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I Will Remain Silence and Scream: Edmond Jabs and the Wound and Witness of LanguageAuthor(s): Andrew J. PloegSource: Shofar, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 91-118Published by: Purdue University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/shofar.30.2.91

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I Will Remain Silence and Scream 91

Vol. 30, No. 2 2012

I Will Remain Silence and Scream:Edmond Jabs and the Wound andWitness of Language

Andrew J. PloegUniversity of Rhode Island

Tis essay argues that Edmond Jabss Te Book of Questions, Volume I radi-cally questions the presumably inherent authority of the witness in distinct yetinterconnected ways. Heavily influenced by Derridian deconstruction, his textchallenges conventional assumptions involving the witness, particularly the im-plied extra-textuality of horrific events (such as the Holocaust) and of thosewho provide testimony to them. Jabss unique rethinking of the witness is madeeven more legible through the productive parallel he draws between the Jew andthe writer. Tis parallel, for the author, is a reflection of the inescapable status ofboth as witnesses to the originary wound of language. Further, Jabs complicatesthe authority of the witness through his insertion of a rabbinical commentary

throughout his text, a framework that fundamentally blurs distinctions betweentestimony and its interpretation.

In Te Book of Questions, Volume I, Edmond Jabs draws upon elements ofJewish theology and philosophy in order to craft a work of literature that isas beautiful as it is poignant and as poetic as it is paradoxical. Troughoutthe text, the author explores the concept of the witness in regard to both lan-guage and the Holocaust, not as a firsthand witness to the Shoah himself (hisfictional characters Yukel and Sarah fulfill this role), but rather as a witnessto the inherent and originary holocaust of language. Jabs cannot personallytestify to the horrors of the Holocaust because he was not a direct victim, hav-ing spent the war in the relative safety of Egypt; however, as a writer and a Jew,he is both haunted and driven by the necessity to testify to what he terms the

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An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

wound1and scream2of language. I maintain that, in his work, this wound isunspeakability, and that, for Jabs, language is forever lacerated by its own in-ability to represent, an original illegibility3that Jacques Derrida enigmaticallydescribes as the very possibility of the book.4Tus, in this paper I proposethat by offering his own paradoxical testimony, Jabs calls into question theauthority of the witness in three distinct ways. First, I contend that Jabssclear and significant incorporation of Derridian deconstruction into his textenables him to interrogate conventional assumptions regarding the witness,particularly in terms of the extra-textuality of the witness and the events towhich he/she testifies. Second, I assert that the author further complicatesthis concept by drawing a direct parallel between Jews and writers, a relation-

ship built from their mutual inability to represent and their shared status aswitnesses to this irreparable failure. Tird, I argue that Jabs challenges theauthority of the witness by inserting a framework of rabbinical commentaryinto his text, which renders indistinguishable testimony and its interpretation.In addition, I dedicate much of my effort to constructing a survey of the theoryinforming Jabss text and the rich scholarship on it in order to situate withinthis context my own argument regarding the uniqueness of the authors ap-proach to the concept of the witness and to acknowledge the indebtedness ofhis project and my own to that work.

The Question of the Witness

Conventionally, we bestow upon the witness a privileged position, whether inhistory, literature, news, judicial proceedings, or the court of public opinion.Characterized by firsthand and sensory knowledge of a situation, the witnessis granted a unique authority, firmly steeped in his own personal and verifi-able experience of a real event. estimony, or the depiction of the event by awitness, is then conferred similar authority to represent the event accurately.

While not considered truth itself, testimony, according to John D. Caputo, inTe Prayers and ears of Jacques Derrida, is a promise to speak the truth, . . .to keep on speaking it, to stick with ones word, again and again, to repeat, to

1Edmond Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover,NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), p. 13.

2Jabs, Te Book of Questions, p. 16.3Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabs and the Question of the Book, in Writing and Dif-

ference,trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 77.4Derrida, Edmond Jabs and the Question of the Book.



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reiterate, to confirm that I am speaking the truth,5though an outside, inde-pendently authoritative institution is usually responsible for establishing itstruth-value.6In the first chapter of estimony: Crises of Witnessing in Litera-ture, Shoshana Felman describes the act of testifying, or providing testimony,as to vow to tell, to promise and produce ones own speech as material evi-dence for truth.7She continues, In its most traditional, routine use in the le-gal contextin the courtroom situationtestimony is provided, and is calledfor, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear,when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its support-ing elements of evidence are called into question.8Here Felman asserts thattestimony and the witness are traditionally endowed with an inherent level

of veracity, granted by the law and grounded in the direct experience of anevent. In his text, however, Jabs challenges this veracity, deeply questioningthe authority of both the witness and his/her testimony, and denying them, inparticular, any direct relationship to or claim upon truth. And, while this radi-cal rethinking is not unique to Jabs, but rather an approach that can be foundin the work of Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Maurice Blanchot, among oth-ers, I assert that the methods of questioning he employs, three of which Iaddress in this essay, are distinctly his own and offer productive insights intothis concept.

In Te Book of Questions, Volume I, Yukel is presented as a witness to theHolocaust who posthumously narrates, writes, and interprets the text. Jabsexplains, In these pages, little will be said about Yukel Serafi. He will, how-ever, often be appealed to. For Yukel Serafi is the witness.9Despite fundamen-tally challenging the claim of the witness to any sort of particular testimonialauthority, Jabs, through his strategic employment of the term, does not disre-gard the witness or his individual, yet still unavoidably mediated, experience.Like all survivors of the Holocaust, Jabss character, Yukel, has witnessed

atrocities that the author and the rest of the people fortunate enough to have

5John D. Caputo, Te Prayers and ears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 157.

6Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery inAmerica(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), p. 26.

7Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, estimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psy-

choanalysis, and History(New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 5.8Felman and Laub, estimony, p. 6.9Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 13.



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escaped its barbarity can scarcely imagine. And, though Jabs specifically re-fers to Yukel as the witness in this passage, I argue that it should be read as asympathetic acknowledgement of his horrific personal experience in the con-centration camps and not a definitive endowment of authority upon him orany witness based upon that experience; such authority would be impossiblewithin Jabss theoretical framework, in that the witness does not and can-not exist independently of language (a term I employ throughout this paperto denote trace-structure).10 For Jabs, as for Derrida, there is no exteriorto language because words and things share the same inherent instabilityacommon condition that paradoxically unites them and keeps them apart. Ashe puts it (reimagining Derridas own famous declaration11): Te world exists

because the book does.12Tat which is conventionally thought to be externalto languagethe so-called historical reality of the physical worldneces-sarily shares in the same intrinsic decentering as language itself, which, Jabsand Derrida both assert, it fundamentally is and is of. In this sense, there is notranscendental signified, no origin outside of language to stabilize words andthings. In this thoroughly linguistic domain, truth cannot be distinguishedfrom lie because truth must exist outside of language but never canonecannot escape the word. As Jabss character Reb Samuel says, You can freeyourself of an object, of a face, of an obsession. . . . You cannot free yourselfof a word. Te word is your birth and your death.13 Reb Leca echoes thisidea when he states, You try to be free through writing. How wrong. Everyword unveils another tie.14Inextricably bound to words, the witness cannotexist in a space of pure, embodied truth, because no such space is possible, butrather must inevitably live in the realm of language and lie. Tus, while, for

Jabs, Yukels personal experience of the Holocaust cannot and should not bedisregarded, that experienceit must be acknowledgedis nevertheless es-sentially linguistic and, as such, denied any unique authority to represent; in

other words, it can testify to nothing but its own inabilityto testify.

10Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ranslators Preface to Of Grammatology by JacquesDerrida (Baltimore: Te John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xxxix.

11Tere is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il ny a pas de hors-texte] (Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: TeJohn Hopkins University Press, 1976], p. 158.

12Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 31.13Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 101.14Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 37.



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Similarly, in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben asserts the impossibilityof bearing witness by arguing that there is an irreducible discrepancy betweenwhat happened during the concentration camps and the facts that constituteit. Te Shoah, he contends, is a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual ele-ments,15surpassing the limits of history, logic, law, and language that attemptto explain or represent it. For Agamben, this surplus makes particularly ap-parent the two impossibilities16of testimony: the essential lacuna at the coreof language and the inability of the complete witness17 to bear witness. Interms of the former, he argues that the survivors [of the camps] bore witnessto something it is impossible to bear witness to;18they necessarily testified toa void, or absence, in language that discharges the survivors of authority.19In

other words, because there is no stable, present center to language, no tran-scendental signified, even the testimony of a survivor of Auschwitz has noinnate authoritylike all of language, it testifies to nothing but its own untes-tifiable lacuna. And, in terms of the latter impossibility, Agamben maintainsthat the only true, or complete, witness to Auschwitz is the Muselmann, thewalking dead, the marked threshold in which man passed into non-man,20who cannot speak and cannot be spoken for. Any attempt to testify to or inplace of the Muselmann, he argues, merely bears witness to the impossibilityof bearing witness.21However, for Agamben, these two impossibilities do not

justify silence in regard to the Shoaha transformation of Auschwitz into areality absolutely separated from language22but rather demand resistanceto such silence that must nevertheless be rigorously submitted to the test of animpossibility of speaking,23to erasure, an ethical obligation echoed by Jabs,Derrida, Blanchot, and others. In this sense, the unrepresentable yet irrepress-ible testimony given by the witness to the truth of an event simultaneouslyand paradoxically acknowledges that in language there can be no truth. Like-

15Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive(New York:Zone Books, 2002), 12.

16Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 39.17Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 39.18Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 13.19Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 34.20Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 47.

21Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 34.22Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 157.23Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 157.



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wise for Jabs, Yukel, despite being referred to as the witness, can neverthelessmerely testify to the impossibility of the task.

The Originary Wound

Trough Yukels inevitable inability to provide authoritative testimony, Jabs,in Te Book of Questions, Volume I, challenges the authority of the witnessin several ways, most notably, perhaps, by mirroring Derridas deconstructiveparadigm throughout the text. I propose that this Derridian framework notonly complicates the idea of the witness, but reveals an underlying fissure in thescholarship surrounding Jabss work, between those who think of the woundof language as originary and those who conceive of it as initially inflicted by

the Holocaust, and in particular a tendency among scholars to blur this crucialdistinction (even among those who read Jabs through a deconstructive lens).Fundamental to Jabss conception of deconstruction and to my own argumentin regard to his text is Derridas assertion, in Of Grammatology, that languagehas no stable origin, or transcendental signified, and that this instability al-ways alreadywas because of the difference inherent within the origin itself. Hecontends that [f ]rom the moment that there is meaning there are nothing butsigns,24and that, due to this simultaneity, there was nothing before difference,

that the origin of language is and has always been non-origin, forever markedby its own incompleteness and lack of presence. Derrida argues that, despiteits impossibility, language seeks to achieve fullness through supplementarity,but the supplement, which itself lacks being and presence, cannot actuallyconstitute a transcendental signified because such stability and immediacy areunattainable. He asserts that the supplement is always incomplete, unequalto the task, it lacks something in order for the lack to be filled, it participatesin the evil that it should repair.25Tus, addressing one lack with another re-veals the diffrancethe difference and defermentinherent to language, that

Derrida terms arche-writing,26referring by it to much more than simply theact or result of putting pen to paper. Because of this play, the homogeneity ofword and thing can never be fully present in language, although a paradoxicaltrace of such a deferred unity does remain. However, Derrida claims that thistrace is not a trace of actual presencethe trace itself does not exist (to exist

24Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 50.25Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 226.26Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 56.



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is to be, to be an entity, a being-present)27but rather a trace of a trace in thatthere is no transcendental signified to which it can ultimately refer.

Toroughly deconstructive in spirit, Jabss text embraces the uncertaintyinherent within language itself, asserting that meaning in language is only de-fined by its distance from other things and that its significance is deferred andultimately unstable. He writes, We know the word which makes us see, hear,dream, and judge does not exist except in terms of the reality it creates andyet eludes.28For Jabs, meaning in language is perpetually elusivewe onlysee the residue of attempts to establish meaning, but never meaning itself. Inother words, meaning, while impossible outside of language, is neverthelessforever deferred within it. In Book of the Dead, a brief essay on and inter-

view with Jabs, Paul Auster writes, o Jabs, nothing can be written aboutthe Holocaust unless writing itself is first put into question.29Trough histexts unique construction, Jabs forces the reader into an initially disturbingnew worlda world hidden in the wordin which one soon realizes thatmeaning inevitably escapes through the books abundant margins, putting intoquestion all hope of authoritative testimony. What at first glance appears to beconfusing and unclear then becomes a poignant example of the originary un-representability of language and the paradoxical nature of the witness. As JoshCohen argues in Desertions: Paul Auster, Edmond Jabs, and the Writing ofAuschwitz, regarding Jabs work: to come to the problem of witness by wayof the process of writing is to put in perpetual question the relation of an un-speakable history to its representation,30which is precisely what Jabs does inhis text. Meaning perpetually eludes efforts to capture it in language, and thereader is left with only the residual traces of attempts to establish such mean-ing, while it remains forever deferred. In Nomadic Writing: Te Poetics ofExile, Richard Stamelman claims that, for Jabs, language is in a state of pro-found and irreversible exile: a rootlessness that reflects the essential separation

and distance at the center of being.31

Later, he continues, His books not only

27Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 167.28Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 53.29Paul Auster, Book of the Dead: An Interview with Edmond Jabs, in Eric Gould,

ed., Te Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabs(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 8.30Josh Cohen, Desertions: Paul Auster, Edmond Jabs, and the Writing of Aus-

chwitz, Te Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2000): 96.31Richard Stamelman, Nomadic Writing: Te Poetics of Exile, in Gould, ed., Te

Sin of the Book,p. 93.



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recreate the experience of exile; they are the experience. Te void of exilic exis-tence is buried deep within the ephemeral meanings and fragmented forms of

Jabss words. History is transformed into text, world into book, and the tracesof footprints on the desert sand into the evanescent signs of words on a page.32Stamelman equates the deferral of meaning that is central to deconstructionwith the state of exile that Jabss text not only exemplifies but embodies, anirreducible distancing inherent to the relationship of word and thing. In anessay entitled Letter to Jacques Derrida on the Question of the Book, Jabshimself writes, Everything is again set in motioncalled into questionbywriting. As we speak, nothing is ever said so completely that it could not besaid over, differently. So that saying is a revelation, with the promise of further

saying. Deconstruction functions on this level also, arranging and preparingthose moments when utterance splits apart and is neutralized by its reconciledopposites.33 Here Jabs explicitly identifies his project of questioning withDerridas deconstructive paradigm, arguing against any understanding of lan-guage as present, grounded, or centered. Instead, his work seeks to decenterlanguage, removing the limits arbitrarily placed upon meaning in discourse bythe presumption of presence and opening language to the freedom of endlessplay that constitutes its exilic existence. Language is thus the ultimate exile,forever separated from its own meaning and wounded by its own inability torepresent; however, language bears within it a paradoxical promise. For Jabs,as for Derrida, this promise constitutes a hope in and a messianic passion forthe to come, in its very deferral, in its to-come-ness. What I mean by God inmy work, he tells Auster, is something we come up against, an abyss, a void,something against which we are powerless. It is a distance . . . the distancethat is always between things.34For Jabs, God is the impossibility of closure,that which is always endlessly and necessarily to come. As he states, Always onthe way, the Jews God never arrives.35Tus, with closure ultimately deferred,

Jabss Reb Mendel declares: Only the hope to be right is real. ruth is thevoid.36And, later, Jabs offers, ruth is the movement toward it.37 In this

32Stamelman, Nomadic Writing, p. 95.33Edmond Jabs, Letter to Jacques Derrida on the Question of the Book, in Te Book

of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 44.34Auster, Book of the Dead, p. 19.35Benjamin aylor, Te Question of Jewishness and the Question of Writing: An

Exchange with Edmond Jabs, Te Treepenny Review, No. 21 (Spring 1985): 17.36Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 117.37Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 319.



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sense, Jabss hope is not in the static transcendence of decidability or totality,but in the quasi-transcendence,38as Caputo terms it, of the wholly otherthatis always coming, but necessarily never comes. Tis approach to the wound oflanguage as unflagging hope in but ultimate deferral of the to comesimultane-ously shatters any understanding of language as presence and stable meaning(i.e., as representation), enabling language to be thought in its creativity andnovelty (i.e., in its expressibility), due to its infinitely open structure.

In Te Book of Questions, Volume I, Jabs demonstrates that, due to thisdistancing, the testimony of the witness can never communicate the truth ofhistorical events, regardless of how mundane or extreme they may be, becauselanguage has always alreadybeen wounded by its own inability to articulate.

Before the reader has even begun the text proper, as he stands precariously atwhat the author terms the Treshold of the Book,39the fictional Reb Alcedirects the reader to [m]ark the first page of the book with a red marker. For,in the beginning, the wound is invisible.40Tis wound of the book, of theword, of writing, is simultaneous with and inseparable from the inception ofthe text itself, and, though the wound remains invisible, in that it has longbeen and continues to be misunderstood, overlooked, and/or denied, Jabsswork is in large part an effort to make it visible for all to see. Tat is why,for Jabs, the story of the book is not simply the story of the scream, of itscause or its origin, but rather the [b]ecoming awareof a scream41 (emphasisadded). Tis mark at the genesisin the beginningof the text is meant toaffirm that languages unspeakability is originary, not a wound inflicted by theHolocaust, but rather one stained red by the blood of six million Jews, peopleof the book, as Jabs calls them, whose deaths, he asserts, have made horrify-ingly visible languages primordial wound. Language, as many scholars havenoted, is altered by Auschwitz (the most famous declaration of which wasundoubtedly made by Teodor Adorno42); however, this alteration does not

lie in the assertion that, due to the Holocaust, language is unable to speak (forit has always alreadybeen unable to), but rather that it has now been plainlymarked, like the biblical Cain, for a life of displacement, distance, and exile. In

38Caputo, Te Prayers and ears of Jacques Derrida, p. 12.39Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 13.40Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 13.

41Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 16.42o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric (Teodor Adorno, Prisms: Studies in

Contemporary German Social Tought[Cambridge, MA: Te MI Press, 1983], p. 34).



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a strictly deconstructive sense, the Holocaust is no more unrepresentable thanany other historical event. For Jabs, to localize the wound of language in theHolocaust or to maintain that the scream only speaks a single historical eventis to narrow its inherent scope, a scope that is all of language, that is the entirebook, and that, as the book, is everything.43He writes, It is not one countrythat the scream accuses, nor one continent, but the whole world. It is not oneman, but all.44By asserting here that the scream does not accuse a single coun-try, continent, or, by extension, historical event, regardless of its devastation orextremity, Jabs implies that it issues from an originary wound, one that wasintrinsic to language far before the Holocaust and one that continues to be anessential aspect of it.

Although it fundamentally aligns with Jabss deconstructive paradigm,this implication divides scholars and creates and/or perpetuates misunder-standings of his work, of deconstruction, and of language in general. Manyscholars, discerning the deconstructive orientation of his text, have observedand articulated the originary nature of the wound and its significance to Jabsswork. In fact, Derrida himself dedicates two essays to Te Book of Questions,Volume I,both in terms of the distinct texts that comprise it and in terms ofits completion in the last book of the trilogy.45In an essay on the initial book

43Berel Lang surmises that Jabs, in attempting to write-the-Holocaust, chooses towrite in the assumed presence of the events, tak[ing] the existence and enormity for grant-ed (Lang, Writing-the-Holocaust: Jabs and the Measure of History, in Gould, ed., TeSin of the Book, p. 194) and to rely on the reader to bring that presence with them into thetext. I would, however, counter that Jabs takes the enormity of the Holocaust more fullyinto account than Lang himself, not only by acknowledging its unparalleled barbarity in thelives of Yukel and Sarah, but actually making it more enormous, if such a thing is possible,by thinking it as the making visible of the wound of language as a whole. In addition, it isdifficult to understand how Lang could accuse Jabs of writing in the assumed presence ofthe events when Jabss own deconstructive framework explicitly maintains that languageitself cannot presence anything, let alone the horrors of the Holocaust. o take the enor-mity of the Holocaust for granted would be to suggest that it could be entirely reduced tohistorical facts or to imply that it could be represented in any way, and it is abundantlyclear that, for his part, Jabs does not entertain either of these notions.

44Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 51.45While he highly praises Jabss text, in his first essay on the authors work, Edmond

Jabs and the Question of the Book, Derrida nevertheless critiques Te Book of Questions,

the initial entry in Jabss trilogy of the same title, for its inclination to replace one tran-scendental signifier with anothersubtly substituting absence for presence at the center oflanguage. He writes, Tis is Le livre des questions, the poetic revolution of our century, theextraordinary reflection of man finally attempting todayand always in vainto retake



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of the volume (itself titled Te Book of Questions), he writes that in Jabsstext [a] powerful and ancient root is exhumed, and on it is laid bare an age-less wound (for what Jabs teaches us is that roots speak, that words want togrow, and that poetic discourse takes root in a wound.46Te ageless woundDerrida refers to here is originary difference, a powerful and ancient rootthat Jabss text exhumes and lays bare by bringing it continually and pains-takingly to the fore. And, while later in the essay Derrida critiques this firstbook for its apophatic implications (a critique that was, at times, made of hisown work47), he nevertheless commends the authors understanding of the na-

possession of his language (as if this were meaningful) by any means, through all routes,and to claim responsibility for it against a Father of Logos (Derrida, Edmond Jabs andthe Question of the Book, p. 73). Derrida asserts that Jabs assumes a Logos exterior tolanguageimplying transcendence beyond the pages of his textwhich he attempts towrest control of language from by accessing it, even in its (or as) absence. In other words, hecontends that in the text absence ispresencedin its non-existent existence, implying closurerather than the infinite deferral that Derrida himself envisions. Tus, for Derrida, Jabssinitial text does not entirely escape a paradigm of transcendence. However, in his secondessay on Jabs, a very brief but important essay entitled Ellipsis, Derrida celebrates thetrilogys final installment, Return to the Book, for doing just what the title suggestsreturn-

ing to the book itself. He writes, In the serenity of this third volume, Te Book of Questions[Volume I]is fulfilled. Fulfilled as it should be, by remaining open, by pronouncing non-closure, simultaneously infinitely open and infinitely reflecting on itself, an eye in an eye,a commentary infinitely accompanying the book of the rejected and called-for book, thebook ceaselessly begun and taken up again on a site which is neither in the book nor outsideit, articulating itself as the very opening which is reflection without exit, referral, return, anddetour of the labyrinth. Te latter is a way which encloses in itself the ways out of itself,which includes its own exits, which itself opens its own doors, that is to say, opening themonto itself, closes itself by thinking its own opening ( Jacques Derrida, Ellipsis, in Writingand Difference, pp. 29899). In the end, Derrida applauds Jabss trilogy for ending where it

beganin the book, in the inescapable instability and openness of the text.46Derrida, Edmond Jabs and the Question of the Book, p. 64.47Some scholars have characterized the work of both Derrida and Jabs as apophatic

in nature. For example, William Franke, in Te Singular and the Other at the Limits ofLanguage in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabs and Paul Celan, New Literary His-tory, Vol. 36 (2005), argues that philosophers like Derrida, Levinas, and Blanchot, alongwith poets like Celan and Jabs, consciously work in an apophatic vein still replete withtheological underpinnings (Franke, Te Singular and the Other, pp. 62223). In hisessay, Franke outlines two distinguishable lineages and logics of apophatic thinking, onebased on the ineffability of the singular existence, whether of God or of the individual

human person or event, and another based on an ineffability inherent in language itself (Franke, Te Singular and the Other, p. 635). He continues, Te latter is traditionallyfigured as the unutterable Name of God. Te word at the origin of all words, too hol(e)yto be pronounced, is the missing ground or abyss into which all language slips (Franke,



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ture of language, which lies in the very agelessness of the wound. Stamelmanechoes Derridas reading of Jabss approach to language when he writes that,for Jabs, [t]he birth of human language coincides with the moment of ex-ile.48Here Stamelman rightly asserts that in Jabss work these two eventslanguages birth and its exileare simultaneous and coextensive, a notion thatis critical to the authors own deconstructive framework. Many other scholarsview Jabss text through this deconstructive lens, including Eric Gould, theeditor of Te Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabs, a collection of essays dedicatedto his work, who describes Te Book of Questions, Volume Ias one of the ba-sic documents of our contemporary sense of apocalyptic displacement in lan-guage,49noting the consciousness of the deconstructive play of writing50and

his dedication to a questioning of the nature of writing itself 51that typifiesJabss text. By directly connecting the apocalyptic displacement in languagewith the deconstructive play of writing, Gould implies that Jabss approachto language is founded upon an understanding of the originary and irremedi-able difference within it. Likewise, Gary D. Mole, in Levinas, Blanchot, Jabs,reiterates the importance of deconstruction to Jabss work by differentiatingbetween his approach to language as always alreadywounded and the percep-tion of language as initiallywounded by the Holocaust. He writes, Auschwitzin Jabss economy . . . points toward an irreparable crisis in languagethewound of writingthat prevents the negativity of absence from being takenup and maintained in the discourse of presence. Auschwitz does not so much

Te Singular and the Other, p. 635). Despite undeniable elements of mystical Judaism inJabs and Derrida, I maintain, along with Caputo and Derrida himself, that approachingtexts of either author through the lens of negative theology, which implies a transcendentalGod (whether speakable or unspeakable), inevitably leads to misreadings of their respective

work. In Te Prayers and ears of Jacques Derrida, Caputo contends that deconstruction, aframework that both Derrida and Jabs bring to bear in their work, is built not on a beliefin transcendenceof stability, stasis, presence, and centerednessbut rather in a hope forquasi-transcendenceof a wholly other that is forever to come. Tus, while both authorscan be said to fit Frankes second lineage of apophatic thought in their deconstructive ap-proach to language, they nevertheless exceed negative theology through their approach tothe tout autre (Caputo, Te Prayers and ears of Jacques Derrida, p. xviii), as neither pres-ent nor absent, effable or ineffable, but rather ultimately deferred, a trace of a trace that isalways on the way.

48Stamelman, Nomadic Writing, p. 98.

49Eric Gould, Godtalk, in Gould, ed., Te Sin of the Book, p.162.50Gould, Godtalk.51Gould, Godtalk.



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name absence as present itself as a trace. Auschwitz, for Jabs, is of an-otherorder altogether.52 Here Mole does an admirable job of emphasizing that,within Jabss deconstructive paradigm, the Holocaust is seen as making vis-iblepointing towardthe wound of language, rather than initiating thatwound itself. He asserts that, for Jabs, Auschwitz is a powerful symbol ofthe originary displacement within language and not the first cause of that dis-placement. It thus constitutes neither a presence nor an absence in language,but rather, in graphic fashion, indicates the movement or trace of perpetualdistance and deferral that marks it. And, similarly, in his essay, Josh Coheninitially seems to distinguish in Jabss work this same fundamental distinctionwhen he writes: o attempt to write the Holocaust is to be brought face to

face with the irreducible lack at the heart of the word,53which suggests a cru-cial difference between, on one hand, the Holocaust as an encounter with theoriginary wound of language and, on the other hand, as that very wound itself.

While it is thus apparent that many, and arguably most, scholars do atleast acknowledge, whether implicitly or explicitly, the importance of decon-struction to Jabss work, some of those same scholars blur the fundamentaldistinction between the originary nature of the wound and what I have termedthe marking, or making visible, of that wound by the Holocaust. For example,in two different essays,54Stamelman, who clearly establishes that, for Jabs, thedawning of language and that of exile are one and the same, nevertheless alsosuggests that language was, prior to the Holocaust, capable of immediacy andpresence.55And, though it is not unique for scholars to assert that language

52Gary D. Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs: Figures of Estrangement(Gainesville: Univer-sity Press of Florida, 1997), p. 146.

53

Cohen, Desertions, p. 95.54Stamelman, Nomadic Writing, pp. 92114, and Te Writing of Catastrophe: Jew-ish Memory and the Poetics of the Book in Edmond Jabs, in Auschwitz and After: Race,Culture, and the Jewish Question in France(New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 26479.

55In Nomadic Writing Stamelman writes in regard to language: What was onceso proximate has become increasingly distant; what was once so familiar, so intimate, hasbecome exceedingly different (Stamelman, Nomadic Writing p. 96). He asserts thatinstead of separating word from meaning, language at one time brought them together,implying that its current state of distance and difference was not originary, but rather ex-ternallyimposed upon it. And, in Te Writing of Catastrophe, he makes it clear that the

external event that wounded language was the Holocaust itself, when he asks: What canin fact exist after Auschwitz . . . if not silence and ineffability? (Stamelman, Te Writing,p. 267). He continues, Te scream is what happens to language when it passes throughthe nothingness of Auschwitz, when it witnesses unnamable atrocities, when it is struck



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was initially damaged by an event as massive and horrific as the Holocaust, itis important to note that such an assertion directly contradicts the approachto Derridian deconstruction that Stamelman previously alluded to in Jabsswork. Similarly, Mole can be seen to, at times, perpetuate this same confu-sion regarding languages initial wounding. In his book, he quotes a section of

Jabss discussion with Marcel Cohen56 in which he describes the Holocaustas that unceasingly revived wound,57a break that, Jabs contends one hasto write out of ;58however, Mole interprets Jabs to mean that he believesthat the word since Auschwitzhas been wounded59(emphasis added). While,admittedly, Moles interest in this passage relates to Jabss firm belief in theethical imperative to write after Auschwitz, rather than the importance of the

originary nature of the wound to Jabss deconstructive paradigm, his readingof the quotation nevertheless implies that the Holocaust itself has inflictedthe wound of language.60Te scholar who perhaps most explicitly conflates

by inarticulateless. Language can never again be the same (Stamelman, Te Writing, p.271). Here it becomes quite evident that for Stamelman the Shoah inflicts upon languagean unspeakability that was not inherent to it.

56Marcel Cohen, From the Desert to the Book,trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Sta-tion Hill Press, 1990).

57Cohen, From the Desert to the Book, p. 93, quoted in Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs, p. 145.58Cohen, From the Desert to the Book, p. 93, quoted in Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs, p. 145.59Cohen, From the Desert to the Book, p. 93, quoted in Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs, p. 145.60Moles interpretation does not accurately reflect Jabss statement in which he clearly

contends that Auschwitz revivesresuscitates or reanimatesand never stops revivingthe wound, but does not assert or even suggest that it initiates it. In fact, this quote providesmuch stronger evidence for my own reading of Jabss understanding of the Holocaust as

the marking or making visible of the long invisible and intrinsic wound than it does forthe argument that the Holocaust delivers that initial wound. o his credit, Mole continuesby returning to Jabss understanding of the originary nature of languages wound in anattempt to clear up some of the confusion born from the blurring of these two approachesthat took place in the aforementioned reading. He writes, Auschwitz, then, according tothese formulations, is a metaphor for the wounded word, the sole property of the writer,and Jabs will claim the right to express this wound without in fact speaking of Auschwitzat all: . . . What language has become for me. I read a sentence, and I see the wound of thesentence, (Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs, p. 145). Here Mole draws on Jabs once againto create a clearer distinction between the Holocaust as the initial wound of language and

the Holocaust as an analogy for the continual apocalyptic displacement in language thatis coextensive with its birth. It is clear, then, that when Jabs himself reads a sentence, hedoes not read the wound inflicted by Auschwitz, but the wound of language that is alwaysalready intrinsic to it.



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the two approaches to languages wound in Jabss work is Josh Cohen, whodirectly argues that the Holocaust introducesinto writing its own impossibil-itybrings describing into proximity with its de-scribing other. We can knowthe Holocaust only in its unknowability, as the negative which refuses to besublated into the order of positive meaning61(emphasis added). Cohen sug-gests that the Holocaust inflicted upon language its initial wound, implyingthat language before the Holocaust operated without such difference, that itwas fully capable of accurately describing, rather than, as Cohen himself putsit, simply de-scribing, or effacing itself.62It is thus clear that Cohen, like many

Jabs scholars (even those who intend to read him through a deconstructivelens), blurs the crucial distinction between an understanding of language as

always alreadywounded and language as wounded by an historical event, fun-damentally contradicting Jabss approach to language and misrepresenting hisunderstanding of Derridian deconstruction.

Tere are also, however, those scholars who resist reading Jabs through adeconstructive lens, preferring instead to interpret his work from a variety ofother perspectives, including Kabbalist,63humanist,64and Hegelian.65Most ofthese approaches take the form of a critique of his work. Perhaps Jabss most

61J. Cohen, Desertions, p. 96.62In his essay, Cohen writes, Tus history for Jabs, and especially history after Aus-

chwitz, does not determine meaning but disperses it, thereby engendering the wound inlanguage which is the very condition of the book (Cohen, Desertions, p. 100, emphasisadded). He asserts that, for Jabs, history, and by implication a historical event like the Ho-locaust, was the first cause of the wound of language, a wound that enigmatically also makesit possible. While Cohen is accurate in asserting that the wound of language is this verycondition, within a deconstructive framework, it cannot be considered a state initiated by

the Holocaust itself. o maintain that language was not always alreadywounded is to assertthat it once had a transcendental signified to which it referred, but, according to both Jabsand Derrida, this is not, never has been, and never could be the case. Te transcendent Goddid not die, as Nietzsche declares; he simply never lived. From its birth, then, the book hasbeen coextensive with its own wound, its own unspeakability, and, in this sense, the Holo-caust, as horrible an event as it inarguably was and as pervasive an impact as it continues tohave on a variety of levels, is no more unspeakable than any other event.

63Matthew Del Nevo, Edmond Jabs and Kabbalism After God,Journal of the Amer-ican Academy of Religion, Vol. 65, No. 2. (Summer 1997): 40342.

64Edward Kaplan, Te Problematic Humanism of Edmond Jabs, in Gould, ed., Te

Sin of the Book, pp. 11530.65Joseph G. Kronick, Edmond Jabs and the Poetry of the Jewish Unhappy Con-

scious, MLN, Vol. 106, No. 5 (December 1991): 96796.



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vehement critic, and a primary example of applying a non-deconstructive ap-proach to his text, is Berel Lang, who, in his essay, Writing-the-Holocaust:

Jabs and the Measure of History, accuses the author of failing Jews, language,and the Holocaust in his work. Specifically, Lang argues that by attempting towrite-the-Holocaust(i.e., to conflate the medium and its object in order to letthe object speak itself ), Jabss text claims for itself a measure of the history, orreality, of the event that is inherently inadequate to the facts66of the eventitself, an objective standard against which, he contends, the text should be

judged. And, if such a process involves language accurately articulating an ex-ternal reality, Lang is, in this sense, correct in asserting that the Holocaust failsto write-itselfin Jabss text; however, given Jabss implicit contention that such

representation is impossible, it stands to reason that, for him, conversely, alllanguage does and necessarily must write-the-Holocaust. From the title of theessay itself, it is clear that there is a significant distinction between Langs theo-retical orientation (i.e., history, transcendence) and that of Jabs (i.e., decon-struction). On one hand, Lang thinks ofthe Holocaust as an independent, his-torical event that transcends textuality, while, on the other hand, Jabs thinksof the Holocaust as the condition of textuality itself, asserting that the worldexists because it is in and of the book. Lang contends that the Holocaust can-not write-itselfbecause, in order to do so, language must diminish the enormityof the eventan event that is far too massive and horrific to be represented inlanguage. Jabs agrees that such representation is impossible, but does so forvery different reasons. For his part, Jabs maintains that the historical eventof the Holocaust cannot be made present in language because no event canever be made present in language, not because the Holocaust itself is uniquelyunrepresentable, but because deconstruction reveals as nonsensical any dis-tinction between the historical and the linguistic, in that they both share thefundamental instability of textuality. In this sense, for Jabs, the Holocaust as

an event in and of language, as all events inescapably are, cannot help but bewritten in every word that is penned because language can express nothingbut the catastrophic displacement at its core. Auster makes this indistinguish-able discontinuity of event and text explicit when he writes that, for Jabs,Te question is the Jewish Holocaust, but it is also the question of literatureitself. By a startling leap of the imagination, Jabs treats them as one and thesame.67In this sense, all language must speak its own inherent and originary

66Berel Lang, Writing-the-Holocaust: Jabs and the Measure of History, p. 204.67Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 3.



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alienation, exile, and distance from meaningevery word must, then, write-the-Holocaust. Tis approach to writing is born directly from Jabss decon-structive framework, but such a framework is precisely what is missing fromLangs reading, a void from which misunderstandings and misinterpretationson many levels emerge. While acknowledging the importance of deconstruc-tion to Jabss work, Lang nevertheless critiques his text by forcing it outside ofthe movement of the thought that it both is and is of. Reading Jabs divorcedfrom the approach to language that should be considered coextensive with hiswork is not reading Jabs. And, by insisting on distinguishing historical realityfrom text and applying such a distinction to Jabss text, Lang constructs hisargument on the effacement of the very distinction upon which Jabss text is

built. Such an approach is intrinsically flawed and necessarily synthetic, andcan result in nothing more than a critique of a text that is no longer the text itintended to critique.

An understanding of Jabss deconstructive paradigm, however, is notonly critical to avoiding the application of alien and contradictory theoreticalassumptions to his work, but also to questioning the authority of the wit-ness and, in particular, to thinking the paradoxical wound of languageitsunspeakabilityas ultimately optimistic in nature. In contrast to the tra-ditional Western metaphysics of logocentrism, which asserts that language,and by extension testimony, can fully represent, Jabs offers no such stability;rather, he maintains that language can only express by perpetually performingits own unrepresentability. Tus, Jabs challenges the idea that the witnesscan represent any sort of objective or immutable reality. Representation, inthis sense, implies a transcendent ruth exterior to language against whichit can be judged, while expression suggests a truth interior to and inseparablefrom language. He asks, You, who think I exist, how can I tell you what Iknow with words which mean more than one thing, with words like me, which

change when looked at, words with an alien voice?68

Jabss work exhibits themultiplicity of meaning underlying every text, showing the conflict betweenthe paradigm of precision, which is conventionally thought to guide language,and the inherent imprecision that inescapably attends its employment. Headdresses this unavoidable uncertainty through an imaginary rabbi, Reb Ivri,who writes: Pick up some sand . . . and let it glide between your fingers. Tenyou will know the vanity of words. Sand is only sand, and the word, the struckflag of the word. . . . Can you swear that the grains of sand you pressed in your

68Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 40.



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hand are the same which ran over your knee? Tey have become a thousandothers which you did not know. So it is with your words, once they have beenunleashed in the world filled with words.69In a world that isbecause the bookis, Jabss text challenges the idea that words can refer to or represent objectivetruth; however, his presentation of the continual deferral of meaning, fromone signifier to another, like grains of sand slipping through ones fingers, alsodemonstrates the impossibility of closure in language through its originaryplay, which gives birth to creativity, novelty, and eloquence. In his essay, Wil-liam Franke writes, Tis infinity and emptiness of the word . . . [is] an openquestion and an open desert for wandering, a space of errancy. And only in thisopenness is there any room for human expression.70Anne Golomb Hoffman,

in Between Exile and Return, echoes this approach to the openness of languagein Jabs when she writes, Displacement and exile are the conditions for a writ-ing born out of a void of shifting sands. Te writing of Jabs is concernedwith an opening of the book, a rupture that occurs through exile and makesutterance possible.71As both of these writers note, the errancy or rupture atthe heart of words, their inherent and originary imprecision, is also the spaceor interval that makes language possible. Were language capable of presenceand immediacy, this opening would be closed, and word and thing, word andmeaning, would be fused. Tere would thus be no room for the plurality andoriginality of expression; rather, the thing itself would be its own and its onlyarticulation.

In his letter to Derrida, Jabs writes, You have often explained [dif-france]. It destroys and creates a space where everything is canceled as it faces,as it opens to, its potential difference by deferring it.72And, later, he contin-ues, So the space created by diffrance is at the same time a space for leav-ing traces.73For Jabs, there is an inherent and necessary distance betweensignifier and signified within language, a separation which, in the deconstruc-

tive framework, is affirmative and vital. Tis distance, the space of the trace,rather than dooming language to meaningless and nihilism, actually enablesreading, writing, and thinking through open and endless interpretation. If this

69Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 113.70Franke, Te Singular and the Other, p. 631.71Anne Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return: S. Y. Agnon and the Drama of

Writing(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 59.72Jabs, Letter to Jacques Derrida on the Question of the Book, p. 46.73Jabs, Letter to Jacques Derrida on the Question of the Book, p. 47.



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interval, this play, were to be removed, it would constitute closure, immobil-ity, and death. Josh Cohen describes this approach to language as the Jewishtextual dynamic, meaning by it that the words impoverishment, its failureto make present its object, is also the very source of its plenitude, its avail-ability to ceaseless interpretation and re-interpretation.74He continues, If aconnective thread can be traced through the modern Jewish literary tradition,it would surely be formed of this view of language as productive failure.75While, for Jabs, language fails in the sense of fusing word to meaning, hesuggests that this failure ultimately succeeds in ensuring the vitality, creativ-ity, and newness of the word. However, what Cohen identifies as the Jewishtextual dynamic is not merely a thread that connects modern Jewish litera-

ture, but rather a significant aspect of a tradition that can be traced back toMoses Maimonides and beyond. It is not Jewish in an essentialist sense, butrather in that it is distinguished from the Christian rhetorical tradition thatdates back to Augustine. Tis Jewish lineage eschews the classical Augustin-ian model of language as a pure conduit for divine revelation in favor of anapproach that seeks to decenter language, radically rethinking the relationshipbetween sacred text and rabbinical commentary, akin to the one Jabs uses toquestion the authority of the witness in his work.

The Jew and the Writer

In further complicating the concept of the witness in Te Book of Questions,Volume I, Jabs draws a compelling connection between Jews (i.e., people of theWordYHWH) and writers (i.e., people of words), asserting that both havebeen irrevocably wounded by languages originary unspeakability. For Jabs,language, due to its inherent instability, cannot authoritatively articulate, and,because it is intended to accurately represent, but inevitably fails to do so, lan-guage is wounded by its own inability. He asserts, Te book is a moment of

the wound.76Every word is a gash buried deep within all words, and the bookis a collective wound painfully reopened with each new reading. For Jabs,this wound lies at the center of languageTe center is a scream, an openwound, a key77and perpetually performs this injury upon the Jew and the

74J. Cohen, Desertions, pp. 9495.

75J. Cohen, Desertions, p. 95.76Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 196.77Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 359.



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writer. He writes, I am bleeding. Te word is a thorn.78Languages inherentunspeakability is then its own wound, but also a weapon that wounds others.

For Jabs, however, there exists a pure, if paradoxical, form of expression.He explains, It is the whole truth I wanted to express. And truth is a scream, astubborn, ineradicable image which pulls us out of our torpor. An image whichoverwhelms or nauseates us.79Confronted with the unimaginable horrors ofthe Holocaust, which have marked language, making visible the originary im-possibility of accurate representation, language gives rise to the screamitsown ultimate and necessarily inarticulate articulation. In Te Writing of theDisaster, Blanchot describes this incomprehensible scream as a voiceless cry,yet one that nevertheless tends to exceed all language.80For Jabs as well, the

scream of the wound at the center of language remains silent, an expression ofpain too pure to be conventionally represented. Tis idea is perhaps best com-municated in the words of his character, Sarah, who states: I do not hear thescream. . . . I am the scream.81In Jabss text, the symbol of the scream workson two distinct levelsone inaudible (i.e., that of literal silence) and the otherinexpressible (i.e., that of metaphorical silence, the inherent unspeakabilitywithin all language), both of which ensure the impossibility of conveying ex-treme events. Te scream, then, can never fully express, but must be excruciat-ingly embodied in the person of the Jew. Tis image of the scream, however, isnot an entirely negative one, not solely a symbol of suffering and the inabilityto fully express it, but also the very dawn of the text. He writes, Te bookrises out of the fire of the prophetic rose, from the scream of the sacrificedpetals.82Te scream itself is the inevitable response to suffering, the painfulyet necessary sacrifice implied within all language that both wounds and givesrise to the book. Inherent to and yet exceeding all language, the scream signi-fies the space and movement in words that embodies both their failure andtheir eloquence. It is in this sense, then, that Jabs writes, Tis white sketch

on the white page is the sketch of a scream.83

Te white space in and aroundthe text symbolizes the distance between words and their intended meanings,

78Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 190.79Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 122.80Maurice Blanchot, Te Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Univer-

sity of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 51.

81Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 166.82Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 42.83Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 205.



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the space that gives words the novelty, creativity, and freedom necessary toalways mean more. Tus, the scream, for Jabs, is not merely the expression ofexcruciating and embodied exile, but the infinite and endless hope within alllanguage that he terms the light of Israel.84

In Jabss text, the Jew, as heir to the scream, stands as a metaphor for theexiled, a refugee forever distanced from what he is, what he wants, and what heloves. Te author writes, Tere is nothing at the threshold of the open page,it seems, but this wound of a race born of the book, whose order and disorderare roads of suffering. Nothing but this pain, whose past and whose perma-nence is also that of writing.85 From an historical and cultural perspective,the Jew was displaced from his people, his country, and ultimately his God;

the only thing that he is not banished from, Jabs claims, is his own suffering,which all roads inevitably lead him back to. Importantly for Jabs, however,we are all in a sense Jews, a single wounded race of the expelled, fundamen-tally distanced from each other and ourselves by the inescapable medium oflanguage.86He writes, I am a Jew, as you are, in each of my wounds. 87Here,to be a Jew does not imply an extra-textual identity, but rather a shared injury,a mutual wound inherent within the book. Mole makes the function of the

Jew clear when he writes, In the Jabs text, the Jew and the condition of exilebecome synonymous, the one reflecting the other.88He continues, Te Jew,in Jabs, is a metaphorical figure, the Jew, as the figureof exile.89Te Jew isthus a symbol for the universal exile of all mankind from truth and meaning,an exile that was not perpetrated on the metaphorical Jews by the Holocaust,

84Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 164.85Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, pp. 2526.

86Te assertion that we are all Jews applies, for Jabs, only in [the] sense that we areallnecessarily exiled from stable meaning through textuality. In this same sense, I am notarguing that Jews are a single wounded race, expelled from all but their own suffering,but rather am proposing that Jabs thinks them as such in order to mobilize a powerfulmetaphor in his work. However, for him, this metaphor is equally as affirmative as it iscynical. He contends that the inherent exile of the metaphorical Jew is one of inevitabledistance and suffering within language, but also one that makes creativity, eloquence, andnewness possible. In this essay, I do not seek to judge the accuracy of that metaphor (likeany metaphor, it is at least to some extent reductive), but rather to analyze how and why itoperates in this way for Jabs and how it thus enables a reconceptualization of the witness.

87Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 61.88Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs, p. 58.89Mole, Lvinas, Blanchot, Jabs, p. 59.



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the breaking of the tablets, or any other devastating historical or biblical event,but is and always alreadywas originary. For Jabs, this separation is coextensivewith the birth of language. In this sense, one is a Jew not through ethnicityor religious affiliation, but through ones inherent separation and suffering.Stamelman further articulates this idea when he argues that [t]o be Jewishis to live a life of continuous displacement.90Terefore, like the Jews who areconsidered people of the book, born from and into words, as metaphorical

Jews, we all must live in and through language, a thoroughly mediated andalienated existence. In this sense, Jabs writes, So the country of the Jews is onthe scale of their world, because it is a book. Every Jew lives within a personi-fied word which allows him to enter into all written words. Every Jew lives in

a key-word, a word of pain, a password, which the rabbis comment on. TeJews fatherland is a sacred text amid the commentaries it has given rise to.91For Jabs, the homeland of the Jew is the book; it is, paradoxically, the textual-ity from which we cannot escape and the deferral of meaning from which weare inevitably exiled. Tis land has no borders and must be lived in, lived as,and lived through. It is a book and, as such, it is infinite, a text that gives riseto an endless array of texts, a wilderness of words that is ever-changing andever-expanding. In Jabesian terms, to be born of such a land is to be exiled tothe desert of the book. However, the Jew as a metaphor of exile is not cynical,as some critics assert,92but rather affirmative in that the state of exile is thenecessary state of the book. Te desert is the distance and void that makes lan-guage possible, which is why Derrida writes that, for Jabs, the Jew . . . protectsthe desert which protects both his speech (which can speak only in the desert),and his writing (which can be traced only in the desert).93Te metaphorical

Jew as exile to and guardian of the desert thus ensures the positive fraudu-lence of a word.94Here Derrida asserts that, for Jabs, the desert of language

90Stamelman, Te Writing of Catastrophe, p. 270.91Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, pp. 10001.92In Writing-the-Holocaust: Jabs and the Measure of History, Lang criticizes Jabs

for misrepresenting the relationship between the Jew and writing in his work and for thusperpetuating a negative stereotype of Jews. He writes, Jabs is right but for the wrongreasons. Jewish life and history are tied to the life and history of the letter, the word, thebookbut not because of the alien and driven presence he claims is common for thosehistories, challenged wherever they would settle, contingent, permanently in exile. . . . But

the convergence is in affirmation and assertion, in a common and extraordinary will to ex-istnot in hesitation or doubt or anxiety (Lang, Writing-the-Holocaust, p. 191).93Derrida, Edmond Jabs and the Question of the Book, p. 69.94Derrida, Edmond Jabs and the Question of the Book, p. 71.



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is intrinsically and necessarily lie, and that the Jew, by virtue of being born ofthat desert, stands as both its victim and its defender. Te Jew, in this sense,protects the fidelity of the lie, safeguarding the undecidability and eloquenceof words from the closure of truth.

Tis paradoxical approach to the wound is perhaps most obviously em-blematized in Jabss symbolic use of the writer whose fate perfectly mirrorsthat of the Jew. Tough he must continually try, the writer can never accuratelyrepresent in words and is thus forever exiled from his subjecta subject thathe must betray with every attempt. Jabs states, I talked to you about thedifficulty of being Jewish, which is the same as the difficulty of writing. For

Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wear-

ing out.95In his interview with Auster, Jabs makes this connection even moreexplicit when he says, I feel that every writer in some way experiences the

Jewish condition, because every writer, every creator, lives in a land of exile.96Haunted by inevitable failure, the writer shares the wound and exile of the Jew,a wound that lies at the core of the task he is compelled to undertake yet nevercomplete. Like the Jew, the writer is doomed to distance, forever separated bythe very language he necessarily employs and is of. Jabs writes, Faced withthe impossibility of writing, which paralyzes every writer, and the impossibil-ity of being Jewish, which has for two thousand years racked the people ofthat name, the writer chooses to write, and the Jew to survive.97Te writercan never accurately articulate because the medium of language, the only me-dium he has access to, will not and cannot ever allow it. While the writer willnever be able to explain because, as Jabs asserts, Te word and he are strang-ers,98he is, as a witness to the wound of language (like the Jew is a witnessto the Holocaust), nevertheless driven to testify. Tis desire, however, inevi-tably leads to what Jabs terms a double despair,99a hopelessness born fromthe impossibility of stable meaning and from the corresponding relationship

that the writer and the Jew share with language. In delineating the significanceof this fundamental equivalence, Susan A. Handelman writes, in ormentsof an Ancient Word: Edmond Jabs and the Rabbinic radition, that [t]he

95Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 122.96Auster, Book of the Dead, p. 12.97

Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 223.98Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 50.99Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 60.



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identification of Jew and writer is not, for Jabs, merely a convenient analogyor apt metaphor; it is the essence of his vision.100 In fact, Jabs himself, inhis exchange with Benjamin aylor, states, Tis connection between the Jewand the writer is for me no whimsy or conceit. It is a conspicuous matter offact. Te more thoroughly I live the one condition, the more thoroughly I livethe other.101Te correspondence of the Jew and the writer, while in part ananalogy built of shared exile, is nevertheless not onlya metaphor, but also theactual hope inherent within languageboth of which, in their coextension,

Jabs, himself, lives. He writes, I believe in the writers mission. He receives itfrom the word, which carries its suffering and its hope within it.102For Jabs,the metaphor of the writer, like that of the Jew, symbolizes not only the suf-

fering of languages woundits inability to representbut, more important,stands as the very promise of writing itself, and this promise constitutes theessence, as Handelman puts it, of his poetic vision. In the text, Yukel writes,Reb Jacob, who was my first teacher, believed in the virtue of the lie because,so he said, there is no writing without lie. And writing is the way of God. 103Here, the virtue of the lie (i.e., languages failure to represent) is tied to itsinseparability from writing, to writings dependence upon it to the point that,without lie, writing could not and would not be. In other words, the goodnessof lie is located in its ability to make writing, language, and, by extension, testi-mony imperfect but possible. Tus, by asserting that the Jew (i.e., the witness)and the writer (i.e., the one who testifies) are fundamentally linked by theparadoxical wound of unspeakability, Jabs radically questions the authorityof the witness by conferring the essential exile of the Jew upon all people andby elevating all writers to the status of witnesses.

The Rabbinical Framework

Finally, Jabs challenges the authority of the witness in Te Book of Questions,

Volume Iby inserting a Jewish rabbinical framework into his text, a frameworkthat complicates both the idea of the witness and of testimony. He invokes thetradition of rabbinical commentary becoming part of the text it is comment-ing on in order to create a seamless synthesis of testimony and interpretation,

100Susan A. Handelman, orments of an Ancient Word: Jabs and the Rabbinicradition, in Gould, ed., Te Sin of the Book, p. 56.

101Benjamin aylor, Te Question of Jewishness and the Question of Writing, p. 16.102Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 58.103Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 85.



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which are both granted equal status. Te texts continuous commentary, spo-ken by a seemingly endless array of imaginary rabbis, addresses the characters,the narrator, and the writing of the book itself. Disembodied and displaced,for Jabs, these rabbis are voices that not only interpret but question the bookand the authority of the witness as well. A significant element of a rich liter-ary history, the practice of integrating rabbinical commentary into scripturaltexts has long held a privileged place in the Jewish religious tradition. In Rei-magining the Bible, Howard Schwartz describes the place of rabbinical com-mentary in the history of Judaism as being held in high esteem104and writesthat these commentaries have taken on the aura, over time, of the sacred textsthey explicate.105In the rabbinical tradition, Schwartz asserts, scripture (i.e.,

the word of God) and interpretation (i.e., the word of man) fundamentallyblur; commentary is thus granted the authority of the original text. Rabbinicalinterpretation is not seen as a perversion of scripture, but as a necessity foraccessing and understanding the multi-layered meaning of the orah. In thissense, even two contradictory interpretations of the same passage are under-stood to shed equally valuable light on the original scripture. Tis paradoxicalapproach, however, does not simply work on the level of exegesis, but, moreimportant for Jabs, extends to the theory of language itself. While rabbini-cal commentary is believed to bear the significance of scripture, the roots ofthis significance cannot extend beyond the text to a transcendental signifiedbecause no such stable foundation is possible. Tus, like all textual authority,rabbinical commentary, due to the originary wound of language, is afflictedby its own inability to be fully authoritative. It is silenced, not in the sense oflacking a physical voice or even apparent confidence in what is said, but in thesense of its failure to fully speak. Tis awareness permeates such commentaryin that it is not treated as static and singular, but as dynamic and multiple,open to endless writing and re-writing, interpreting and re-interpreting. Rab-

binical commentary, for Jabs, is then a confident production of meaning onthe part of those who know that no stable meaning is possible within the text,those who speak and write under erasure, in the full knowledge of the silenceof their efforts. Tis confidence, despite languages inherent and necessary in-stability, constitutes precisely the ambiguous and contradictory nature of rab-binical commentary. Handelman, in Te Slayers of Moses, asserts that, regard-

104Howard Schwartz, Re-imagining the Bible: Te Storytelling of the Rabbis(New York:Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 31.

105Schwartz, Re-imagining the Bible.



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less of this paradoxical nature, or perhaps precisely because of it, such com-mentary was granted unparalleled authority. She writes that in this traditioninterpretation and text were . . . inseparable106and seen as twin aspects ofthe same revelation.107She continues, Tus interpretation is not essentiallyseparate from the text itselfan external act intruded upon itbut rather theextension of the text. . . . Since the oral orah is the revelation of the deeperaspects of the written, it also has divine status.108Here Handelman addressesthe convergence of oral and written orah that is at the heart of a proper un-derstanding of rabbinical commentary and its significance in Jabss text. Ac-cording to Jewish tradition, God gave the written orah to Moses during thedays on Mount Sinai; however, at night, God supplemented that orah with

an oral version, the combination of which is believed to contain everythingthat ever was, is, or will be. In essence, the black of the page (i.e., the ink ofthe letters) constitutes the revealed written orah, and the white of the page(i.e., the space in the margins and the gaps between the letters and words)constitutes the mysterious oral orah, both of which are vital to a completeunderstanding of Gods law. While God revealed the written orah (staticand unchanging) to Moses on Mount Sinai, the rabbis to this day continueto supply the oral orah, a dynamic and evolving interpretation considerednecessary to fill in the gaps and holes of the original text. Far from subordi-nate, rabbinical commentary carries the weight and authority of scripture, anauthority great enough to overrule even its divine author. Tus the text and itsrabbinical interpretation are considered distinct yet complementary testimonyto the revelation of God, the latter, in a critical sense, completing the former.

Jabss insertion of the rabbinical structure into his work is meant toevoke a very specific understanding of the relationship between original text(i.e., testimony) and the interpretation of that text (i.e., commentary). He usesthis paradigm to make subtle but significant assertions regarding both tes-

timony and the authority of the witness. Tough the actual storyline of histext, if it can be said to have one, is fragmentary, cryptic, and incomplete, Jabsdoes eventually reveal that Yukel and his lover Sarah, both French Jews, arearrested and sent to concentration camps. While they manage to physicallysurvive the Holocaust, somehow salvaging bits of written testimony to their

106Susan A. Handelman, Te Slayers of Moses: Te Emergence of Rabbinic Interpreta-

tion in Modern Literary Teory(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. xiv.107Handelman, Te Slayers of Moses, p. 31.108Handelman, Te Slayers of Moses, p. 39.



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mutual love and their experiences in the camps, the psychological impact ofthe atrocities they witnessed proves overwhelming, as Sarah returns insaneand Yukel, after his release, eventually commits suicide. Troughout the novel,rabbis provide continuous and enigmatic commentary on the lives and deathsof these characters, as well as the intricacies and impossibilities of writing theirequally tragic fates. Yukels first-person narration, fragmentary journal entriesfrom both characters, repeated insertions by an unnamed authorial voice, por-traits representing a series of themes and motifs, and brief appearances byvarious other characters, such as scholars and chance guests,109 all providerich fodder for rabbinical commentary. However, in regard to these contrast-ing elements, the author imposes no hierarchy of voice or perspective upon the

text. For example, in a brief, one-page section entitled Portrait of Sarah andYukel in the Scream,110the author combines a comment from the imaginaryrabbi, Reb Lezer, a brief, anonymous prose poem, a comment from anotherimaginary rabbi, Reb Gamri, and a quotation from Yukel himself. And, be-tween these four seemingly disparate entries, there are no transitions or overtthematic connectionsnothing but substantial amounts of white space tenu-ously connects them to one another on the page. Te rabbinical commentaryis thus conflated with Yukels testimony in the text and, by extension, in themind of the reader. Drawing on the institutional authority of the rabbinicaltradition, the text and the commentary are seen as inseparable, and Yukelsauthority as witness is radically questioned. Te presentation of firsthand ex-perience and the interpretation of that experience by the rabbis become oneand the same. Terefore, by putting Yukel in the position of witness to theunspeakable events of the Holocaust and at once challenging the authority ofthat position, Jabs is asserting that the firsthand witness can testify to noth-ing more than languages inabilityto testify. In Stamelmans words: Nothingcan be told except nothing itself.111 Tus, due to our necessary relation to

language and to its inherent and originary wounding, we are all made wit-nesses, equal in authority, to languages ultimate unspeakability. And yet, thedecentering effect of rabbinical commentary in Jabss text also bears its ownparadoxical affirmation. Te author suggests precisely this approach to suchexegesis when he writes, Inquiries and meditations of unreal rabbis are theboundary marks which the book, each time, joins for a brief stop and a new

109Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 223.110Jabs, Te Book of Questions, Volume I, p. 205.111Stamelman, Te Writing of Catastrophe, p. 273.



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departure.112 In this sense, rabbinical commentary at once delineates andextends the boundary of the book, marking and yet blurring the distinctionbetween original and secondary text in an effort to extend the book and itsinterpretations indefinitely. In her essay, Handelman argues that rabbinical in-terpretation reinvigorates scripture by opening it to radical and contradictoryreadings in order to prevent the closure, or death, of meaning. For the rabbis,far from threatening scripture itself (which they adamantly believe must notbe altered, even down to the letter), this process actually helps strengthen andperpetuate its meaning. Terefore, the rabbinical framework within Jabsstext, while fundamentally questioning the role of the witness and the claimsmade to the authenticity of his testimony, nevertheless succeeds in extending

the dimensions of the book to infinity, opening it to an endless play and mul-tiplicity of meanings that are the lifeblood of the text.

The Conclusion

In Te Book of Questions, Volume, I, Jabs challenges conventional under-standings of the authority of the witness and the truth of testimony. Within atheoretical framework distinguished by the deconstructive linguistic paradigmestablished by Derrida, the simultaneous and synonymous effects of the origi-

nary wound on the Jew and the writer, and the tradition of rabbinical interpre-tation and its relationship to scripture, Jabs complicates the presumed purityof uncorrupted, unmediated, univocal representation. Haunted by the specterof the Holocaust and driven by the necessity yet impossibility of speaking itsunspeakable horrors, he questions not only our ability to accurately representin language but language itself. As a witness to the wound of words, Jabs isnecessarily compelled to testify with words that silence themselves and ar

witness jabes

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