ABSTRACT
The title of this article comes from the following passage by Edmond Jabès in The Book of Questions: “You, who think I exist, how can I tell you what I know with words which mean more than one thing, with words like me, which change when looked at, words with an alien voice?”. 1 Jabès’ work can be read as a long meditation on the refusal of words to stay put in the neat canonical—Scriptural—niches to which we assign them. Any text, and any canon defined as a collection of texts, is self-transgressive by virtue of the nature of words themselves: as Jabès remarks, “How can I say what I know with words whose signification is multiple?”. 2 If “every word unveils another tie”, 3 which requires further words for expression, then the concept of canon as a fixed authority, that is, as a fixed corpus of texts, is mistaken, even delusory.
