by harnessing together the superb and haughty traditions of
avant-garde polemic, existentialist bravado, Blanchot’s match-
less asceticism, and the prophets of the Bible. As we have seen,
Derrida’s point is to claim force for himself, against what he
sees as the limp outworn clarity of structuralism. He follows
this first essay with another attack, the treatment of Michel
Foucault already discussed (“Cogito and the History of Mad-
ness”). Derrida is in a much quieter mood as Writing and
Differencecontinues with his thoughtful, admiring essay on
Edmond Jabès, author ofThe Book of Questions.Jabès’s vol-
ume, which appeared in 1963 , is a Talmudic rumination on
Jewishness, time, and writing. Jabès exposes, writes Derrida, “a
powerful and ancient root,” “an ageless wound”: the Jewish
connection between memory, trauma, and the “passion of
writing” ( 64 ). For Derrida, following Jabès, the Jews are not
merely in history; they arehistory. “The only thing that begins
by reflecting itself is history. And this fold, this furrow, is the
Jew” ( 65 ).
Jabès, Derrida argues, shows that the situation of the Jew
is exemplary. And the Jew is also the poet: bound and yet freed
by language’s demands on him, the man who painfully ques-
tions his own nature, his future, and his past; who questions
the Law as the Law questions him. Yet the poet and the Jew are
not completely synonymous. “There will always be rabbis and
poets,” close to one another yet incapable of being fully united
( 67 ). One might add that there will always be rabbis and
philosophers, and the division between them. For all his Tal-
mudic ingenuity, Derrida remains a free philosophical spirit,
rather than a pious Jew who trusts in the covenant.
Derrida’s tentative, inquiring relation to Zionism ap-
pears in his essay on Jabès. The holy book, as Jabès describes it,
is written anywhere that the Jew wanders; place becomes a
120 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology