Politics of the Imaginary in the Work of Edmond Jabès
This thesis concerns the relationship between socio-historical context and literary criticism with respect to the work of Edmond Jabès (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop). I argue that literary discourse is a significant site in the history of ideas and that criticism accordingly bears a latent narrative in that it is not merely reflective or reactive but co-constitutive of political discourse. Taking my cue from Edward Said, I read Jabès’s text as an event contemporaneous with the Holocaust and the declaration of the State of Israel. The inquiry broadly follows three strands of purpose: (a) to ascertain modes and means through which dominant political ideas are sustained and preserved in a critical culture; (b) as consequence of which, to show how certain nuances, complexities and subtleties in the text are traded for essentialism; and (c) to assess the alternative possibilities created by the primary text. The secondary literature on Jabès is analysed to trace the underlying narrative, both political and historical, in relation to these events. Simultaneously Jabès’s text is examined as the site of an alternative imaginary against the hegemonic status quo. The first chapter focuses on exile and exilic consciousness in Jabès. After 1948 and the declaration of the State of Israel, Jewish exile ceases to be a religious abstraction. Most of Jabès’s interlocutors direct their attention to the theological while overlooking the socio-political context of exile in relation to statehood. These metaphysical readings, however, while refraining from explicit political pronouncement, tend to affirm and bestow legitimacy on the state’s construction of mythology as history. I determine the critical gestures that consolidate this narrative and read Jabès’s text as a form of resistance to teleological statehood. In the second chapter I examine the textual methodology employed in the translation of figural gesture in the Bible into political literalities. I argue that the hermeneutic legacy of constituting statehood from religious scripture is significant for literary studies whose primary object and mode is text and textuality. An analysis of Jabès’s conceptual conceits compared with the socio-political trajectory of the Bible (in relation to statehood) yields critical insights both in terms of Jabès’s work and the relationship between religious and literary methodology. Jabès resists the authority of religious orthodoxy and affirms poetic injunction that both opposes and transcends the sacred creed. The third chapter focuses on translation in which I consider the ethics of adopting a political subjectivity while translating works that bear witness to moments of historical rupture. Translation or the translatedness of the text is integral to the inquiry – the particularity of the translated condition is not ignored in favour of reading the translated text as if it were identical with the source text. I resist the invitation to draw equivalences between the source text and the translated text and read the latter as witness to the event of the former.
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