Questioning Edmond Jabès by Warren F. Motte, Jr. (review)

98Rocky Mountain Review then puts them to the test of Lacanian psychoanalysis. These juxtapositions provoke a recognition ofa "kind ofmistranslation" that is "not the misreading of the original language but the production of a strangeness in the target language" (153). Like analysands, "cultures cannot know what they don't know until they see what they fail to say" (160). Hollier harks back to the early days of psychoanalysis with his discussion of hysterical peiralysis in Zola's novel Lourdes, published in 1894, one year after Freud's article distinguishing between organic motor paralysis and hysterical paralysis appeared in Archives de Neurologie. Lourdes is haunted by a repeated imbrication of walking, women, and knowledge, as indeed were Zola and Freud. In Hollier's reading, Zola's novel becomes the story of a man's desire to protect a woman from the knowledge that he deeply fears already possesses her. As Leupin notes, this collection indicates "the immense impact of Lacan's thought, be it negative or positive" (19). I would add that, taken together, the essays point directions for a psychoanalytic reading ofthe ideology of science, a reading that might suggest why certain of the human sciences are conspicuously absent from this collection. SUSAN BAKER University of Nevada, Reno WARREN F. MOTTE, JR. Questioning Edmond Jabès. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. 180 p. Edmond Jabès, born in Cairo in 1912, emigrated to France in the 1950s (during the time of Nasser's regime) and died there in 1990. He had been a member ofthe French-speaking Jewish community in Cairo and begem writing poetry right after the end of World War II. After his emigration to France, he established himself as a major French writer, producing some two dozen books in 35 years (a large number of these have been faithfully translated by Rosmeirie Waldrop, and there will no doubt be more in the coming yeeirs). Interest in Jabès' work is gradually increasing, within and outside ofFrance, because of Jabès' remarkable originality and his prodigious skill as a writer. He is also noteworthy for his friendship with Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, both of whom have written with admiration about his work; and he will remain an important figure within the context of post-Holocaust Jewish thought and re-evaluation of the situation of Judaism in the contemporary world. Only one book on him in English has appeared so far, an important pioneering collection of essays: TAe Sin of the Book, edited by Eric Gould (University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Motto's study is in effect the first comprehensive study of Jabès' important writings. Questioning Edmond Jabès is indeed the right title for such a study. The ambiguity is intentional: Jabès is perpetually asking questions, and we ask questions of Jabee. No reader of Jabès can approach his work in any other way: Jabès compels us to keep questioning at the center of our engagement with his books. His first important work is entitled Le Livre des questions Book Reviews99 (TAe Book ofQuestions) (1963), and, in a sense, that title is generic for his first seven books (a heptalogy ofsorts) in stressing the questioning process and the creation of the Book. It might be seiid that even his later books continue to revolve concentrically around that seven-layered center; and the rest of the writings are, so to speak, satellites ofthat grand planetary system, whose center and ultimate periphery is the Quest for the Book. It is hard to resist the fascination ofthe overall design, that singularity ofpurpose and that mastery ofexecution. It is probably self-evident that these works abound in repetitions and self-quotations; yet their cabbalistic structure and their secret intent is a necessity deriving from Jabès' deepest intellectued, artistic—and theologicalpreoccupations . Jabès' neo-cabbalism reminds us that the word cabbala reedly means "tradition," so that Jabès' work becomes identifiable with (as well as a legitimate successor of) the body of writings that, in the late Middle Ages, claimed to renew a tradition which it was in fact also subverting. Evidently it is not easy to write about Jabès: there are repetitions, there are...