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Thou shalt never again dwell permanently in the Land of Egypt.
Deut. 17:16
But it would be impossible for me to say that France is my country . . .
Edmond Jabès
Melancholy is both an emotional state of profound dejection and an organizing principle, a structure of consciousness and a mode of thinking. Slavoj Zizek calls melancholy an ideology and the origin of philosophy (659). Jacques Hassoun calls melancholy "le moment fondateur du sujet" (CM 11)1 and psychoanalysis "un mode de connaissance mélancolique" (CM 19). My aim in what follows is to propose melancholy as a framework for understanding a source of suffering in Jabès' work and to suggest a reading of the Holocaust from the perspective of his personal history of persecution in Egypt. Jabès wrote about exile and suffering when, to be a Jew, to suffer as one, meant to be a European Jew.
There have been many exceptional studies on Jabès. The works of Warren F. Motte, Jr., Steven Jaron, Richard Stamelman, Paul Auster, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, are examples of the quality of consideration his work has received. The consensus in these discussions is that absence and loss are the organizing concepts of his work. Most readers agree with Stamelman that in Jabès, "nothingness appears as the only possession, difference as the only identity, writing as the only trace, wandering as the only activity, and suffering as the only inheritance" (231). Yet, importantly, as Warren F. Motte reminds us, although a key element of the Jabesian text is that "there is a strong impulse toward coherent telling," (92) there is a "resisting voice," which "in spite of its determination, must cede to constraint, announcing as it does so the final question of the book: Have you seen how a kingdom is made and unmade? / Have you seen how a book is made and unmade" (92-93; italics in text). Jabès' texts are as much about what they say as they are about what remains unsaid and unassimilable. There is a repression at the heart of telling that generates pain and ambivalence. The repeated motion of putting together and disassembling that his reading entails, as Motte suggests, is emblematic of the inability of the melancholic subject to finish once and...