• A poem always runs the risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without the risk of being meaningless.
• …everything that is exterior in relation to the book, everything that is negative as concerns the book, is produced within the book… for Jabes, the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.
"The world exists because the book exists."
"The book is the work of the book." "The book multiplies the book."(p.33)
"To be is to-be-in-the-book."
• …The book can only be threatened by nothing, non-being, nonmeaning.
"Poetry is the desert of the promise.
Kafka: "We are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God."
"God is in perpetual revolt agains God" (Livre des questions, p.177).
"God is an interrogation of God" (p.152).
"… But I am not this man
for this man writes
and the writer is no one."
I, Serafi, the absent one, I was born to write books.
(I am absent because I am the storyteller.
Only the story is real.)
•…Absence of the writer (p.98)
For to write is to draw back. Not to retire into one's tent, in order to write, but to draw back from one's writing itself. To be grounded far from one's language, to emancipate it or lose one's hold on it, to let it make its way alone and unarmed. To leave speech. To let it speak alone, which it can do only in its written form… For the work, the writer is at once everything and nothing. Like God…
Derrida / Edmond Jabes & The Question of the Book
