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Literature and Theology Advance Access published online on May 23, 2007
Literature and Theology, doi:10.1093/litthe/frm015
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Edmond Jabès, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God

William Franke

Zentrum Theologie Interkulturell und Studium der Religion Universitätsplatz 1 5020 Salzburg Austria

william.p.franke{at}vanderbilt.edu


  Abstract

The work of Jabès calls to be read in a tradition of apophatic discourse that reaches back to Neoplatonic sources on the ineffable One, as well as to the tradition of reflection on the Name of God as the Ineffable par excellence that one finds in the Kabbalah. Such modes of thinking and writing prove to be key to the significance of Jabès's project as a whole. His oeuvre is exemplary of new forms that this type of discourse can assume in its revival underway today. Jabès contemplates ineffability in language in the first instance in the Name of God. But all language is engendered by the divine Name, and consequently language in general proves in Jabès's work to be inhabited by a silent instance that it cannot name or say. The Name of God thereby emerges as the vanity of language in the heart of every word.


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