insignificant object - a sheaf of wheat
forgotten in a field, for example - triggers fundamental
metaphysical and ethical reflections. The Talmudists like to
compare the Talmud to the ocean. The very dimensions of the
work corresponding to the idea I myself had of the book. 3

1 Jabès, DB. p.48; DL. p.76.

2 "It was the implacable logic of rabbinic argumentation that seduced him,
rather than the actual content," says Jabès of his father; and the same might be
said by Jabès of himself. (DB. p.72; DL. p.107).
3Jabès, DB. p.72-73; DL. p.111.
 We need to realize, however, that Jabès does not take Kabbalah up in the
same way it understands itself - or the way he thinks it understands itself.
Kabbalah exists for Jabès in what he calls, as we shall see, a deflected sense. It is
this deflected sense of Kabbalah which really lies at the heart of his
understanding of writing, the understanding we, his readers, need if we are to
arrive at "the site around which the pages he is reading organise themselves"; to
glimpse there, that "something else" the writing of Jabès tends always to express.
"Writing is never just that. It is always that plus something else."
1

A Question of Writing

In his Letter to Jacques Derrida on the Question of the Book, Jabès 2

distinguishes his own notions of writing and the book, which in fact influenced
Derrida in the first place, from those ideas of writing and the book which have
come to be understood as Derridean. This is an interesting document because it
brings before us questions of the meaning of writing in general and the concept
(or poetic image as it functions in Jabès) of the book; and these matters are
made contemporary - because of the specific address to Derrida - and therefore
accessible to critical reflection and extemporization. My discussion of Jabès in
this chapter is intended for general understanding of his writing, yet I will keep
his Letter as a focus of attention. This is not because my arguments here depend
on a direct logical relation to the Letter, but because by means of the Letter I can
conveniently bring into view something of the essential stance of Jabès.
It is commonly supposed, and Derrida does not deny it, that for him
writing is the sphere of philosophy, in particular, of the question and
questionable authority of meaning's decidability. Writing is also the ground
(but groundless while essentially lacking authority) of deconstruction.
Deconstruction, keeping close to its Urtext, wants "to keep meaning at the point
of the exhaustion of meaning." For Derrida, the book is largely synonomous
3

with the "closure" and "totalization" of the meaning (which in his book is always
the undecidable). As we have seen in Chapter Three, for Jabès "it would be a
4

serious error to connect any part of The Book of Questions with a theory of
1Jabès,DB. p.111; DL. p.154.
2Jabès,BM. pp.36-48; Ça suit son cours, pp.41-60. NB: I have relied upon my
own translations of this particular text, rather than those of Rosmarie Waldrop.
3Derrida, Positions, p.14.

4Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," in Of

Grammatology, pp.6-26; "Ellipis," in Writing and Difference, pp.294-300.

writing." His work has no underlying didactic purpose. Presumably this
1

warning goes for both what The Book of Questions influences as well as
interpretations of it. The deflected sense of Kabbalah with which I am
associating Jabès's writing is not a connection of it with any theory of writing: it
is a way of suspending such a connection. It is a way of holding Jabès's meaning
and the question of authority which goes along with it, in abeyance. While
authoritative statements on matters of philosophical concern are lost under the
deconstructive gaze of Derrida, much as under the deflecting gaze of Jabès the
horizons of these concerns are sketched and lost in visionary poetry, the
question of authority itself is not lost. Rather, it stands out all the more strongly
as a question of the deep words of life. But it is a question in itself - a question
that so many of Jabès's thoughts revolve around - as to whether, "after
Auschwitz," the deep words of life are to be found. Thus, for Jabès, the book is
not a metaphor for the totalisation and closure of meaning, but the condition of
any search for the deep words of life: "those headstrong key words for which
we are veil and face, sand and horizon." 2

What Jabès puts to Derrida, at the heart of his Letter are the words of a
Kabbalistic rabbi. The particular rabbi is mystical within structures of mythical
thought (of the Tree of Life); he is not, therefore, solely concerned with the
eponymous letter of the Law. Jabès cites words "diverted from their original
3

mystical sense," and here is what I have called his deflected sense of Kabbalah:
"the Book will be that which 'is graven with black of fire on white of fire.' Black
fire on white fire." The citation is from Rabbi Isaac (late c. 13th/early 14th) and
4

refers to the relation of the written Torah (referred to as black fire) to the oral
Torah (white fire). At least, this is the interpretation which most readily
5

presents itself: the white associated with the blank page, the black with the
figures of ink which leap upon it.
First I will discuss what this citation means; then I will discuss what it
means for Derrida, according to Jabès. We will then be able to distinguish the
Jabèsian notion of writing more easily, also what he means by the "reading
claiming priority" that I have mentioned above.

1Jabès, BR.I.18; LR.I 28.

2Jabès, BR.II.71; LR.II.85.
3 According to Gershom Scholem the Kabbalistic Tree of Life issued into Judaic

lore without anyone quite knowing where it came from. On the Kabbalah and it
Symbolism, p.90.
4Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.54.

5M. Idel, "Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah," in Midrash and Literature, ed. G.

Hartman and S. Budick, p.145 & note 11, p.154.

Black Fire/White Fire

The symbolism that springs first to mind is that the written Torah has
passed through the medium of the oral Torah and is an expression of it. The
written Torah is the text of the Pentateuch. According to Gershom Scholem,

The oral Torah is the sum total of everything that has been said by
scholars or sages in explanation of this written corpus, by the
Talmudic commentators on the Law and all others who have
interpreted the text. The oral Torah is the tradition of the
Congregation of Israel, it performs the necessary role of
completing the written Torah and making it more concrete.
According to Rabbinic tradition, Moses received both Torahs at
once on Mount Sinai, and everything that any subsequent scholar
finds in the Torah or legitimately derives from it, was already
included in this oral tradition given to Moses. Thus in Rabbinical
Judaism the two Torahs are one. The oral tradition and the
written word complete one another, neither is conceivable without
the other.1

Yet if one interpreted Rabbi Isaac's words as the white fire symbolizing the oral
Torah and the black fire symbolizing the written Torah one would be remiss.
Another interpretation reverses the symbolism which first presents itself. "The
white fire is the written Torah in which the form of the letters is not yet explicit,
for the form of the consonants and vowel points was first conferred by the
power of the black fire, which is the oral Torah." One of the leading scholars on
2

the subject of Kabbalah, Moshe Idel, a student of Scholem and now a leading
scholar in this field, sums up the reversed interpretation by saying: "The real
'written' Torah consists in the white background enveloping the black letters
which, paradoxically enough, are said to form the 'oral' Torah." 3
Scholem's
account, however, goes a step further: "What we call the written Torah has itself
passed through the medium of the oral Torah." "It was revealed to Moses, but
what he gave to the world as the written Torah has acquired its present form
through the medium of the oral Torah." Therefore the "white fire" Rabbi Isaac

1Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, pp.47-48.

2Scholem, ibid. p.49.
3 Idel, ibid.
spoke of is not the written Torah, but the written Torah is "hidden" in it. "There
is only oral Torah." But going back to my previous quotation from Idel, if what
1

is said to be oral Torah is somehow more primordially constituted by the

'written' Torah, then we can with equal legitimacy state the opposite: there is
only written Torah. The two statements spiral around each other like white and
black flames; but the fire is one and the same. Written Torah is not simply
understood in Kabbalah as the words on the page, nor is the page itself
understood in a straightforward way. The Kabbalists had a mystical and occult
understanding of the Book, but this is deflected by Jabès into his understanding
of the book. For Jabès, the book comes after the Book. The Book is a cipher of
the source of authority; the book is a cipher for the source of its absence. The
Kabbalah already has a sense of this absence, which I shall explain more clearly
in what follows, it is an absence which is not simply conceptualized as
concealment (in the Heideggerian sense derived from aletheia) nor is it absence
as simply not being there (das Nichts); it is the absence of something abscondent.
The authority of writing and the writing of authority, which is what Torah is -
and ontologically constitutes writing as Torah - is an abscondent absence. God's
absence is a torment for Jabès as a Jew and a writer, and we shall see shortly
that this is true in a Kabbalistic sense.
Writing, interpretation, the whole oral Torah (black and white fire) is an
attempt at the evocation (the hope of the restoration) of the written Torah.
Therefore, the written Torah as such, becomes, in every interpretation of it, like a
Land of Promise that the person of the word (the writer) and the People of the
Book (the Jew) will never reach but to which, in their wandering, they are ever
drawn. This, in figurative terms - perhaps the only appropriate terms - is what
Jabès means by writing and the book: that authority which is never really with
us, but always on the way in the sense of an advent.
As attested by the final book of Resemblances, for Jabès to write means to
put the ineffaceable, the unperceived to the pen. That meant making authorship
(writing), something authoritative, or to make a Book of the book. To write
what comes to have sacred authority is the ultimate calling of the writer and
what alone can verify the existence of the Jew. While Jabès distinguishes
writing and Judaism, he cannot conceive of one without the other. For Jabès,
the book is only a cipher of authority, because authority itself is absent. The
move from Book in the upper case to book in the lower case is not only a mark
of Jabès's deflection of words from their original mystical sense but shows his
perception of the change from the certainty of God's presence to His people, to

1Scholem, ibid. p.50.

the experience of His absence; from possession of authority's horizons to their
obscurity and loss.
The parallels between what the Kabbalistic rabbi has said about the Book
and what Jabès has said about the book should stand out immediately. Jabès
has said the book is always what "slips away," never quite what one is writing. 1

Jabès aims what he is writing toward the evocation of the book that slips away:
the writing which might bear authority in its pages. Jabès attempts the
evocation of the book by questioning and resembling the book that slips away in
the book beneath the pen. The book that slips away is accurately qestioned or
resembled when the book beneath the pen is graphomorphic with the book to
come; that is, "a divine page. A human page. And in both cases the author is
God, in both cases the author is man." I use the word graphomorphic because
2

the writing of the book and the sacred and authoritative writing of the Book,
would form a homology. The page on which the writing is both human and
divine in one and the same words would be the page on which the reader with
eyes to see would encounter "bursts of authoritative Speech"; a page in which
3

would be inserted "the eternal Book in the metamorphoses of the mortal book." 4

The one is the interiorization of the other; or the face of one is the face of the
other. Such a page sacralizes the book and transfigures écriture (writing) into
5

Écriture (Scripture). Therefore, insofar as we are to consider the sacred activity

of writing, it is not just a question of the book, but a question of the book and
the Book. For the two constitute a synergy. This idea was famously developed by
6

Rabbi Elie of Vilna in which Book, book, and commentary come to signify a

1Jabès, DB. p.82; DL. p.119.

2Jabès, Le Parcours, p.88.
3Jabès, Le Parcours, p.83.

4Jabès, Le Petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon, p.50.

5On the intériorization and dédoublement of the Face, see Corbin, Face de Dieu,

pp.247f., 301f.
6See Stamelman, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 12:1 (1987) pp.94 and 97,

and "Le Dialogue de l'absence," in Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman and M. A.

Caws, pp.201-217. I agree from a literary point of view with Stamelman that
Jabès's work is fundamentally "allotropic" (oriented to the other) as he calls it,
but I disagree that this is fundamentally true from a philosophical point of view.
Philosophically, orientation to the other, as Plato's Eleatic Stranger points out to
Theaetetus in The Sophist, presupposes both. Anyway, I would avoid trying to
hang Jabès's philosophy on either point. From a philosophical and literary point
of view Jabès's writing keeps the unknown before it. As René Char has said, "It is
right for poetry to be indistinguishable from what is forseen but not yet
formulated." ("The Formal Share," x, in Hypnos Waking, p.51.)
hierarchical order of descent by which the infinitely unknown manifests itself in
the world. The truth of writing and reading in the world are graded according
1

to the extent to which the infinitely unknowable lies before the mind's eye: is it
more or less?
The question of authority always bears back upon the infinitely unknown:
for the book in question can never establish the book of authority but vacillates
before it, because the book beneath the pen is only ever an equivocation of the
authority which words, through the strength of their evocation and their life,
grant to it. This is the grant of the Book, of absence. Absent, because the
question of authority always commands the book and the Book. The Book only
2

1Stéphane Mosès has pointed out how in the Kabbalistic Sefer Yetsira (Book of
Formation), it says: "He created the world by three books: the Book, the book,
and the commentary (récit)." "Edmond Jabès: d'un passage à l'autre," in Écrire le
Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman and M. A. Caws, p.53. The question of the Book and
the book must include the récit in which this reflection is made, and which
authorises the equation.
2I am talking here of authority as a metaphysical question at the core of all

philosophy. It is authority at this metaphysical level which marks Jabès's sense of

absence and which he denotes as the Book. With this core question of authority
in mind Jabès's question of the book and the Book takes up an essential matter
of both Greek and Jewish metaphysics. It is not, in my view, simply a case of
Jabès asserting a Jewish metaphysic against a supposedly Greek metaphysic; if
these matters we hear so glibly spoken of as Jewish rather than Greek, or vice
versa, were really metaphysical, as we are told they are, we should not be so
easily able to comment upon them from some unspecified but neutral place
apparently outside them, or aside from them. This fallacy of speaking about
metaphysics, logos or mythos, as though writer and reader shared some neutral
vantage point from which to authoritatively judge these matters is found
wherever metaphysical discussion turns on the so-called gulf of difference
between Greek and Jew. The truth is that one is unthinkable without the other.
Jabès is not a Jewish writer as opposed to a Greek writer, nor is this difference
very helpful for reading Edmond Jabès - for Jabès is questioning writing and
what a writer is. For instance, "Le point sur l'un," by François Laruelle, while
admirable for taking a metaphysical approach to Jabès, falls foul of this
Greek/Jew, ontology/heterology fallacy (See, Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman
and M. A. Caws, pp.121-132). But even if this objectifying stance is correct, the
Jabèsian question may still be asked: upon what authority? And the place of this
question is not neutral. How can academic formulations about alterity suffice to
reading Jabès, let alone that to which Jabès's writing would suffice, namely, the
disaster? It is to the credit of Rosmarie Waldrop that she translates "L'Autre est
l'au-delà personnifié de l'Un," as: "For the One, the other is a personified beyond."
commands authority under the auspices of idolatry or what we now call
fundamentalism. It is this question of authority as the most authoritative of all
questions which the synergy of the book and the Book constellate throughout the
work of Jabès. In what follows I want to take up my interpretation of the
citation of the Kabbalistic rabbi in terms of Jabès's poetic image of the blank
page, then go on to discuss what Jabès supposes this means for Derrida. This
will lead us back into the meaning of the citation from the Kabbalistic rabbi in a
discussion of what Jabès calls ABSENCE.

A Blank Page

For the Kabbalist absence is mystical. The absence of the written Torah
turns it into a purely mystical concept. Also it is another instance of the
iconoclasm of the Jewish tradition. The Torah, which has been so loved and
glorified by the People of the Book that it has become equated with the pre-
existence of the Most High before the Creation of the world, cannot, therefore,
be said to be something seen without the greatest sacrilege of idolatry. Jabès
resembles this pre-existent Book in a reflection on his own volumes where, we
have seen in Chapter Six, he speaks of the volume that "all books are contained
in, and were drawn from, the last. Book before all books." The "inexhaustible
1

last book, ineffaceable, come before all the others." Its real absence, since the
2

inexhaustible and ineffaceable cannot be contained in a mere volume, resembles

the absence of mystical possibilities in a world as demystified as our own. It
also resembles the absence of any certainty over where the writer and the Jew
are to begin with respect to the really great problems and question-marks of
existence, after the disaster. These resemblances remind us about what was
3

present and seem, almost, to represent that presence. All metaphysical premises
have been demystified it would seem. But if so, this is the mystery of our time.
Jabès's cipher for the prevailing mystery of our time, the absence of
metaphysical premises out of which poetry might, once again, issue forth and
certain values re-establish ruptured communities is that of the desert or the
blank page: metaphors which become synonymous for the spacious wandering

(BQ.II.136; Elya, p.29), for this does not treat either the One or the Other as
concepts in a metaphysical agenda, but gives a poetic sense of both.
1Jabès, BR.III/LR.III:jacket-note.

2Jabès, BR.III.1; LR.III.7.

3This phrase "the really great problems and question-marks" of existence is

snatched from Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aph.373.

of his pen. Like the absent written Torah of the Kabbalists, the blank page, for
1

Jabès, is the template of all beginnings. The difference here between Jabès and
the Kabbalists is the difference between the idea of the Book as an invisible
absence and an invisible presence. According to Helena Shillony in her study of
Jabès, the word which Jabès bequeaths to us, should we have to choose only
one, would be le blanc. This is one of those deep words of life I referred to
above. Shillony writes: "Leaving the last word to Jabès, and this word will be
blank (le blanc)." The blank means that into which all the deep words of life
2

disappear in the disaster and from which, on the page, beneath the pen, they
will rise again.
While Shillony brings us to the heart of Jabès's work with this word,
what it means she leaves unthought. To give some preliminary elucidation of it
here will help bring into view the Kabbalism after God which issues from the
deepest intuition and organizational core of Jabès's writing.
The blank is not nugatory, it is the element of Creation, icon of the nihil
out of which Creation will be brought and out of which the writer creates. All
our writing is held in it and that which is written is written in it. The blank has
no beginning or end. The blank, more historically, is the cipher of authority lost
and found: because what has been written as Law has been wiped out by
lawlessness, in the disorientation of the absolute, by the disaster; and because
blank is how the light of authority now looks. The blank page is an image of
the imageless. The great iconoclasts who would brook no image of God, who
would deconstruct all anthropomorphism (and therein lies deconstruction's true
genealogical origin), who would uphold a conceptual theology of abstraction
purified of myth became themselves the burnt offering. Nothing materialized to
help them because there was nothing - a blank page. The People of the Book,
"after God," are not a race, but those who belong to the blank page. The blank
page is an icon of the difference between then and now. All the words that once
were there now are wiped out. The utterness of this wiping-out - the blank page
- is an unforgettable difference. And the blank page straddles this difference at
the same time. It is also a bridge between then and now. It remembers the
prohibition of images (the God that is questioned is an image of God). The
blank page is the measure of every picture words decide to trace; thus it is an
icon of iconoclasm, of the blank slate, the new creation, the beginning.

1See ch.1 or my article, "Reading Edmond Jabès," Literature and Theology, 9:4
(Dec. 1995) pp.399-422.
2H. Shillony, Edmond Jabès: une rhétorique de la subversion, p.69.
 As an icon, the blank page has a particular kind of significance for
writing. All writing on the blank page is not literal or symbolic, but
iconographic. Iconographic writing is tied to this idea of symbolism as its
negation: rather than the word calling forth the unfathomable soul of itself, its
image, to presence, the word is a window onto infinity. The page is an image of
the blanc, icon of this infinity of which symbols are the most fruitful words;
negative because it can harbour no word in particular. The blank page, like the
1

desert, is the image of fruitlessness. Yet out of these arid literary and historical
circumstances of death and disaster, love, hope and orientation after the disaster
are wrested. Intimations of a Book resound within the book. One can hear
Jabès draw breath in words "irrigated with his blood," in works "which impose
2

silence." Thus, Jabès does not consider the criteria of authoritative writing from
3

the outside, as it were, but writes authoritatively of what is most qualitatively

interior to questions of writing and authority: of "the text which engenders all texts
to be written and which, though ever elusive, will not leave off haunting us."
4

The word itself, symbolically speaking, is a symbol of its own

effacement, and we hear this throughout the writings of Jabès in what Shillony
calls the rhetoric of subversion, and in what I would call Jabès's philosophy of
silence and poetics of absence. "A kind of white writing inside of writing,"
Jabès says. It is because the word is a symbol of its own effacement that we can
5

speak of these things. Therefore, in a key passage on this question of writing

Jabès muses:

Writing, or being written, then means passing, sometimes

unawares, from the visible - the image, figure, representation
which lasts the time of an approach - to the invisible, the non-
representation against which things put up a stoic struggle; from

1I agree with Massimo Cacciari where he says, "the writing of Jabès renounces
not only every symbolic value, but likewise every allegory. The desert does not
signify something else, has no value by virtue of signifying anything other than
itself. It is precisely this sign, pure and naked, never simply metaphor." ("Black
and White", Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 12:1 (1987) p.76). The idea of
"precisely this sign", however, would be my definition of a symbol as opposed
to an allegory. It can be said that with this symbol, Jabès renounces every
symbolic value; for we have yet to value this symbol!
2Jabès, BS. p.35; LP. p.51.

3Jabès, BS. p.32; LP. p.46.

4Jabès, BS. p.35; LP. p.51 [italic in original].

5Jabès, DB. p.47; DL. p.75.

 the audible, which lasts the time of listening, to silence where our
words obediently come to drown; from sovereign thought to the
sovereignty of the unthought, remorse and supreme torment of the
word. 1

This kind of writing, if we are to call it iconographic writing, is only such, as an

icon of iconoclasmic writing: writing which smashes the image in the image of
underlying absence.
The blank page is not a theological abstraction, however, but abstracts
the meaninglessness of abstraction; its indifference and disastrous inhumanity. It
is abstraction as such and as a whole that is meaningless - abstraction as
presupposition and system behind thinking - particular abstract propositions in
terms of others whose relative meaning may be perfectly demonstrable remain
of course as meaningful as ever; it is only that now, with this question of
writing, they are under suspicion. Abstraction as a human process cannot
survive disaster, assuage pain, bring about solidarity on earth, touch the earth.
To a material age the blank page is a material thing on which the creative
process can be materially carried out. The blank page is an icon faced to the
future: of what will be written. The blank page is about possibility. It holds out
a hope - only one we have to fill. "Judaism after God," is about turning to this
page; it is the page at the end of one book and the beginning of another; the end
of a book which is finished and the beginning of a book which must be begun.
The disaster marks the break between the two. The Book of God's presence
closes when His absence becomes manifest and He becomes a myth unto
himself ("the metaphor for the void," as I quoted Jabès above); the book of
God's absence is the book to come. Yet through this transition from one book to
the other, the Authority which put the question becomes the question of itself.
To sum up, the blank page recalls the Kabbalah because, in a sense, it
replaces the Kabbalah's main mythological symbol of the Tree of Life. The Tree
of Life symbolized the mythical structure of God's creative powers which could
be named and known; the blank page calls on human creative powers which
2

each person has always owed to God, but which each person now owes to him
or herself. God is no longer in the Book. I will delay my discussion of theurgy,
which arises from this particular point about the human's creative powers, until
later where I discuss ABSENCE. The idea that God is no longer in the Book

1Jabès, Le Parcours, p.86; tr. as "The Key," by Rosmarie Waldrop in Midrash and
Literature, ed. G. Hartman and S. Budick, p.356.
2 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.91.
means that the Book of God is in the human. But the obvious circularity
1

between mankind and God which makes them so inseperable has not been
erased. Nor can it be erased unless mankind erase itself. It has always been this
way:

- In citing the Book, the Jew cites himself.

- The Jew is nothing, is he not, but the citation of the Book?
- The Jew does not cite the Book. He is cited by himself. 2

Thus, "after God," theology does not end; it becomes all the more crucial. Jabès
faces this fact in every fragment and he never defaces it; that is his seriousness.
For Jabès, our time does not lead to an abstract questioning of God, or to a foray
into mythological thinking (whether this derives from a fabulous sense of reality
or a fictive sense of authority). Nor does Jabès indulge in a new wave of
iconoclasm in the vindictive sense (the icon of the blank page saves him from
this). For Jabès, our time leads to a hard questioning of humanity and its ways.
But these are not the ways thought has been already, or humanity, but ways
mankind has not been, ways of unthought: "the opaque, translucent, cursed
unthought which saps, abases and depraves us." This way of thought - which
3

the genius of Jabès's writing shows is no aporia - in which God is as unknown as

the nature of humanity, each and all of us, points to what Jabès faces and
represents as the religious paradox of our time:

I said that at the farthest, boldest, most daring point of his quest the
Jew ceased to be Jewish to the Jews, and that this paradox was one
of the keys to Judaism, the promised key to the Book which all
books, presuming on the promise, claim to hold. 4

The "Jew" in this quotation, as a metaphor for the torment of the void, means all
those whose Faith is of the Book. Thus, Kabbalism after God does not refer to
an obscure area of philosophy only relevant to Jewish studies, but to a
contemporary religious sensibility with implications for more than one world
religion. A sensibility which the work of Jabès will ensure has a future.

1 Jabès, Un Étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format, p.105.

2 Jabès, ibid. p.83.
3Jabès, BR.I.109; LR. p.141.

4Jabès, BR.I.107; LR. p.139.

 Given images of what has not been thought and the paradox just referred
to, new ways are not novel, they resemble old ways. Many of Jabès's sayings
present themselves as the lost voices of the past who have only come to the
book "over the centuries." The lost voices reappear in the inspired memory and
1

imagination of the writer after the disaster as fragments only, as figments of

possibility, inklings, experimental beginnings, shelters in the debris of language
and being. "O perpetual day in the ephemeral day," writes Jabès in the Letter to
Derrida: words which evoke this very ethos of a Kabbalism after God.
Why does Jabès put these words of a Kabbalistic rabbi about black fire on
white fire to Derrida? What does he want him to hear? What do we hear from
the words addressed by Jabès to Derrida, about Jabès? What do we hear about
his writing; about the site around which the pages we are reading organise
themselves? Let us look at these questions now, for they will lead us into the
discussion of what Jabès refers to as ABSENCE. Then I will tie up the various
general notions I have discussed under the notion of Kabbalism after God, to
define "a reading claiming priority."

Kabbalism After God

The writings of Jabès could be seen, and not unjustly, as an extenuation

of the words of Rabbi Isaac. The image of fire is equated with the questions of
writing and the book by Jabès in the poem at the start of the Letter to Jacques
Derrida. This image of fire points to the passion of what is at issue (writing and
the book), to their primordial nature and the difficulty of language with respect
to them: for fire is an unstable and insubstantial element, unlike the word with
its traditional tendency to fix representations and hold them steady. The
extenuation of one writing by another, of book by book, is what Jabès calls
desire. "Fire is virginity of desire," he says at the end of the poem. Derrida's
2

work is described by Jabès as "the propogation of innumerable fires to the

spreading of which your philosophers, your thinkers, your favourite writers
taken back to their writings, contribute." "Thus your books mutually reflect
3

each other and they reflect your privileged examples, back-to-back." 4

Ultimately, for all its worth, which Jabès evokes with some warmth,
Derrida's understanding of the question of writing and the book is set in meagre

1BQ.I/LQ.I: Dedication.
2Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.47.
3Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.55.

4Jabès, ibid.
epistemological terms of meaning and interpretation. Derrida's "positions"
which are without position as such, his transgressions and subversions seem
unable to bring anything into sight beyond the aporia - Derrida has in fact said
that his work has all been a labour "in aporetology or aporetography." "An 1

aporia is a non-road." Without an orienting star Derrida's word-plays lack the

2

reverential sense, "the consecrated gesture," of Jabès's. Derrida's word-plays

3

are the boast, probably a vain boast, of a "dislodged and dislodging writing." 4

Jabès, by contrast, seeks the metamorphoses of the word for ends which are
neither a travesty of traditional justice nor ideologically, as it were, bound up
with non-roads. 5

1 Derrida, Aporias, p.15.

2Derrida, "The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority," in Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice, ed. D.G. Carlson, D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, p.16. But this is
only really a species of ideology put up in opposition to Husserl's Gedankengang
and Heidegger's Denkweg.
3Jabès:

So the act of writing would appear to be the consecrated gesture of

handing man's power over to the utterance of the book, equivalent
to sacrificing the word to its power of absence, allowing it only its
immediate, ill-timed manifestation.
We are born and die of this perpetuated, never deferred
power. To attain it we resort to our creative force - whether friend
or enemy - whose word remains centre and bond. But we continue
to answer only for ourselves, even where nothing remains of us,
marking our power to disappear, with its intoxications as well as
its despair. (BR.II.56; LR.II.69).

4 Derrida, Positions, p.42.

5I assert this despite the fact that in a much later writing than the context of
Jabès's Letter to Derrida, Derrida has boldly asserted the connection between
aporetology and deconstruction as operating on the basis of an infinite "idea of
justice." ("The Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority," in
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. David Gray Carlson, Drucilla
Cornell & Michel Rosenfeld, pp.24-25). In dissociating justice and law Derrida
makes a law of undecidability.
Gillian Rose takes issue with Derrida about writing and law (Dialectic of
Nihilism, pp.131-170). Elsewhere she criticizes Derrida's association of
deconstruction with the undeconstructability of justice as leaving the authority
and legitimacy of its claim a mystery - and a mystery which, therefore,
constellates the need "to represent, to formalize, to think, to know, to judge."
 Near the end of the Letter Jabès takes up a synonym of Derridean
differance: the word mine (mine, as in mining), which has multiple meanings. 1

Differance is lost in a poetic synonymy, as if Jabès, with his sure creative touch,
wished to deconstruct differance. At the same time he begins to delimit the
physiognomy of differance. The point Jabès makes, however, is Kabbalistic: "The
single letter is able to contain the book, the universe." The "pyramidal silence"
2

Jabès quotes at this point of the Letter is from Derrida's early essay "Différance,"
which, with seeming Kabbalism itself, announces its subject as the letter a. 3

From Jabès's point of view, when Derrida changed a letter without altering the
vocalization of the word in French, he enacted something more ancient and
radical than he calculated on enacting and than it was possible for the rhetoric
and labour of deconstruction to take up. While making a Kabbalistic move to
start with, Derrida stuck to a theoretical stance in which the letter 'a' is made an
object, and his essay an object lesson for Heideggerian ontology. Derrida's essay
attempts to inaugurate what, in in a contrived spirit, he calls "play." This is the
4

play which, for Jabès, is superficial; and his Letter suggests that the
objectification of the letter in Derrida's philosophical stance has only led
wisdom up the non-way of ideology and academicism. It is not by virtue of
5

differance that the single letter is able to contain the book, the universe; nor is it
by reason of the playful undecidability of Derridean writing. The Kabbalists
suggest to Jabès a more magnificent and magnanimous concept of writing altogether
and this is what he wants to suggest to Derrida by way of the Letter. This Jabèsian
notion of writing depends upon a number of Kabbalistic ideas working in
concert, all deflected, of course, from their mystical sense. I will proceed to
unfold the Jabèsian notion of writing by reference to the most important of
these Kabbalistic ideas and then by a discussion of what Jabès calls ABSENCE.
(Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, p.87).
1Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.58.

2Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.59.

3Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, pp.3-27.

4On "play" see Derrida "Différance", in The Margins of Philosophy, p.4-5 Like so

many of Derrida's ideas, this idea of play derives from Heidegger, specifically
from Heidegger's "temporal play-space" of being (The Principle of Reason, p.84);
and his idea of the post-metaphysical "leap of thinking." that supposedly puts
one into "the mystery of the play," "that play upon which our human nature is
staked." (ibid., pp.111-112)
5Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.49. Jabès's reason for the Letter is "also in order to

contain my irritation at this questioning of the word which has become

suddenly, for many, an object of false play in that superficial audacity, that
erudite seizing of what never allows itself to be tackled head-on."
At the end of this discussion we will be in a position to see writing in the way
Jabès wants Derrida to see it.
To start with we need to recall that the idea of inarticulate sound is a
powerful motif of Jewish tradition. Scholem points out that, in the Guide to the
Perplexed of Maimonides, "wherever in passages dealing with the revelation on
Mount Sinai, the children of Israel are said to have heard words, it is meant that
they heard the (inarticulate) sound of the voice, but that Moses heard the words
(in their meaningful articulation) and communicated them." Nearer to our own
1

time, the Kabbalistic Rabbi Mendel of Rymanóv said that only the first letter of
the alphabet, the aleph, was revealed to Israel on Mt.Sinai. Scholem comments:

The aleph may be said to denote the source of all articulate sound,
and indeed the Kabbalists always regarded it as the spiritual root
of all other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet
and hence all other elements of human discourse. To hear the
aleph is to hear next to nothing; it is the preparation for all audible
language. 2

When Jabès tells Derrida that, "The single letter is able to contain the
book, the universe," he is also reiterating what the great teacher of Mishnah,
Rabbi Meir told Rabbi Ishmael when the latter asked him about writing. He
was told that "if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many, you will
destroy the whole world." Jabès is not merely alluding here to Derrida's change
3

of an 'e' for an 'a' in difference. For the Kabbalist, the single letter was able to
contain the book, the universe, because for them the Torah was the organ of
Creation.4

For Jabès, the intuition is homologous and the reason is analogous; only
the mysticism is deflected. For Jabès, contra Derrida, writing means that,
because "the act of writing would appear to be a consecrated gesture." The 5

letter is venerated accordingly, with humility, in "handing man's power over to

the utterance of the book, equivalent to sacrificing the word to its power of
absence, allowing it only its immediate, ill-timed manifestation." "Ill-timed,"
6

because the world is never on the watch for the utterance of a book such as this.
1 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.30.
2 Scholem, ibid.
3 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.39.

4 Scholem, ibid. p.73.

5Jabès, BR.II.p.56; LR.II.p.69.

6Jabès, BR.II.56; LR.II.69.

A book of humanity and God, of "undefinable presence and infinite absence," "a 1

single promised book of fire," a book in which "God is, with me, this vocable." 2

So that, to take up a previous metaphor, the blood with which the writer
irrigates his words, is God's blood. 3

By contrast, for Derrida, the meaning of absence has always seemed to

confront him with the dynamics of negative theology, a bloodless God; even
though, ironically, Derrida has always been aware of negative theology and at
pains to distinguish what he means, from it.

What differance, the trace, and so on 'mean' - which hence does not
mean anything - is 'before' the concept, the name, the word,
'something' that would be nothing, that no longer arises from
being, from presence or from the presence of the present, nor even
from absence, and even less from some hyperessentiality. 4

Negative (apophatic) theology is that discourse on God which proceeds by way

of saying what God is not, rather than stating positive (kataphatic) attributes in
the manner of anthropomorphism and a metaphysics of presence. In this
passage Derrida is speaking of (how to avoid speaking of) negative theology
and while acknowledging the resemblance of negative theology with his
discourse, points out differences, one of which is a dissociation from
esotericism, another of which is the incipient influence of Heidegger in his
discourse. 5

1Jabès, BR.II.67; LR.II.80.

2Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.47.
3Jabès, BS. p.35; LP. p.51.

4Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Languages of the Unsayable: the

Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. S. Budick and W. Iser, p.9.
Kabbalah differs from negative theology, because whereas the former is
mythological and poetic, the latter is conceptual and bound to the dynamics of
rationality, for instance, to binary oppositions (including their opposition by
deconstruction).. I should state, however, that by mentioning Jabès in relation
to Kabbalah, I am not interested in correlations, as if the fact that Jabès can be
related to Kabbalah gives what he has to say any special credence. Derrida's
ideas have already suffered being correlated with Rabbinic thought and I would
not wish to extend this allegorizing, for it can lead to the kind of misconstrual
that I think we have in one of Susan Handelman's books of both the rabbis and
Derrida. (The Slayers of Moses: the Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern
Literary Theory).
 The point here, however, is not to reduce either Derrida's and Jabès's
ways of thinking and unthinking to a theoretical issue of negative theology, or
vice-versa, for this would be untrue to both of them. I am speaking of Jabès in
1

particular here and arguing that Jabès lies closer to Kabbalism (deflected from its
mystical sense) than to negative theology. My view agrees with what Edward
2

Kaplan has called Jabès's "atheistic theology." In other words, Jabès's theology
3

(should we care to speak of such a thing) is not conceptual but imaginal - that is,
true by imagination's standards. Imagination's standards, it must be stressed,
are not imaginary in the ordinary derogatory sense, but are images, formative
images, conversant with the deep words of life, dying and coming alive with
them. The logic of his imaginative work is Kabbalistic because, like Kabbalah, it
finds its meaning in myth and is essentially mythical. My view here agrees with
what Max Bylen has called the "mythical comportment" of Jabès's writing. 4

5On the former, see Derrida, ibid. pp.18-19; on the latter, p.53ff. The influence of
Heidegger means that the concept of nothing which informs his text follows
from the fundamental ontological difference between being and beings, between
what 'is' is and 'God' is etc. See Gabriel Motzkin, "Heidegger's Transcendent
Nothing," Languages of the Unsayable: the Play of Negativity in Literature and
Literary Theory, pp.95-114.
1See Kevin Hart The Trespass of the Sign, on the particular relation of

deconstruction to negative theology and vice-versa. Hart's position is "not that

deconstruction is a form of negative theology but that negative theology is a
form of deconstruction." (p.186). The 'trespass of the sign' is the sign's
overstepping of its asigned limits as such; a problem of the constitution of its
presence (that it is marked by absence) p.14.
2Edward Kaplan supports this, he says, "the writer deploys negation and

contradiction so as to clarify and free the hope which these make possible."
"Edmond Jabès: un prophétisme sans Dieu", in Écrire le Livre..., ed. R.
Stamelman and M. A. Caws, p.230. Delimiting what he calls Jabès's "atheistic
theology" Kaplan gives an appropriate poetical exegesis of a passage by Jabès,
to show us that "a literary figure, not mystical intuition, is at work." See, "The
Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès," in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature,
12:1 (1987) p.48.
3Kaplan, "The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès," Studies in Twentieth

Century Literature, 12/1, pp.43-63; "Edmond Jabès: un prohétisme sans Dieu," in

Écrire le Livre, ed. R. Stamelman and M. A. Caws, pp.219-323.
4Max Bylen, "Le comportement mythique dans l'oeuvre d'Edmond Jabès," in

Jabès, le Livre..., ed. David Mendelson, pp.83-90. See also, Shlomo Elbaz, "Jabès
en question," ibid., pp.139-147. While Elbaz finds Jabès's writing thoroughly
modern in its multiple meanings, deliberately conflicting significations and
hermeneutical impossibilities, he nontheless finds it also intimately related to
Myth here means an account of reality which only poets can produce by which
humanity is put in touch with the world and with itself in an encompassing and
thorough-going manner. As I quoted Paul Celan saying in Chapter One, "It is
not communication between man and man that matters but communication
between man and cosmos. Put men in touch with the cosmos and they will be
in touch with one another." Myth is therefore an ontological account of being
1

and dying. In short, myth as I am referring to it here is when poetry is

cosmological or world-defining. The myth can be considered dead when people
are self-consciously aware of it as but a tale told; however, the myth is living
and true when people believe that is how the world really is. There are at least
three other important Kabbalistic aspects of the language and writing which
inform Jabès's own work, of which I would like to introduce now, for they will
enable us to understand what Jabès means by writing: the mytho-poetical sense
of this word's image and expression.
Firstly, in one important and long-standing tradition of Kabbalah, the
entire Torah and tradition, the textus (living texture), could be resumed, it was
thought, into the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the divine Name of God
(YHWH). In Kabbalism this Name is synonomous with the Creation of heaven
and earth. Jabès's conception of the book in some fragments explicitly thinks
2

of the book as if it were the Tetragrammaton, containing within it the birth and
death of everything in heaven and earth: "If God is, it is because He is in the
book." For Jabès, all originates in the book, through its naming: "naming gives
3

existence [...] nothing exists outside the book." 4

How Jabès makes these
seemingly aggrandising views bear a contemporary purpose will become clearer
in my discussion, below, of God as ABSENCE and book as place.
Secondly, the Kabbalists spoke of the vowel-point - pen touched to
parchment - as the résumé of creation. Of course a wisdom of God is needed to
5

know just where and in what way to point the text. It is not that this wisdom is
esoteric or secret, but that it is a world away from the foolishness which its
absence constellates; it is from knowing how to point the text that "the prophet"

the anteriority of mythic Jewish imagination.

1Cited by Hamburger, The Truth in Poetry, p.79.

2Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.41ff. S. Cohon, "Theurgic uses of

the Names," Essays in Jewish Theology, pp.156-161.

3See especially, Jabès, BQ.I.31-32; LQ.I.32-33.

4See especially, Jabès, BR.II.76; LR.II.92.

5See Jabès's quotation from the Kabbalah to this effect at the start of the final

volume of Questions: "When God, El, wanted to reveal Himself, He appeared as

a point."
in the person emerges. In an epigraph to the most explicitly Kabbalistic of his
1

books (the seventh volume of Questions), there is the same symbolism of black
on white as in the words of the Kabbalistic rabbi in the Letter to Derrida. The
epigraph is from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The point
precedes being black or white, Wittgenstein says. Furthermore, "we can indicate
a point on the paper even without knowing what black or white is." This strikes Jabès
2

as a Kabbalistic idea. "When God, El, wanted to reveal Himself, He appeared as

a point," writes Jabès at the start of the seventh volume of Questions (which in
fact has a point as its title). Thus it is from this point that writing and authority
issue, that the word and the book to come will be enabled to come: "From this
point...," writes Jabès. And: "From this point we have conceived the book."
3 4

"We": the writer and the Jew; the author and the reader; God and each person.
For Jabès, this idea of a point would precede even the Derridean trace and the
binary concept of decidability/undecidability itself. The idea of the point
becomes the symbol for Jabès of the book which is ineffaceable and
unperceived, the "mythical" book "before all books," as he describes it in the
jacket-note of the third volume of Resemblances. God appears as a point. That
means, God, nothing in Himself, is only in every interpretation. This kind of
ontology is shared alike by Jabès and Derrida. It is not a fundamental ontology
like Heidegger's in Being and Time, but ontology as a matter of writing, a
covenant with the word, a question of the book and the Book. This kind of
ontology is what makes the idea of "the reading claiming priority" a puzzling
prospect, yet one I shall address shortly.
My third point about the way in which Kabbalistic ideas of language and
writing inform Jabès's thinking is this: the pointing of the text of the Torah was
considered by Kabbalists a desacralization of it. Because of this preconception,
the unpointed scroll of the Torah, that is, the Torah in which the vowel sounds
were omitted, meant the consonants could be vocalised differently, shifting the
meaning of the text both within and between every word. The possibilities of
interpretation of the Torah were literally infinite because there could (literally
speaking) be infinite Torahs. This Kabbalistic notion is radical even by Derrida's
5

standards of the undecidability of texts because it would unbind the logical

opposition between decidability and undecidability, text and context, Same and
1Idel,"Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah," in Midrash and Literature, p.144.
2Wittgenstein, cited by Jabès, QB.II.345; El, ou le dernier livre, p.11 [italic in
original].
3Jabès, BQ.II.351; El, ou le dernier livre, p.17.

4Jabès, BQ.II.441; El, ou le dernier livre, p.121.

5Hence, the title of Idel's essay in Midrash and Literature, pp.141-157.

Other. But it is precisely at this point, when undecidability gains the absolute
upper hand, that "a reading claiming priority" comes back into view.
Interpretation either has to become impossible or it has to become a function of
wisdom. Wisdom must be defined by having come to "a true intuition of the
text"; to that point, without knowing what it is, but in which God reveals
1

Himself. Thereafter it becomes possible to 'point' the text, or in other words, to

allot to it readings claiming priority.
In Kabbalism, as in reading Jabès, a "true intuition" of the text suggests a
superior, more authoritative interpretation. The rabbi's interpretation of the
Torah is more authoritative than that of the tradesperson, that of the teacher
than the pupil; and the analogy holds for reading Edmond Jabès. Yet, the "true
intuition of the text," which distinguishes the wise interpretation from the
mundane or mistaken, means "nothing that would resemble a closure, nothing
that would lock [the texts] in on themselves." The reading claiming priority, as
2

we shall come to see, does not refer to an interpretation or something that has
to be decided, but to a place prior to interpretation: a starting point. Jabès's
writing can be duly understood as carrying the reader to the threshold of such a
place. Before bringing together the notions of book, place and readings
claiming priority, I need to say something about ABSENCE.

ABSENCE

The question of the book is primarily a question of meaning and

authority's absence defined by the Scriptum Absconditum (the written Torah) and
the Deus Absconditus (God in the disaster and aftermath, that is, in our time); in
other words, the presence of absence - death - and the absence of presence - God
- in the disaster and its aftermath.

...for what I was confronted with was the absence of God and not
of the concept of god. This absence slowly became ABSENCE, our
absence to ourselves, the absence of origin which is the root of all
creation. The abyss, in fact.
3

This matter of ABSENCE is what I want to discuss now. Jabès's sense of

ABSENCE, his isomorphic understanding of the relation between the Book and

1Jabès, DB. p.82; DL, p.118.

2Jabès, DB. p.33; DL. p.57.
3 Jabès, DB. p.72; DL. p.106.
the book is not atheistic. In the conventional sense an atheist does not believe in
the existence of a God, but at the outset of this chapter I established that the
existence, or otherwise, of God in the conventional sense was not the issue. The
issue has to do with the fate of certain values symbolized by what I have called
the deep words of life. The absolute anchor of the deep words of life, in
humanity, has been disoriented by disaster. "The thread has been cut," between
one person and another, between each person and God. In this situation the
1

book comes to stand for the condition of any search for the deep words of life.
As I have indicated above, it would be wrong to simply interpret Jabès's
atheism under the heading of negative theology. As I have argued, most
essentially, Jabès's atheism is Kabbalistic. Kabbalistic atheism starts with the
Scriptum Absconditum and Deus Absconditus as mythical pretexts on the basis of
which humanity's essential origin and end is thought out. Kabbalistic atheism
mythologises being. Its myth (of the Tree of Life) is now only of historical
importance since the only true myth is living myth. Analogously, Jabès raises
the question of the book, through poetry in a shattered narrative, into something
approaching myth. This is not myth in the historical sense of some pre-scientific
mode of belief, but myth we have yet to recognize as such: living myth, myth in the
making, literally Creation theology because the creation of theology, of the word
to come (le vocable à venir), "the writer being unable to express himself except in the
future." This "word to come" is "a word of solitude and certainty, so buried in
2

its night that it is barely audible to itself."

3

As Betty Rojtman has pointed out, Jabès's metaphysical premises are not
conceptual but mythical. This is the myth of ABSENCE. The human being is
4

configured not by some idol or image of absence (God or Book), but by the
ineffaceable, the unperceived (subtitle of the last book of Questions and
Resemblances). This is not an abstract absence, a theoretical positing of absence,
but real, like pain, like screams: God is abscondent. A contemporary experience in
the aftermath of disaster, but also a Kabbalistic idea (Lurianic, after Isaac Luria,
1534-72) which was called tsimtsum. Lurianic myth originally grew out of a
5

great massacre and dispersion of Jews (from Spain) as an attempt to take

account for the world again in circumstances of great pain and disorientation.
Tsimtsum means God's withdrawal into Himself; His contraction and hiding.
The crisis in the world is the result, the outcome, of a crisis in God. The world
1Jabès, DB. p.61; DL. p.92.
2Jabès, BS. p.36; LP. p.52-53. [italic in original].
3Jabès, BS. p.1; LP. p.9.

4Betty Rojtman, "La Lettre, le point," in Jabès, le Livre..., ed. D. Mendelson, p.96

5Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.110f

will only be restored to God's powers and command when God has been healed
and made pure again (the tikkun) by the prayer and exemplary justice of
humanity. It is in this Kabbalistic way, deflected from its mystical sense, that
Jabès calls himself an atheist. Jabès's atheism is not merely the logical negation
of theism; it is Lurianic. Thus it is not a contradiction in terms for Edward
Kaplan and others to speak of Jabès's "atheistic theology," as for Jabès atheism
follows from the logic of a myth which is true: that God has withdrawn and is
hidden from the world. Thus, according to Didier Cahen Jabès's myth is
atheological and bibliosophical.1

Above, where I said the blank page calls on humanity's creative powers, I
mentioned theurgy. Jabès is a theurgic poet. Just as the Lurianic Kabbalist had
to invite God to presence, so does the Jabèsian poet, starting with Jabès himself,
in our time, after the disaster. Edward Kaplan draws attention to what I also
consider an important page of Jabès in this regard, for it strongly shows that all
Jabès's atheism and talk of absence is not nihilism or some ideologically inspired
poetic agenda. The passage I am referring to comes from Le Parcours and is
entitled, "The Book Read; Here, First / The Reading of the Book." It begins as
follows:

To negate Nothingness (Nier le Rien). By this phrase I have wanted

to build the book; because that is what it means to live, to negate
Nothingness. 2

In Jewish tradition, when God is abscondent, He is sought by theurgy; by

means of fervour, prayer, petition, evocation. The word was considered an
instrument of creation, especially the name and most especially the name of
God, the four letters of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH). The Kabbalists worked
magic by means of those names discovered to be homologous with elemental
powers. For the Kabbalist everything in the world was significant in some
occult manner. This is not the kind of theurgy we read about in Iamblichus or

1Didier Cahen, "Les Réponses du livre," in Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman

and M. A. Caws, p.61.
2Jabès, Le Parcours, p.105 [my transl.]. See Kaplan, "Edmond Jabès: un
prophétisme sans Dieu", in Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman and M. A Caws,
p.230 and "The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabès," in Studies in Twentieth
Century Literature, 12:1 (1987), p.60.
Proclus (or in Heidegger for that matter); it is not a matter of calling down the
1

gods from on high to save us.

Jewish theurgical anthropology strikes utterly different chords; the

problem is basically the need of the Divinity for human help, or
human power, in order to restore the lost sefirotic harmony. The
focus of Kabbalistic theurgy is God, not man; the latter is given
unimaginable powers, to be used in order to repair the divine glory
or the divine image. 2

The ancient Jewish idea of theurgy is quintessential to Jabès, for after the
disaster, the divine glory and image are almost in need of creation, so dire has
their lot become. While Jews needed God's help in the Holocaust, now, in the
aftermath, God needs humanity to save Him. God needs each one of us to
intercede on His behalf. This is why creation is important in Jabès: writing as a
mode of intercession, a form of prayer. What an author creates must be
3

authoritative, indeed, if it is to restore the deep words of life, God and humanity
included, to some resemblance to their former glory; but the voices of the rabbis
in Jabès's books recall such authoritative saying. What it means for the deep
words of life to suffice to the disaster, is what Betty Rojtman, citing the
Kabbalistic notion of Tikkun, has called, "the possibility of Reparation." This is
4

not a political notion of what the aggressors owe the victims, but a metaphysical
notion of healing. It is a religious idea of which the age-old emblem was the lion
lying down with the lamb, the hope of a time when all manner of thing would
be well and God's promise fulfilled.
Theurgy is the work of the word in the mythical situation of ABSENCE.
This mythical situation is that of the time of the death of myth; our time. For
Jabès, the writer and the Jew, the word is the theurgical instrument by means of
which the writer intercedes on God's behalf. Warren Motte, following Agnès
Chalier and Joseph Guglielmi, and a literary (rather than philosophical)
interpretation of Jacques Derrida, connects word-play with Kabbalah and would

1Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us," Philosophy Today (Winter 1976) pp.267-
284.
2Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, ch.7: "Kabbalisitic Theurgy," p.179.

3In his fragmentary writings Kafka has written, "Writing as a form of prayer".

"Fragments from Note-books and Loose Pages", in Wedding Preparations in the

Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, p.343.
4Betty Rojtman, "La lettre, le point," in Jabès, le Livre..., ed. D. Mendelson, p.102.
have this "the basis of Jabès's poetic enterprise." Why Jabès should want to
1

"play" with the discursive function of words, or why Kabbalists should have
wanted to, is left unsaid; unless we are to suppose, as Motte thinks, that this is
worthwhile for its own sake.
The notion of the word is suggestive in the work of Jabès in several
senses, two of which are worth a brief mention. Firstly, the word means the
element of authority. The word for Jabès does not mean logos. Logos means a
general sense of discourse and "making manifest" which can be signified in a
variety of proclamatory senses (judgment, reason, definition, ground or
relationship). Word as element of authority means it is the locus of authority;
the word is that which has the power to authorise. On this view, the author
stands in a unique relation to both the word and the philosophical and poetical
question of authority. Yet this (Jabèsian) view, is not one viewpoint on a par
with infinite others, for the introduction of the philosophical and ontological
question of authority ranks every viewpoint on the basis of its authority. In
other words, writing becomes a matter of the more or less essential, and the
commentary on that writing with it.
Secondly, for Jabès the word means a material means of creation.
Creation does not mean a lost and abstract origin, but is what ties writing as a
form of prayer, and creating, together. Where writing is a form of prayer, the
word is the means at hand which invests myth with its power and symbolism.
The word is the material of image and the image of the material with which the
writer works. The word is what creation is done with and by which the writer
is in turn made. The first sense of the word I have mentioned here means the
word is essential to authority, and the authoritative to the essential; this would
have ramifications for Heideggerian ontology as well as the post-modern
practices which have taken their impetus from it. The second sense of the word
I mention here shows that it is integral to any idea of creation. Authority and
creation (of the myth which most fundamentally bespeaks humanity and the
world) are the strongest strands woven into the writing of Edmond Jabès.

Jabèsian Writing

The human being is no longer in the image of God after God has gone;
rather, at such a time the writer is the person of the image: the image-maker.

1Warren Motte, "Récit/Écrit," in Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman and M. A.

Caws, p.167.
But he will be known by the images he or she makes. The one who writes will be
2

the one who is written. When God is absent there is a corresponding loss of the
image in which creative persons (each of us) may create themselves. I am not
simply talking about psychological or sociological self-image here, but of
something underlying. The images in which men and women make themselves,
in the Jabèsian context, mean something ontological with respect to
imagination; as Alexander Koyré put it: "imagination, magical intermediary
between thought and being, incarnation of thought in image and presence of
image in being." Imagination stands between the word which evokes it and the
2

evocation which it materializes. The word of the past has evoked a quality of
imagination which has materialized in disaster. Theurgy recovers its lost or
obscure importance, because it is no longer evocation which the writer demands
of the word - or perhaps which the word demands of him - but invocation.
When God is not there, imagination must be invocatory, the word incantatory.
Invocation, in this sense (like incantation), binds what is homologous (God and
humanity, Book and book). This is another Kabbalistic idea. 3
It is an idea
which Jabès deflects from its theosophical premises because, for him, "the thread
has been cut" between God and humanity, between past and future, between
the person of the word and the word of authority. Perhaps the thread never
truly connected God and humanity to begin with. Jabès reflects upon the
writer's art in this juncture between a time lost (when God's words had a
significance) and a time to come (when such words might be resembled once
more) in an address to Yaël:

Yaël, when I, at the end of my pains, denounced writing as a God-

given and God-begetting lie because it is loyal to the claims of the
signs, I was floundering between two expressions of one truth
lived in relation to a vast reality. So that the word changed
nothing, but interpreted things with a name, in terms of an image,
a sound. The object remained out of reach even when grasped,
when shown in its failure to show.

1"You are the one who writes and the one who is written," says Jabès
(BQ.I:frontpiece).
2Alexandre Koyré, Mystiques, Spirituels, Alchimistes du XVIème siècle allemand,

p.60, n.2; cf. his La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, p.218, n.4.

3Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives , ch.6: Kabbalistic Theosophy.
 Then I said to myself that I had perhaps half-opened the
soul of things with my words - which were now their soul - and
had anticipated their future in their blossoming dreams.4

The writer still seeks the key to creation. Creation is only a slow dawn. Jabès's
2

creative writing founders on a negative dialectic of book and Book, humanity and
God. 3
Yet it is a magnificent foundering that may one day render obsolete
whole libraries of more articulate expositions of the really great problems and
question-marks of existence. Again, reflecting his negative dialectic, and Jabès'
work is replete with such passages:

When he realized that the Word had a face and that Silence had
one likewise, he understood that man, in what he introduces or
keeps unsaid, has now the face of God, now that of his absence. 4

Writing as a theurgical form of prayer means the operation of a

mediatory power, or in old fashioned language, an intercessory power. "You
write in a solitude where only the word joins you," Jabès writes. This "solitude"
5

is not a reference to an ivory tower but to the depth of the poet's imaginative

4Jabès, BQ.II.84; Yäel, p.116.

2Jabès:

Dawn, the book's vast desire.

Did we know, O destiny, that the dazzling morning of writing was
only a mirage in an ashen desert, a mirage from beyond, where fire
is at its zenith? (BS. p.100; LP. p.142).

3I have the post-Shoah groundlessness of the late Adorno in mind with this
italicized phrase, but other commentators on Jabès have used it. See Adolfo
Fernandez-Zoïla, "Ecriture en-temps et dialogue dans le livre, selon Edmond
Jabès," in Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman and M. A. Caws, p.107; also, Helena
Shillony speaks of "le paradox Jabésien," between the "reality of nothing," and
the "irreality of everything," in "Métaphores de la Négation," Écrire le Livre..., ed.
R. Stamelman and M. A. Caws, p.29. Shillony bases her "paradox" on BS. p.67;
LP. p.99. She cites Jabès from the same source: "I write from two limits.
Outside there is nothing. Within, the horror of Auschwitz. Real-limit.
Reflection-limit. Nothing left but inability to found equilibrium." [my transl.]
Écrire le Livre..., ed. R. Stamelman and M. A. Caws, p.29.
4Jabès, BQ.II.134; Elya, p.26.

5Jabès, BS. p.34; LP. p.50.

work, I mean his visionary work: where word is the material of image. For
Jabès, what words mediate and what his writing envisions, are poles apart: God
and humanity; Book and book; divine page, human page; words and silence,
absence and ABSENCE (the Absconditus). Yet this mediation, this invocation,
this incantatory writing and mythical book act upon us, the reader. Even if, as
Jabès suggests, his audience is really God and his public reader secondary to
Him. Yet Jabès also says, in the first pages of The Book of Questions, "you are the
1

one who writes and the one who is written." This "you" might be me the reader,
or you, God. I would suggest it is both. This means, if what the words mediate
in the being of the book, does not concern us as much as it concerns the writer,
we are discrepant readers. Jabès makes the utmost demand on the reader, for
his writing attempts, in Blanchot's phrase, to suffice to the disaster. The reader
2

is called to a reading at this level. A level at which "the reader rejoins the creator"
in "the intuition of the book." 3

The level at which writer and reader see eye-to-eye in an intuition of the
book, that is, the site around which the pages organise themselves, is a
Kabbalistic idea. In the words of Rabbi Mordekai of Chernobyl, writer and
reader form "a cleaving of spirit to spirit." Thus the Kabbalists understood that,
4

"a prophetic state of mind is necessary to the proper decoding of the Bible." 5

Likewise, a Jabèsian state of mind is proper to the decoding of the book formed
by the question of it. A book such as the Book: "the place in which all books
resemble - also, all places." And it is significant that we are talking here of a
6

Jabèsian place, not merely a viewpoint (on a par with endless others). The
Kabbalistic notion of writing and reading is appropriately a hierarchical notion,
1Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.47. "I fill in with unearthed words some unappeased
pages, God, at the other side of my table, composes His book of which the fume
envelops me; because the light of my candle serves him as a pen."
2I assert this is full awareness of the fact that Jabès's literary colleague Maurice

Blanchot wrote that, "nothing suffices to the disaster." The Writing of the Disaster,
p.2. I would say this work by Blanchot, similarly to Jabès, attempts to do just
the opposite and suffice to the disaster. Like Jabès, Blanchot would be aware of
the difficulty and challenge of the question of the book as Jabès defines it.
3Jabès, DB. p.82; DL. pp.118-119.

4Cited by Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives , p.245.

5Idel, "Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah," in Midrash and Literature, p.144. See also,

"The Pneumatic Interpreter and Union with the Torah, in Kabbalah: New
Perspectives, 134ff. Some of the same themes we find appearing in a different
context in "Hermeneutique Spirituelle," in Henry Corbin, Face de Dieu, face de
l'homme, p.41ff.
6Jabès, BR.I.1; LR.I.7.
in which writer and reader meet where they see eye-to-eye; not any reading will
do. What kind of reading will do? I shall begin to elaborate this question here,
but only to elaborate it, for the question itself, as we shall see, is unanswerable.
Both the question and its impossible answer are tied up with the intention of
Jabès's Letter to Derrida, and what Jabès wanted in that Letter to bring to
Derrida's attention.
Jabès calls the human being a "written bond and place." Also, he equates
1

the book with the place of truth's first dawn. For Jabès, truth is a matter of the
2

word's authority and what the author authorizes; words derive their authority
from the extent to which they suffice to the disaster. Now I want to say that
this word place is important for Jabès because it has a meaning which relates every
reader along with himself, to God's ABSENCE. In an interview with Marcel Cohen,
Jabès has stated:

Think also about the word 'book'. The book, where everything
seems possible through the language that one thinks one can master
and that finally turns out to be but the very place of its bankruptcy.
All the metaphors the word can inspire lie between these two
extremes. None of them really gets to the heart of it, but, between
this all and this nothing, the unfathomable opening takes place,
which in the end is what every reader is confronted with [assuming,
that is, every reader can acheive this "end"]. Moreover you know
that one of the Hebrew names of God is Hammakom which means
Place. God is the place - as the book is.
3

The book is the image of place and God. The question of the book is the
question of God, by the same token (of the word). Hence, as I have already
pointed out, writing is "the consecrated gesture of handing man's power over to the
utterance of the book." But this is not a handing-over to a God who is present and
4

waiting, but a handing-over to a God who has absconded and left behind His
absence. Jabès describes "the consecrated gesture," therefore, as "equivalent to
sacrificing the word to the its power of absence." Writing is a consecrated
5

gesture, not despite God's absence, but because of it; because the question of God
is now all the more Sachlich (substantial and thought-worthy). The question of
1Jabès, BQ.I.19; LQ.I.17.
2Jabès, BS.100; LP.p.142.
3Jabès, DB. p.15; DL. pp.34-35.

4Jabès, BR.II.56; LR.II.69 [my italic].

5Jabès, ibid.
the book, of God, is what in Albert Camus' words may truly be called "thought
at the meridian." The "rebel" in Jabès's books, however, is not a human person,
1

but God. God has rebelled by departing. At first it was thought by Nietzsche,
among others, that God was dead. This was perhaps a somewhat rash
speculation. God is not dead, for Jabès, He has gone wandering. The writing of
Jabès resembles this wandering and God's ABSENCE is made poignant by it. But
every question recalls Him, goes out to Him to the spaces He has vacated:

Is God, whom man allowed to enter eternity in his place, the

beginning and end of an irreverent meditation on the human
condition which would tend to prove that any place where people
die is a latent source of anguish?
The hope to be saved by writing would then be born of the word
received as revelation of a non-place, born of the book as of a space
summing up incommensurate reason. 2

In such a thought at the meridian, God's ABSENCE is not His utter

unimaginability, but existence screaming for us to use our imaginations. "You
are the one who writes and the one who is written," implicates writer, reader
and God in one and the same words. Each page of Jabès, each fragment almost,
is a place, where once again, writer, reader, and God are brought together. God
here, it must be remembered, is Jabès's metaphor for the void; the writer, the
Jew, Jabès's metaphor for the torment of God, of the void; which leaves but the
reader to work out their own reading, if they can, with diligence.
Jabès has taken Kabbalistic ideas of writing, God, the book, deflected
them from their mystical sense, and made authoritative matters of them in our
time, after the disaster. Jabès still upholds the whole theurgic nature of the
poetic word, its power to invoke as well as evoke, that governs the poetic word
and makes of writing a sacred activity, a "consecrated gesture." This is what, in
the Letter to Jacques Derrida I believe Jabès wants him to see. Derrida, who hung
his writing on the act of differance which Jabès could not, but who nevertheless
derived this act from Kabbalistic thinking, shares Jabès's feeling for ontology as
a question of writing and being (rather than the Heideggerian Being-itself).
Writing is a creative activity for Derrida, as it is for Jabès, but for Jabès, this
creativity recalls a sacred authority.

1Camus, The Rebel, p.243.

2Jabès, BQ.II.64; Yaël, p.87.
Temple and Contemplation

I shall conclude this chapter with a note on each of these three

dimensions of the question of the book: the sacred, the authoritative, the
creative. The three staples of Jabès's books, hedging the site around which his
pages organise themselves: the place of a reading claiming priority.
Starting with the sacred. This is a matter, as I said earlier, of passing
from the visible to the invisible, "from the sovereign thought to the sovereignty
of the unthought":

The sacred remains what is unperceived, hidden, protected,

ineffaceable. Hence writing is also the suicidal effort to take on the
word down to its last effacement where it stops being a word and
is only the trace - the wound - we see of a fatal and common break:
between God and man, between man and Creation. 1

The sacred dimension is best symbolized by the graphomorphic and

theographic concept I mentioned earlier in the piece: "A divine page. A human
page. And in both cases the author is God, in both cases the author is man." A 2

page in which is inserted, "the eternal Book in the metamorphoses of the mortal
book." A page on which écriture (writing) becomes Écriture (Scripture). But
3

this presupposes the creative power of writing. It also presupposes authority

which is metaphysical, by virtue of which one kind of writing can bear
transposition into the other. The grounds for such presupposition is in each
case the Kabbalism after God of the blank page, the black fire on white fire, the
point, and ABSENCE. These grounds, philosophically speaking, are of both an
epistemological and ontological order. They do not arise except as a
(Kabbalistic) "cleaving of spirit to spirit" between author and reader. First
4

there is a silent dialogue between author and reader which Jabès depicts as "a
deepening inner speech face to face with the undecipherable text"; eventually
5

this leads to a conjunction at the limits of readability; this would be the

6

1Jabès, Le Parcours, p.87; tr. as "The Key," by Rosmarie Waldrop in Midrash and
Literature, p.356.
2Jabès, Le Parcours, p.88.

3Jabès, Le Petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon, p.50.

4Rabbi Mordechai of Chernobyl cited by Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, p.245.

5Jabès, Le Parcours, p.90.

6Jabès, Le Parcours, p.78.

authoritative point reached or place arrived at. This Jabèsian stance differs from
7

overly epistemological theories (which reduce the ontological matter of being to

that of knowing) in which either the author or the reader are subjected or
objectified according to the rational protocols of implicitly ideological stances
as, for instance, are found in Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical theories.. The2

Absconditus (God or written Torah) is the pretext for the elliptical relations
between God and humanity, writer and reader. The myth of ABSENCE suffices
to the disaster, for like the disaster, it imposes silence. The silence which this
myth of ABSENCE enjoins on the writer and the reader is the "secret" which is
for Jabès, the essence of the sacred.
3

Coming now to the matter of authority. We might question the authority

of this view of writing as Scripture in potentia. Has it to do with what Scholem
calls "nihilistic mysticism" or "mystical nihilism," in which "all religious
authority is destroyed in the name of authority"? 4

The authority of Jabès's writing has to do with his use of the word as I
explained above where I spoke of the word as the element of authority. But it also
has to do with the historical necessity of the question (in the aftermath of the
disaster) and the ontological depth (of human being) at which the questioning
strikes. The disaster strikes an ontological depth for Jabès, in which the
absolute is disoriented for humanity. Writing must attempt to strike depth
enough to suffice to the disaster It is this kind of depth which Jabès finds in
Kabbalah, in the vertigo of its concept of the Absconditus, in its reversals of
symbolism, in the movement of life and death inherent in its motif of fire, and
the sadness inherent in its motif of ashes - a motif which has haunted Derrida no
less. After the disaster it is not mankind who need God, or if it does, it cannot
5

have Him, because God has absconded; it is God who needs mankind. Writing,
for Jabès, (and this is also what he would have Derrida know) means taking up
his unimaginable powers (which he owes to the word) in order to repair the
divine glory or the divine image.
God's dereliction of His duty requires of humanity what Derrida has
called, a "community of the question," to re-establish the covenantal terms that

1Idel,Kabbalah: New Perspectives, p.247.

2For example, where Ricoeur writes: "The book divides the act of writing and
the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication."
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p.146.
3Jabès, Le Parcours, p.87; Le Petit livre de la subversion hors de soupçon, p.57.

4 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.28 and p.11.

5See Derrida, Feu la Cendre, passim.

are lost to both. To Jabès a community of the question means the experience of
1

kinship with every "victim of injustice" because the hard questions arise at the
margins of (philosophical or social) systems, not from the safe seats at the
centres of complacency. For both Jabès and Derrida (who began, at least, by
2

identifying himself with "the margins of philosophy") a community of the

question stands out against "an answer that wants to be absolute" that is, 3

against any authoritarian stance. Certainly, as Jabès puts it, "this questioning lies
at the core of the most important texts written since Auschwitz." And Jabès
4

writes: "The essential in the throes of our crisis: to preserve the question." For5

Jabès, authority is absent, but for this reason it is not simply a negative term,
and even less is it a matter of nihilism. The question of authority lies behind
every question in God's absence. The question of authority lies unanswered,
and thereby preserved like the photograph by its negative, whenever the deep
words of life (God, stranger, law, love, name, death, book) are matters of
thought and writing. God has disappeared and left us authority as the question
of it. This is the hidden sign of our times. Jabès articulates the question of
authority in his writing as the question of the book and the Book. A community
of the question, as Derrida suggests, "may not yet [have] found the language it
has decided to seek," but it can afford to live in hope. The absence of authority,
6

the absence of God, the absence of the Book, haunts us: "the text which engenders
all texts to be written and which, though ever elusive, will not leave off haunting us."
7

Perhaps this ghost is the modern concept and experience (deflected from its
mystical sense) of the Shekinah (the holy spirit of Kabbalistic lore). The Shekinah,
which once used to be identified with the mystical ecclesia of Israel, now comes
to be associated with a community of the question whose task it is to keep the
Shekinah alive. This is not purely rhetorical, perhaps, given that I have
interpreted Jabès in terms of Kabbalism after God, the blank page and
ABSENCE; for according to Kabbalah, the Shekinah "is purely receptive and 'has

1Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Levinas,"

Writing and Difference, p.80.
2 Jabès, DB.p.42; DL. P.68.

3 DB. p.75; DL p.111.

4 Jabès, DB. p.62; DL.p.93.

5Jabès, BQ.II.442; El, ou le dernier livre, p.123.

6Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Levinas,"

Writing and Difference, pp.79-80.

7Jabès, BS. p.35; LP. p.51 [italic in original].
nothing of its own.' " Little wonder then such a notion should come back into
8

view, pertaining to Jabès's poetry.

Finally, on the matter of creativity, given the absence of authority
intrinsic to Jabès's writing, which, however, takes on an authority all its own,
how can he speak of "a reading claiming priority," or "the intuition of the book,"
or "the site around which the pages he is reading organise themselves"? This
question seems especially difficult given, as we have seen, that Jabès also thinks
that no intelligent reading of him "would resemble a closure." The answer lies
with the idea of the book (and God) as a place. As place, the book is not just any
place, or some arbitrary place, but the templum of the question: a sacred place, a
precinct. The templum is a cipher I am using here for the site around which the
pages of Jabès organise themselves. Such a site (a templum), as Henry Corbin
reminds us, is not a view-point, but the viewing-point. Templum originally meant
"a vast space, open on all sides, from which one could survey the whole
surrounding landscape as far as the horizon. This is what it means to
contemplate: 'to set one's sights on.' " In this name contemplation I think we
1

characterize Jabès's creativity. Writing as contemplative activity means

expressing the holy in that which can see its face. Reading Edmond Jabès may
always mean something different, perhaps something fairly relative, or perhaps
a perspective which opens him up to what is considered understanding (from
that perspective). However, what he calls "the intuition of the book," or "a true
intuition of the text," does not refer to seeing him from a viewpoint (a
perspective), but to seeing one's own persepctive from 'his' viewpoint; such that
the reader is "the one who writes and the one who is written." I put inverted
commas around 'his' in the previous sentence to express irony, because Jabès has
always identified his work with voices older than his own, and wiser: "I could at
best manage to adjust my voice pitifully to the undatable echoes of theirs." Of
2

course this goes against modern sensibility, but that is a sacrifice one has to
make, for it is contemplative sensibility that reading Edmond Jabès demands
more than anything else.
If Jabès is the most contemplative of poets he demands as much of his
reader. The reduction of Jabès's poetic work to a theory of writing or concept of
the book is the destruction of the templum. For "the intuition of the book" is this
templum where reader rejoins the creator at the point where the horizon can
properly be seen and perspectives really open out. Being and writing come

8Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, p.107.

1Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, p.386.
2Jabès, DB. p.33; DL. p.57.
together there. Pretending to explain Jabès in this way, through the cipher of
the templum, is admittedly somewhat forced. But the equation of templum and
contemplatio remind us that contemplation is about disengaging with wordiness
and entering oneself upon the silence and absence which are the matters at
stake.
The relation of reader and writer in any reading claiming priority, as
Corbin reminds us from another context, is "tautegorical" as opposed to
allegorical. "That is to say, it [that which is tautegorical] should not be
1

understood as concealing the Other whose form it is. It is to be understood in

its identity with that Other, and as being itself the thing which it expresses." 2

He means to say that reader and writer are not essentially understood as two
discrete entities, comparable or incomparable to each other, the same or
different as the case may be, but that reader and writer are essentially
understood in community with each other and as enlivening one another. The
Other in the context here, in community with and enlivening reader and writer,
is God. "God, at the other side of my table," as Jabès puts it to Derrida, as if to
show writing's true proximity to the absent Other. "The deepest intuition" of
3

the book (on Jabès's side of the table), presupposes the identity of reader and
writer: "you are the one who writes and the one who is written," referring
equally to both. A reading claiming priority, whatever it should be, arises from
this conjunction. Thus, "cleaving spirit to spirit," as the old Kabbalist put it,
reader and writer see the same Other. What Jabès tells us "always slips away"
from the pen; as God does, as the book does, both of which remain absent as
4

the infinity confronting reader and writer and infinitely underming every
reading, every word. Yet between the two, the book beneath the pen and the
5

book that always slips away from it, is formed an imagined trajectory of
resemblance. The Book of Dialogue, an extremely solitary book of listening, starts
by suggesting that questions are the foothills of dialogue. The intimate dialogue
of two silences: the reader shares the writer's silence, the writer shares God's
silence, God is silent because He has wandered out of our earshot. The silence
of the Book, of the word of authority, is confronted by the book, not in words
and petty human theories, but in the godly silence of this poet whose words
only try to impress such a silence upon us. Within this intimate dialogue of
1Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, p.267.
2Corbin, ibid.
3"God, at the other side of my table, composes His book, the smoke of which

envelops me; the light of my candle serves him as a pen. Ça suit son cours, p.47.
4Jabès, ibid.

5DB. p.51; DL. p.80.

silences, the trajectory of resemblance swells and spills into first words, such as
these of Jabès, on the nature of the trajectory itself:

The trajectory of the book to the absolute Book, silently - an

unchanging speech would not be able to be other than silent - is the
personalized speech of the impersonal Speech; as the trajectory of
the absolute Book to the book is the Speech of fire to the speech in
flames. 1

These are the flames of Kabbalistic myth and of what Jabès, borrowing the
motif, calls "eternity of the book, of fire in fire," in the poem which introduces
the Letter to Derrida. These same flames, in the final paragraph of the Letter,
2

divide into black and white, in order for "the familiar face" to be revealed. Is
3

this the face of she who sustains the meditation of the soul by lavishing light
upon it, and who is witness of its contemplation? These flames are a
poeticization - more than that, a kabbalization - of the ungovernance
determinative for Derrida. These are the flames where, for Jabès, following
4

Blanchot, philosophy loses its way. For the ancient faith, like that of the
5

community of the question today is that, "it is only in the desert, in the dust of
our words, that the divine word could be revealed." "What will my book
6

become," asks Jabès, "but a little ash on the pages of His?" 7

Conclusion

No adequate conclusion can be given with respect to the writing of Jabès

or in terms of the Kabbalism which is integral to it. However, four items are
worth remembering. Firstly, this Kabbalism after God is deflected from its
mystical sense. Secondly, Kabbalism after God means a radical constellation of
absence; one in which God is not merely dead but abscondent, and the writing

1Jabès, Le Petit livre de subversion hors de la soupçon, p.55.

2Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p. 47.
3Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.60.

4"I have regularly tried to restage philosophy in a scene where it is ungoverned,"

Jabès cites Derrida as saying in the epigram to the Letter (BM. p.36; Ça suit son
cours, p.41.) From Derrida, Positions, p.50.
5Jabès cites Blanchot as saying philosophy goes its way by losing it in a

postscript to the Letter (BM. p.48; Ça suit son cours, p.61).

6Jabès, DB. p.68; DL. p.101.

7Jabès, Ça suit son cours, p.47.

of authority with Him. Absence is not constellated with presence, nor is
absence merely a concept: absence means death and the fate worse than death -
the disaster - and the torment of the word that must suffice to them. Thirdly,
the negative dialectic of absence (of God and Book) is only fore-shadowed by
questions and resemblances. The fore-shadowing is not an intellectual exertion
over conceptual grounds and about natural origins; it is a call for creativity, a
search for authority, writing as the exercise of contemplation, bringing the deep
words of life to be; Lastly, the idea of Kabbalism after God helps us not to
understand the site around which the pages of Jabès organise themselves, for this
would merely be to literalize and concretize a poetic (imaginal) verity; rather,
Kabbalism after God enables us to enter the sacred precinct of contemplatio,
which no words of our own would permit.