ABSTRACT
At the beginning of The Book of Shares (1987) Jabès evokes in a few bleak words the difficult community which had haunted his work since the publication of The Book of Questions in 1963. The writing of this community came from within a culture which was ‘violently cracking up’ and which, in the graffito MORT AUX JUIFS, had signalled that the Jew could no longer belong to it. Jabès describes his writing as following the dictation of an ‘anterior memory’ which questioned itself to the point ‘where it has no longer any belonging or place or resemblance, where therefore it escapes all categories and traditions’.1 The experience of the Shoah shatters not only the memory of community-the sense of belonging to a land, a people, to oneself-but also the sense of belonging to a shared world. The path of questioning such a community begins in difficulty, ‘the difficulty of being and writing’, and ends in difficulty: ‘“Difficulty is selfcontained,” said Reb Akad. “It cannot be resolved, except by another difficulty we have to face”’.2 Jabès insists that this difficult questioning cannot pass through, resemble, or belong to any existing tradition, especially that tradition of questioning known as philosophy. His austere non-philosophical writing of a derelict community in which nothing can be shared because nothing is owned puts a question mark in the margin of the philosophical questioning of politics and the community. It indirectly asks whether it is possible to speak of community after the Shoah from within philosophy and does so by doubting the ability of the philosophical tradition to tolerate difficulty and irresolution, as well as its ability to respect the unthought and ultimately to welcome the other.
