ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand the entirety of Edmond Jabès's writings through the principle of non-appartenance. One of the hazards of Jabès's exile is that, far from the centre of literary activities, he adhered strictly throughout the Cairene period to that very centre. Despite his anxiety, or perhaps because of it, Jabès found the rupture with Egypt and France wholly liberating. With Bounoure's constant guidance, he transformed his artistic uncertainty into a salutary creativity. Henceforth, his writing would take on an absolute heterogeneity. Jabès repeatedly used the expression non-appartenance to describe his sentiment of cultural, religious and domestic étrangeté. The principle of non-appartenance was useful to Jabès as a justification for maintaining his position as a writer outside generic categories and, further, as a rationalization of his status as a Jew who did not adhere to the conventions of rabbinic prescriptions. Jabès himself seems to be suggesting that his very early poetry is shrouded in a kind of 'prior silence'.
