Reluctant Theologians: Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes 9780823292486

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Reluctant Theologians

Studies in Religion and Literature John L. Mahoney, Series Editor 1. John L. Mahoney, ed. Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Religion and Literature. 2. David Leigh. Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography. 3. J. Robert Barth, S.J. The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition.

Reluctant Theologians `s Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabe by

BETH HAWKINS

Fordham University Press New York 2003

Copyright 䉷 2003 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved. Studies in Religion and Literature No. 4 LC 2002192533 ISBN 0-8232-2201-4 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8232-2202-2 (paperback) ISSN 1096-6692 Studies in Religion and Literature, No. 4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data Hawkins, Beth. Reluctant theologians : Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabe`s / by Beth Hawkins. p. cm.—(Studies in religion and literature, ISSN 1096-6692 ; no. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2201-4—ISBN 0-8232-2202-2 (pbk.) 1. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Religion. 2. Celan, Paul—Religion. 3. Jabe`s, Edmond—Religion. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Influence. I. Title. II. Studies in religion and literature (Fordham University Press) ; no. 4. PT2621.A26 Z746215 2003 833⬘.912—dc21 2002192533

Printed in the United States of America

For my father, Craig Harrison (1944–1992) —despite and because of you

‘‘Onto the answer Elohim grafted the question, and thus the innumerable supplanted the unique.’’ —Edmond Jabe`s ‘‘But we need to try to speak, knowing that our words will necessarily be fragmented.’’ —John K. Roth

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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I. Franz Kafka: Creating a Theology of the Void 1. Setting the Stage 2. The Revaluative Process: Description, Rejection, Prescription

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II. Paul Celan: The Silence of Relation 3. Toward a Logic of the ‘‘Both/And’’

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4. Counting and Recounting

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5. Building the Space Between

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`s: The Death of God and the III. Edmond Jabe Emerging Law of the Other 6. Posing the Questions

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7. Murdering God: Yae¨l

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8. Abolishing the Graven Image Elya and Aely

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9. The God of the Void: El, or the Last Book

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Afterword

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In a project in which the continual refrain is the power of the ‘‘other’’ in the self/other relation, it becomes an almost daunting task to acknowledge the vastness of this ‘‘other’s’’ influence. So many people have helped, in so many ways, to put this book together. My deepest and warmest thanks to those who formed my dissertation committee at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. To Michael Palencia-Roth, for encouraging me to pursue the questions that remain most meaningful for me, and for modeling scholarship based on integrity, honesty, and compassion. To Nancy Blake, for introducing me to the world of mystery that I have made my literary home, and for guiding me through the years to find my voice. To Jim Hurt, for reminding me to keep a sense of humor and perspective when darkness threatens to overcome. To Herbert Knust, for challenging me to rise up to the level of rigor he embodies. To Nicolae Popescu, for broadening my scope of the unanswerable and honing my penchant for abstraction. My special thanks, also, to Gary Porton, for consistently and generously providing me with invaluable suggestions and material, and to Richard Schacht, who launched me full force into the world of Nietzsche. I could not have asked or hoped for a more outstanding group of mentors. I am indebted to Liliane Weissberg, of the University of Pennsylvania, who encouraged me to have faith in and to press forward with this project. Her warmth, generosity of spirit, sincerity, and candor have helped to steer me through the turbulence that comes inevitably with writing. I owe, perhaps, the greatest debt to the anonymous reader for Fordham University Press. His or her comments, suggestions, and questions were tremendously insightful, forcing me often to wrestle with points that I had not considered. The participants in the ‘‘Ethics after the Holocaust’’ seminar, held in July 2001 at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, played a significant role in honing my thinking in the final stages of this proj-

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ect. I want to extend particular thanks to John Roth, of ClaremontMcKenna College, who acted as leader for the seminar; under his direction, we pursued questions that loom over this project and will continue to haunt me. To friends who have supported me throughout this project, particularly Bruno Chaouat, Monica Kelley, Leisa Kauffmann, Sriparna Basu, Swagato Ganguly, Susan Warth, and Alessandro Gerini, I am extremely grateful. A special thanks to Michael Wetzel, who drew the cover illustration and with whom I have had a number of conversations that contributed to the evolution of this book. Several journals have included articles that constitute pieces of this book: Journal of the Kafka Society of America, Shofar, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy. Lastly, but most importantly, I am indebted to and grateful for my family. My brother, Scott Harrison, and my sisters, Rachel Beck and Abbie Sockloff, have given me the unconditional and moral support only they could give. I especially want to thank my mother and stepfather, Carol and Alan Sockloff, who have been constant forces of love, understanding, trust, and patience.

INTRODUCTION Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Wither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. —Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 125

The ‘‘Death of God’’ as Transitional Space: `s Locating Kafka, Celan, and Jabe When Nietzsche’s madman frantically proclaimed, ‘‘God is dead. . . . And we have killed him,’’ he indicated that the foundations of absolute morality were shattered. With this proclamation, Nietzsche connected human guilt and responsibility with a kind of freedom representing at once dizzying possibility and hysteria. This succinct diagnosis set into motion a number of responses, leading directly to Freud’s rejection of religion as a collective neurosis and perhaps not so directly to theologically minded philosophers such as Buber, Levinas, and Ricoeur. Indeed, each philosopher following Nietzsche has had to contend, in some form, with the death-blow that was delivered on the already weakened state of Western metaphysics. Those who agree only partially with Nietzsche—that is, those who

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accept that the rigid categories most often manifested in doctrinal religion and the supreme form of transcendence (i.e., God) have become insufficient and destructive means of accounting for the human condition—ask an important question. Ricoeur poses it most clearly: ‘‘Which God is dead? We can now reply: the god of metaphysics and also the god of theology, insofar as theology rests on the metaphysics of the first cause, necessary being, and the prime mover, conceived as the source of values and as the absolute good’’ (445). What Ricoeur suggests here in questioning ‘‘which God is dead?’’ is that there can be a viable depiction of the divine, one that takes into account the loss of wishful illusions for a saving God, a protector, a Messiah. Ricoeur continues to explain that, insofar as Nietzsche is concerned primarily with the task of exposing the illusions that govern our perceptions, he is a very specific kind of atheist. This type of atheism may be placed in ‘‘an intermediate position, both as a division and as a link between religion and faith; it looks back toward what it denies and what it makes possible’’ (440). The possibility Ricoeur suggests here is that this atheism occupies a transitional space. The pronouncement of the madman, then, that ‘‘God is dead’’ is by no means fixed or final. It is in this hazy space of transition, a space that is permeated by the ambivalent strains of despair and hope, a space that rejects at the same time as it affirms, that the ‘‘theology’’ of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s originates. Reluctant theologians, perhaps, these three authors use their work to explore a set of questions, for them become urgent: What does it mean to believe when all bases for belief have been shattered? Is God necessary for belief ? What kind of God, if any, is compatible with a loss of illusions so pervasive that no absolute has been left intact? If God is one such illusion and can, therefore, be created or destroyed, what type of God is most conducive to building an ethical system based on responsibility and solidarity? If the ‘‘God’’ who has ‘‘died’’ in Nietzsche’s formulation is a speaking, personal God who acts in history, then the death-of-God hypothesis has a unique and particularly devastating set of consequences for Judaism. In his book After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein argues that the covenant becomes the point of contention in post-Holocaust theology. He raises the decisive question: Is it possible to sustain the notion of covenant in the face of God’s silence? Across the historical divide that the Holocaust represents, Kafka’s project is linked with

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Celan’s and Jabe`s’s in his anticipation of Rubenstein’s question. Kafka’s treatment of this subject, and the answer that I believe he provides, a qualified but resounding ‘‘Yes, it is both possible and necessary to sustain the covenant,’’ places him in a unique position: his project provides a theological grounding that will become sustainable for Celan and Jabe`s after the Holocaust. Celan and Jabe`s are linked intimately with Kafka because, like him, they categorically refuse to deny the necessity of the covenant. Their refusal is all the more profound because it occurs in spite of what would appear to be proof that the covenant either never existed or had been horribly violated. The covenant (berit), as it evolves and develops from the first covenant with Noah, signified by the bow in the clouds, through the various covenants with Abram and later Abraham binding him to a people and a land, sealed first by a ritual of cutting, and then by circumcision, to the penultimate covenant with Moses, forged in exile, inscribed in stone upon the Tablets of Law, is the basis of Judaism. The God of the covenant, in all its variations, is a speaking God; the logic of the covenant begins as a basic quid pro quo and develops into an uneven, though thoroughly binding, relation of subservience, worship, punishment, and promise. If this God has died, or, more precisely, has been deemed the figurehead of an unhealthy self-deception—namely, that we can fix and know the world—what remains? What can be salvaged of a faith ultimately grounded in dialogue? Is it possible to maintain a relationship with a God that does not speak, that does not act, that is impersonal? That, perhaps, does not exist? Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s provide a radical set of responses to these questions. On one level, they all feel acutely the urgency and despair displayed by Nietzsche’s madman, and, like this madman, their projects circle around the question of where to locate God (‘‘Whither is God?’’) in the midst of chaos. As well, they all grant legitimacy to the claims that the death-of-God metaphor makes—that is, that we can no longer take solace in absolutes of any kind. In the vast turbulence of the first half of the twentieth century, all the values of Enlightenment humanism—faith in the dignity and nobility of the human subject, in the power of reason and rationality, in the progress of technology to improve the world—were shattered. Like Nietzsche’s madman, all three writers place the burden of responsibility and ac-

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countability on us for the failure of these values, and sense that a God who can speak, who does act in history, who is personal, is a dangerous illusion that we have concocted in order to deflect such responsibility. And yet, all three are also deeply committed to sustaining a covenantal structure, perhaps as a necessary illusion, because they sense that this structure is crucial not only for the preservation of Judaism, but also for the task of revaluation in which they are engaged. Their response to Nietzsche’s madman would seem to suggest that, while they continue the ‘‘revaluation of all values’’ that Nietzsche launches, they fear that Nietzsche might have gone too far in demolishing all bases for religious faith. Some illusions, they argue, are necessary for establishing a system of ethics, and some processes (as long as they produce no definitive product) are, in their view, primarily healthy. The covenant is one such illusion, and seeking God is one such process.

The Covenant as Dialogical Relation: Three Covenantal Midrashes In his letter to Hans Bender, Celan makes this claim: ‘‘I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem’’ (Collected Prose 26). Poetry is fundamentally an act of communication, a moment of solidarity, a reaching out from self to other. This claim, I would venture, is more an imperative than a statement of fact, and it captures something of the basic motivation of all three projects: art should be directed toward the other. In directing their art toward this unnamed ‘‘other’’—an ‘‘other’’ at once human and potentially divine—in reaching across and away from themselves, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s sustain something of the dialogical foundation of the covenant, even as this foundation has been shaken by the ‘‘death of God.’’ In each of these projects, the poetic force of the covenant is represented by a Midrash on a particular instance of the covenant. The purpose of Midrash is to illuminate the gaps or spaces in the biblical text. Midrash grants a certain primacy and legitimacy to the written text; this ‘‘text,’’ this ‘‘enunciation,’’ in other words, has inspired further commentary. At the same time, it is a method that, by its very nature, privileges absence over presence. In that it is a method that encourages and promotes interpretation and digression from the

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written text, Midrash is potentially subversive; it is in this spirit of subversion that Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s conduct their various Midrashes. Paradoxically, Midrash—a strategy traditionally employed as an expression of God-closeness, a means of describing the ‘‘life’’ of God—is transformed by these three authors into a strategy that perpetuates the ‘‘death’’ of God. Midrash for these three writers is conducted in the space of negation; it hastens the shattering of illusions, but, in this very hastening, looks to promote, give sanction to, and create a type of God that complements human responsibility. Kafka’s Midrash focuses on the Akedah (the binding of Isaac). This disturbing story might be looked at as the first internal challenge to covenantal theology in the Hebrew Bible. The level of obsession that Kafka has with this story, both in his extended parable ‘‘Abraham’’ (to which I will return at length in the following chapter) and in his metaphorical reworkings of this story (the most graphic of which might be identified as Josef K.’s execution upon a makeshift sacrificial altar), suggests the centrality of this story to his own project. Celan is drawn more often to the first covenantal moment—the story of Noah. His poem ‘‘Einmal’’ might be read as a Midrash on the Flood and the corresponding promise from God, signaled by the rainbow. Here, he speaks of a universal cleansing, a ‘‘washing of the world.’’ Jabe`s most consistently takes up the covenant at Sinai. For him, the most significant aspect of this covenant is that it is sealed by multiple acts of transgression. The Golden Calf—the result of impatience as Moses is receiving the Tablets of Law—is the impetus for a further level of transgression, namely, the explosive wrath of Moses as he destroys the Tablets. In Jabe`s’s various Midrashes on this event, these transgressions carve open a space for interpretation, for commentary, that will come to be the mark of human freedom in his project. Here, transgression is the necessary condition for human dignity; loss of ‘‘absolute’’ meaning is the impetus for pursuing a multiplicity of meaning. This causal relationship takes on similar contours in Kafka’s project. For him, the ‘‘Fall’’ from Paradise (which, he insists, is perpetual) paves the way for freedom. While it is often not clear what the exact nature of transgression is in Kafka’s world, transgression, guilt, is always a given. The ‘‘answer’’ to this pervasive guilt is punishment—become, in his world, the unique mark of connection to an unidentifiable other. The covenant, as mentioned above, is a structure founded tradi-

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tionally on dialogue. It describes, that is, a dialogical relationship configured in terms of commandment and obedience, call and response. Call and response are verbal structures, and, being verbal, they can be approached in the poetic realm, through a language that aims at their reflection and sustenance. Buber writes, ‘‘the basic movement of the life of dialogue is the turning towards the other’’ (22). The projects of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s reflect this ‘‘turning towards,’’ and it is here, in this turn, that the revaluation of the covenant begins to take shape for each of them. While God loses, in virtually every respect, a voice in these projects (Kafka grants God a voice only provisionally, only as a necessary construction), the covenant remains firmly in place because it is a necessary construct for the maintenance of an ethics grounded in the relation of self and other. These various Midrashes reflect a commitment to the covenantal structure at the same time as they radically recast what the covenant might mean in a world where God does not speak, where, perhaps, God does not exist.

Covenant, Body, and a Cautiously Restorative Hermeneutics This ‘‘recasting’’ in many ways involves a return to traditional expressions of a covenantal relationship. The use of Midrash, of exegesis (as a strategy by which the covenant might be upheld, even if God is silent or does not exist), grants legitimacy to the text, the written word, at the same time as the ‘‘meaning’’ of the text becomes pliable. The exegetical method that Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s use might be located in the crossroads of what Ricoeur describes as two differing hermeneutic methods, the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of restoration. In other words, their exegetical method both strives to unmask and expose the raw tendencies that are responsible for illusion-construction and looks to give voice to the plenitude of meaning in a text that points beyond itself to what inspired its being written. Ricoeur suggests that in a restorative hermeneutics, where the text serves as a symbol for this inspiration, intentionality is given back to the text; but the ‘‘intention’’ of this text-as-symbol is one of ‘‘showing-hiding,’’ revealing only to hint at all that lies concealed. In his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem re-

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lates a passage from the Zohar that captures beautifully the double intention of the text. At the same time, it offers a vivid model not only of the interpretive strategies of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, but also for the way in which we might read their texts: Verily the Torah lets out a word and emerges a little from her sheath, and then hides herself again. But she does this only for those who know and obey her. For the Torah resembles a beautiful and stately damsel, who is hidden in a secluded chamber of her palace and who has a secret lover, unknown to all others. For love of her he keeps passing the gate of her house, looking this way and that in search of her. She knows that her lover haunts the gate of her house. What does she do? She opens the door of her hidden chamber ever so little, and for a moment reveals her face to her lover, but hides it again forthwith. Were anyone with her lover, he would see nothing and perceive nothing. He alone sees it and he is drawn to her with his heart and soul and his whole being, and he knows that for love of him she disclosed herself to him for one moment, aflame with love for him. So it is with the word of Torah, which reveals herself only to those who love her. . . . Come and see: this is the way of the Torah. At first, when she wishes to reveal herself to a man, she gives him a momentary sign. If he understands, well and good; if not, she sends to him and calls him a simpleton. To the messenger she sends to him the Torah says: tell the simpleton to come here that I may speak to him. . . . When he comes to her, she begins from behind a curtain to speak words in keeping with his understanding, until very slowly insight comes to him. . . . Then through a light veil she speaks allegorical words. . . . Only then, when he has become familiar with her, does she reveal herself to him face to face and speak to him of all of her hidden secrets and all her hidden ways, which have been in her heart from the beginning. (55)

A seductive—and illicit—affair, this ‘‘striptease’’ of the text. Understanding the Torah is described here as an intensely intimate act, fueled on by desire and the slow disrobing, unveiling, disclosing of the elusive text. This passage provides two levels of information, with regard to the hermeneutic strategy of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, and with regard to the way this strategy is connected to the ‘‘revaluation’’ of the covenant. First, as in this passage, for Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, the body— and specifically desire—cannot be divorced from any discussion of covenant, particularly a covenant that will be newly inscribed in the

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space of a silent and perhaps absent God. For Kafka and Jabe`s, the body is implicated in the collapse and subsequent reinstatement of the Law. Georg Bendemann, for example, is ‘‘sentenced to death by drowning’’ for his so-called betrayal of his father, signaled by his choice to get married and, consequently, become a sexual being. Kafka tells himself, ‘‘sex is the punishment for being in love’’ (Diaries 228), but punishment is what his characters crave; it implies a kind of relation and intimacy, even if this is a relation based on violence. In Jabe`s’s Book of Questions, the death of God is mirrored in a husband’s brutal murder of his adulterous wife. The drama that unfolds is intensely visceral; the stillborn child who is in the womb of this murdered woman gives way to a bodiless form in which a new law, characterized by desire—Dieu, ‘‘God,’’ he spelled D’yeux, ‘‘of eyes.’’ ‘‘The ‘D’ stands for desire,’’ he added. Desire to see. Desire to be seen’’—is written. Sexual transgression here, as well as in Kafka’s work (where, it might be argued, all sexual acts are transgressive), paves the way for a more binding relation. In Celan’s poetry, desire connotes both the intimacy of the self/ other encounter and the submission of self to other. He asks, in the poem ‘‘Allerseelen,’’ ‘‘What did I / do? / Seminated the night, as though / there could be others, more nocturnal than / this one.’’ His act of ‘‘semination’’ is the (pro)creative, the restorative, response to ‘‘an oath which silence annulled.’’ At the same time, the spirit of the Shekinah—the feminine principle of the divine who, according to Lurianic Kabbalah, took on bodily form and, out of compassion and shared anguish, followed her people into exile—haunts Celan’s poetry. His poetry might be cast as a love story enacted on multiple levels—inspired by the loss of his mother, the love of his wife, the sympathy of Nelly Sachs—captured in the moment that he finds a name for this guiding spirit: ‘‘Ziw, jenes licht.’’ The sensuous detail that permeates his poetry—flowers, almonds, ice, snow, etc.— presents a material and physical, an intensely natural, backdrop against which the revaluation of covenant occurs. Second, the method of ‘‘revelation’’ that the ‘‘beautiful, stately damsel,’’ the Torah, uses in the account above is echoed in the stylistic choices of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s. The type of language these writers use most consistently is a language that conceals while it reveals—it reveals, in riddles and glimpses, only very tentatively, its ‘‘message.’’ Kafka tells us, ‘‘art flies around the truth, but with the

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definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this ever having been perceptible before.’’ The linguistic stance each of these authors has taken is one of circumspection—a language that speaks around rather than of its object. Kafka’s statement above suggests that this type of language preserves itself against the ‘‘truth’’ around which it flies, as though direct knowledge of this truth would necessitate destruction. He gestures, here, to Exodus 33: 18–23, where Moses pleads with God to see his face, to which God responds, ‘‘you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live.’’ At the same time, this circumspect language reflects the nonviolating principle behind the second commandment. Thus, Celan’s imperative ‘‘Speak, you also’’ necessarily involves a type of speech that will not defile its object—‘‘Speak, but leave yes and no unsplit / he speaks truly who speaks the shadows.’’ While Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s reject the traditional hermeneutic method that views the biblical text as divine enunciation, it is curious that they maintain the deferential stance before the text (here expanded to include their own texts) that such a method requires. The ‘‘truth’’ of which Kafka speaks is no longer the ‘‘Word’’—at the same time, this truth, like the Word, resists penetration. Similarly, as Celan’s Schattensprache (language of shadows) suggests, whatever this ‘‘truth’’ might be, it is best protected by darkness, is best glimpsed through an unlifted veil. Jabe`s, in a metatextual description of his Book of Questions, speaks of ‘‘the place beyond all place of an obsession with God, unquenched desire of a mad desire; a book, finally, which would only surrender by fragments, each of them the beginning of another book.’’ An ‘‘obsession with God’’ ‘‘surrender[ed] by fragments’’ no longer reflects the same God as the Midrashim pursued, but the method itself survives. The written word, for each of these authors, retains the trace of the divine (becoming more faint with each project); as such, it must be produced and approached with caution and deference.

Toward a Universal Covenant Celan’s choice to focus on Noah as the representative bearer of the covenant suggests something about the aims of his poetic project,

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and points, as well, to an important concern for Kafka and Jabe`s. The Noahide Laws are described in the Hebrew Bible as a universally binding system of law and, likewise, a universally applicable covenant. These laws pre-date the covenant with Abraham, and precede the attachment of the covenant with a specific people who come to be identified as ‘‘the chosen people.’’ At the center of the projects of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s is an intense anxiety connected with their revaluation of the covenant. The message of solidarity, so central to each of these revaluations, is not compatible with an exclusionary model of covenant. Consequently, they promote an inclusionary model, a model that, like the Noahide Laws, applies to everyone. At the same time, each of these projects demonstrates a return to specifically Jewish modes of expression. To a large extent, the anxiety that each of these authors exhibits is a product of the historical necessity for assimilation, particularly in the cases of Kafka and Celan. The work of each plays out an internal conflict in this sense: each of these authors is ‘‘assimilated,’’ is thoroughly indoctrinated in the shared culture of European modernism (this culture permeated Jabe`s’s Cairo as well). However, each is also deeply committed to preserving a Jewish identity. The landscape, mythology, language, and collective experience each draws on are Jewish. For Kafka and Celan, this conflict manifests itself in an ambivalence concerning what it means to be Jewish in a virulently antiJewish world. In Jabe`s’s case, a return to Jewish forms and symbols is coincident with exile, and, therefore, is informed by an overarching sense of marginalization. Though their situations are in many ways profoundly different, these three authors share a common strategy that underlines a common intention: each uses a specifically Jewish paradigm as the means for promoting a universal ethics. At the same time, they remain leery of universalizing schemes overall and promote, rather, multiplicity and diversity over the unified and singular. This tension between the particular and the general, the specific and the universal, the diverse and the singular generates much of the movement of these projects—it is a profound and at times painful tension, marked often by self-doubt. In the cases of Kafka and Celan, this ‘‘universal’’ ethics can begin to be approached only if the historically tortured relation between Judaism and Christianity is first acknowledged. Kafka lives in a world that views blood-libel as logical in the anti-Semitic culture that took

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many of its cues from none other than Luther himself, and Luther from none other than Paul. In the post-Holocaust world, the world in which Celan lives, the central claims of both Judaism (Jews are the ‘‘chosen’’ people) and Christianity (God is love) are shaken to the core. Although this is not a predominating theme in either Kafka’s or Celan’s project, it does enter into the mix in an important way, providing a point of departure in the larger project of creating a universal ethics based on solidarity and respect. Kafka’s description of Christ as ‘‘an abyss filled with light’’ is both antagonistic and compassionate, fueled at once by a desire to reject a belief system that has trampled on his own and by his hope that, in rejecting the Messiah figure (here Christ becomes a general title), we might be able to come to a system of belief that doesn’t require saving devices. In a similar fashion, Celan’s conflation of the catechistic method with a saturation of Hebrew in his poem ‘‘Mandorla’’ suggests a meeting ground between these two systems of belief. At the same time, a ‘‘meeting ground’’ by no means implies that he is ready to forgive or to forget that the atrocities committed against him and his family were in many ways able to be committed because they tapped into deep-seated hatred, on a theological level, of the Jews. In Celan’s poetic landscape, Shulamith will always have the last word. To the extent that, in these three projects, the particular is the vehicle for the universal at the same time as the universal is often privileged over the particular (and I make this claim tentatively, because, as will become clearer in the chapters to follow, the balance between particular and universal is precarious and constantly shifting in these projects), Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s might be identified as the precursors of a newly emerging academic discipline: postmodern Jewish philosophy. I’ll say more about this in the conclusion of the book; I briefly raise the issue here to provide a theoretical frame for these literary projects. Postmodern Jewish philosophy is concerned primarily with the way Jewish modes of expression have begun to provide a language with which we might speak about the postmodern ‘‘condition.’’ The tropes of exile, wandering, absence, disappearance, the simultaneous power and insufficiency of language—these have entered into a shared vocabulary. A ‘‘condition’’ that has been secularized on the one hand (God has been effectively removed from the mix) has been sanctified on the other (language itself has replaced

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God; it has taken on its own sacred properties and produces its own mystery).

The Lesson of Job In addition to the specific ‘‘Midrashes’’ that Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s conduct, their work is inspired more generally by the spirit of the Book of Job. As the most extended and explicit meditation on the covenant in the Hebrew Bible, it is an important touchstone, symbolically, for Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s. The Book of Job overturns the notion of causality that sustains both the pre-Sinai and the Sinai covenants. That is, according to the covenantal structure, there is a causal link between one’s actions and one’s situation in life. It follows, then, that if it appears that one is being punished, one must have done something to merit this punishment. Where Abraham’s silence in the Akedah, his refusal to question the appearance of punishment, attests to his faith, Job’s active and persistent questioning, paradoxically, attests to his. Job is deemed righteous by virtue of his refusal to accept the role of transgressor—his faith consists in upholding his own righteousness despite a seeming lapse, and in doing so he intimates that understanding of the covenantal relationship precedes all logical configurations of that relationship. With the Book of Job, the notion of the absurd is born. What is so puzzling and mysterious about the Book of Job is that the logic invoked here, and finally overturned—the logic guiding the arguments of Job’s friends, that is—is precisely the logic that governs the prophetic books. The basic message of the prophets is this: You have violated the covenant. Repent, or you will bear the consequences of this violation. Here, there is a strictly causal relation. Job’s friends articulate this message with a slight variation—You have violated the covenant, either consciously or unconsciously. Your predicament is a direct result of this violation. The thundering reply of God to this message is No, there is no such relation between cause and effect. The Book of Job reveals the dark underbelly of the covenant, the uncertainty and fundamental incapacity of human understanding that—beginning with God’s response to Moses, ehiyeh ashar ehiyeh (I will be that I will be)—the covenant never pretends to repair. The Book of Job widens the rupture first expressed at Sinai, and with this

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widening comes a paradox: the relation between God and humanity is as thoroughly binding as it is incomprehensible. The relation carries with it no discernible content save for the command that the bond be sustained. The Book of Job announces the reign of the whirlwind God over the covenant, and, in so doing, joins irrevocably, under the banner of faith, the poles of challenge and contention with uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It is with the Book of Job that the question becomes the means of demonstrating faith in an unknowable divine. Job, in his refusal to remain complacent and accepting in the face of seeming injustice, in his commitment to the question in the face of the unknowable, carves open the space of the ethical. This is a dynamic space, a space that emerges between the dialectical movement of self and perceived divine. The space of the ethical is the space in which the bond is upheld at the same time as it is questioned. It is this ‘‘space of the ethical,’’ as I am calling it, that forms the common ground shared by Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s. For them, faith is an ethical pursuit rather than a possession. The ‘‘lesson’’ of Job for these three writers is both methodological and mythological in scope. For them, the ‘‘question’’ triumphs over the ‘‘answer’’— symbolically, the imperative to challenge the given, to resist closure, to reject what smacks of wrongdoing (even if God is responsible for this wrongdoing) wins out over definitive claims to ‘‘truth.’’ At the same time, all three authors symbolically rewrite the Book of Job. In their versions, there is no resolution; the story ends before an angry God is coaxed out of the whirlwind. Instead, the only response to what we might imagine is Job’s clenched fist, outstretched toward the heavens, is silence. And yet, despite and because of this silence, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s urge us to continue asking questions. Kafka writes cryptically, ‘‘A veering round. Peering, timid, hopeful, the answer prowls round the question, desperately looking into its impenetrable face, following it along the most senseless paths, that is, along the paths leading as far as possible away from the answer.’’ Celan embraces the spirit of the question, emptied of an answer, as the vehicle for self-authentication—‘‘a dead Why stands at the stern,’’ navigates the way to a ‘‘soul-prolongation.’’ And Jabe`s implores us, in the final line of his massive Book of Questions, ‘‘in the throes of the crisis, to preserve the question.’’ There is another important consequence of the Book of Job for

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these writers. The overturning of a causal relation between circumstance and prior behavior in many ways renders specific action—that is, ritual—irrelevant in the context of expressing faith. Faith becomes, rather, a disposition, a positioning, a way of being-in-theworld. The question, as a formal strategy, promotes a kind of suspicion regarding doctrine, because doctrine is an attempt to fix and explain—and, therefore, limit—that which is essentially elusive and unknowable. In this sense, the Book of Job undermines the specifically Jewish interpretation of the Law—halakhah—and opens up the possibility for multiple interpretations and expressions of faith. As it is exploded into this realm of possibility, faith is also reduced to a common denominator—the relation, bond, and connection between the self-who-cannot-know and the unknowable other. The reduction of faith to the relation produces another level of anxiety for these authors. While each ultimately upholds the type of faith that does escape halakhic and doctrinal boundaries, there is a nagging doubt that lurks behind each of these projects: Can they speak for a group to which they do not—ritualistically—belong? Are they representative enough of Judaism if, as in Kafka’s case, he is only superficially schooled in the theological and liturgical details of Judaism? If, as in Celan’s case, he chooses exile in Paris rather than emigration to Israel? If, as in Jabe`s’s case, his Sephardic background and his noninvolvement directly in the Holocaust separate him from the primarily Ashkenazic community in Paris?

A New ‘‘Humanism’’—Strength in Weakness It is precisely this anxiety, this self-doubt, that becomes the paradoxical point of departure for each of these projects. Kafka, for instance, pinpoints ‘‘human weakness’’ as the necessary building block for the ‘‘commandment’’ he will proceed to create. Celan, similarly, rejects the very existence of the ‘‘ich,’’ calling it, in a poem entitled ‘‘Ich kenne dich,’’ ‘‘ganz Wahn’’ (complete delusion). Likewise, Jabe`s locates his ‘‘authority’’ to speak in his basic incapacity as both a Jew and a writer—‘‘You who are not Jewish (which I have been so poorly, but which I am), I will introduce you to my land. You who are no writer (which I have been so poorly, but which I am), I will give you my books.’’

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We witness in these projects a radical subversion of the Enlightenment humanism that allows for faith in humanity as a necessary corollary to faith in the unlimited power of reason. Here, human capacity is tempered by incapacity and the evidence, at every turn, of the inhuman. At the same time, the human subject is the basis for movement; the revaluation of the covenant pivots around human responsibility once the divine is made negligible. Subjectivity, in these projects, is grounded in loss, lack, weakness, absence—a human subjectivity that paradoxically mirrors the divine subject in the mystical account of tzimtzum. The human subject, like the divine, becomes creative in its own reduction, its own retreat into nothingness. The perpetually receding horizon that forms the symbolic landscape of these projects—enacted in Kafka’s ‘‘Imperial Message,’’ where obstacles continually block the path of a messenger who desperately wishes to deliver his message, in Celan’s poetic tzimtzum in ‘‘Sprich auch Du,’’ where he depicts a receding divine that can be approached only tentatively, circumspectly, by means of a Schattensprache, a language of shadows, in Jabe`s’s haunting symbol of the book, written in his sparse desert landscape, that erases itself as it is written—lies behind these poetic moments which capture the retreat of the divine, mirrored in the retreat of the confident, unified, autonomous subject.

Dissolution of Self in Other and the Blurring of These Categories of Description As the subject, or ‘‘self,’’ loses autonomy, the text becomes the instance of, the arena for, the dissolution of the self in the other. At the same time, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s remain conscious of the need for separation between self and other. In this way, their projects reflect something of the paradoxical positioning between self and other that Levinas promotes. On one level, Levinas argues that our humanity rests in our responsibility to and for the other—‘‘man par excellence—the source of humanity—is perhaps the other’’ (‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ Basic Writings 14). We gain our humanity from the other, we are ourselves only because of the other. For Levinas, the perpetual alterity of the other, the difference that cannot be re-

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duced to the same, upholds the ethical relationship between self and other. Height, a sense of exteriority that is not merely other but of a higher order, necessitates both obedience and the leap of conscience. At the same time, sustaining an ethical relation with the other is, in Levinas’s estimation, an expression of self-sacrifice: ‘‘the responsibility for the other is perhaps the concrete event designated by the verb ‘not to be’ in an attempt to distinguish it both from nothingness and from the product of transcendental imagination’’ (‘‘Substitution,’’ Basic Writings 91). A strange double standard is called for here: the self can, and will, be dissolved into the other, but the other is, on no condition, to be assimilated into or appropriated by the self. Such appropriation would be exploitation, violence. And yet, in the projects of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s violence is committed against the self by the other. Kafka’s ‘‘In the Penal Colony’’ is a gripping example of this violence, enacted in the space of Law and ‘‘justice’’; Celan’s ‘‘Ich kenne dich’’ depicts a self ‘‘pierced through . . . subject to You’’; and, in a richly layered expression of this violence, Jabe`s relates the ‘‘suicide’’ of the writer coincident with the ‘‘murder of God.’’ Levinas’s double standard generates much of the movement in these projects. For Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s the ethical obligation to and for the other becomes a threat to the self; at the same time, subservience to the other is the cornerstone of the revaluation of the covenant. Kafka instructs us, ‘‘Destroy yourself! In order to become what you are.’’ In these projects, the isolated self is reborn in the collective—the other always informs ‘‘what one is.’’ At the same time, though the self is subservient to the other, what, precisely, this ‘‘other’’ represents is often neither singular nor clear. Buber writes, ‘‘man is to be understood as the being who is capable of the three-fold living relation (man to things and the world; man to other men; man to the mystery of being) and can raise any form of it to an essentiality’’ (181). Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s grant credence to this three-part relation, and this granting accounts for what seems to be the constant tension in their projects concerning where to locate the proper place of the ‘‘encounter’’ between self and other. Is the encounter between man and man, man and the world, or man and God? To whom is the self subject? Is the ‘‘other’’ impersonal or personal? Human or divine? Material or spiritual? Immanent or transcendent? Indeed, the other is all these things and, therefore, makes a number of competing demands. The self that is subject to this mul-

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tiple other is faced with (at least) two, seemingly contradictory codes of conduct: (1) affirmation of the earthly, the body, the here-and-now; and (2) dedication to the ideal, the transcendent, the eternal. Add to this the increasing suspicion in these projects that the ‘‘other’’ actually exists, and the categories of self and other are blurred almost beyond repair. Buber’s ‘‘I–Thou’’ relationship is grounded in an unwavering faith in the existence of the ‘‘Thou.’’ The work of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, on the contrary, is marked by its primarily agnostic bent. This agnosticism sometimes appears as a hope against all hope that there is something out there to which we are bound. Just as often, however, it appears as a painful skepticism, to which a resigned Kafka responds, ‘‘obey, even if one hears no command.’’ Even if the other fades away—as it does in Celan’s poem ‘‘Ich kann dich noch sehn’’—even if the other is not real—as Jabe`s tells us, ‘‘the other is always somehow a fiction, but a fiction that is so necessary that it becomes for me the very reality of what I can feel and the very possibility of speaking about this thing that I seek’’—we remain, nevertheless, subject to it. The alternative, which is profoundly unacceptable to these three authors, is solipsism. Even if we are alone, we must act as if we are part of a collective that makes demands of us.

The Conditional Space: The Triumph of What Ought to Be over What Is In sensing the danger that lurks at the heart of Nietzsche’s revaluation, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s seem to be operating from an important assumption: ontology and ethics are inextricably connected. The ground of being, that is, necessitates a prescribed set of behaviors; the way a particular world looks has crucial consequences for the way one must act within this world. Given this connection, panic will inevitably erupt when the ‘‘ground’’ is exposed as inherently empty of value and meaning (and for each of these projects, the first step is such an exposure). Once it is emptied of meaning, what kind of action can this world possibly prescribe? Consequently, these authors posit an ontology that hypothetically does provide for an ethics based on relation, that does, in other words, enable the kind of action that each project promotes. The hypothesis, in turn, is taken as the starting

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point for ethics promotion. Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s occupy a curious space here, an area that Jean Starobinski calls ‘‘the conditional space’’ (41). Giving themselves over to what ought to be, these authors promote a constructed ideal, and ask that their readers act as if this ideal were objectively true. While they are committed to the work of exposing illusion and deception, they are at the same time putting forth prescriptive hypotheses. For these three authors, it is the primary task of the writer to create and reinforce the ethical space—to use writing as the means of witnessing that there is this space, and, more so, that if there is not, there should be. While Kafka’s, Celan’s, and Jabe`s’s views differ significantly on what constitutes this conditional space, they all seem to agree that ethics ought to be attached to a divine figure. And, to judge from the irreversible effect of Nietzsche’s claim on these three authors, this is a highly problematic hypothesis to negotiate. Behind the death of God lurks the nagging doubt that a governing system of ethics is possible only if the divine is an ethical figure. Ultimately, each will reject this kind of God—as a reality—and opt instead for an ethics originating from humanity, an ethics that persists despite the nonexistence of a personal, saving, speaking God. At most, this God can be accepted only as a necessary illusion, a voluntary deception that is conducive to the production of ethics. Nevertheless, the speaking God is a powerful model for these writers, and, for each, the first step of value-construction is to contend with this God as a viable hypothesis. Each author recognizes the precarious connection between the speaking God and the covenant, and therefore engages in a simultaneous revaluation of both concepts. Where Kafka rejects the deus ex machina but promotes—as a necessary illusion—a God who exercises an arbitrary form of justice and judgment, Celan and Jabe`s first indict, then overthrow, the speaking God of the covenant in favor of the mystical God of silence and absence, a God who is inexorably pre-moral. While Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s eventually come to the conclusion that the traditional God of the covenant—the God of absolute morality and the basis for values—is no longer a possibility, each continues to promote the illusion of this God. What is is supplanted by what ought to be, because it is, finally, only the realm of the ought that provides for the ethical space. As Jabe`s suggests, ‘‘the writer is chosen to formulate the Law’’; the writer in each of these projects takes

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on the mantel of rabbi, of teacher, in a world that is becoming rapidly secular.

Resisting the Totalizing Impulse While Pursuing Totality Each of these authors demonstrates a similar distaste for systematicity and dogmatism in light of the loss of absolute value, implying at the most fundamental level that form must reflect message. As such, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s alike reject the totalizing impulse, and instead choose literary forms that reflect a pervasive anti-systematicity, a vehement refusal of closure or finality. Kafka and Jabe`s share a similar aphoristic style that lends itself often to parables, the ‘‘morals’’ of which usually reflect a fragmentary and inconclusive world. Their maxims—bearing a close resemblance to Nietzsche’s own chosen formal strategy—suggest, rather than a concise and pithy ‘‘recipe’’ for knowledge and wisdom, that knowledge really consists in not knowing. Jabe`s intimates, by including these maxims under the guise of the ‘‘question,’’ that answers impose a false sense of certainty on a world that has lost the means for such an authoritative reply. Likewise, it is the logic of paradox that guides Kafka’s parables. Celan’s poetry and polemical writings are founded on the same principles of absence, uncertainty, and paradox. His words convey a palpable negativity, silence rather than speech. And yet, there is fundamental paradox around which each of these projects spins. On one level, all claims to totality have been rejected as ultimately false, the impulse to totality reflecting our need to fix and to know. On another level, to the extent that these authors are looking to put back, to fill the void that has been created by the death of the speaking God, to replace the ground beneath our feet (Kafka tells us, for example, that he can find ‘‘happiness, only if [he] can raise the world to the level of the true, the pure, the immutable’’), these projects pursue nothing less than the totality of being. What emerges is a strange tension between two competing impulses, again highly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values, the impulse to describe the world as it ‘‘really’’ is and the impulse to prescribe a type of behavior or disposition that builds from a loss of illusions but takes us past this loss. Nietzsche’s prescription is primarily aesthetic; his

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famous claim in The Birth of Tragedy that ‘‘life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon’’ (17) suggests that art provides the means for transfiguring the real in such a way that we can say ‘‘yes’’ to life. Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s agree, at least in part, with this claim, but they take their ‘‘prescriptions’’ one step further: for them, life can be justified only as an ethical phenomenon that must be promoted by aesthetics. The aesthetic, that is, has to be attached to the ethical; art has to be used in a way to guide us to the ethical transfiguration of the void.

Collapsing Kierkegaard’s ‘‘Either/Or’’ Why such emphasis on linking these two modes—the ethical and the aesthetic? The ghost of Kierkegaard haunts Kafka’s work persistently, to the extent that we might read his developing theology, the theology that will become foundational for Celan and Jabe`s, as a rejection of the ‘‘either/or.’’ Kafka writes: ‘‘Kierkegaard faces the problem, whether to enjoy life aesthetically or to experience it ethically. But this seems to me to be a false statement of the problem. The EitherOr exists only in the head of Søren Kierkegaard. In reality one can only achieve an aesthetic enjoyment of life as a result of humble ethical experience.’’ Kafka’s dissolution of the conflict between these two modes suggests the prevailing strategy of all three literary projects; for Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, the challenge is to create an ethical model that is deeply embedded in life itself—to say ‘‘yes’’ to life, then, is to accept the ethical trajectory of the aesthetic. Kafka collapses the ‘‘either/or’’ in another way that has deep significance for his own project and for the projects of Celan and Jabe`s to follow. This aphorism captures, I believe, the guiding spirit of these projects: ‘‘Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.’’ As he looks to more precisely measure what belief ‘‘means,’’ he settles on this equation: believing means being. Faith and existence are inextricably joined. Kafka’s formulation accounts, I would argue, for the sense of urgency in these projects, for the nearly prophetic sense of compulsion driving them on. At the center of these projects is the

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compassionate and often desperate wish to instill in us as readers the possibility for belief, because, they suggest, belief sustains existence. Abraham Heschel writes: Awe precedes faith; it is at the root of faith. We must grow in awe in order to reach faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith. . . . There is thus only one way to wisdom: awe. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. (53)

Like Heschel, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s sense that, once awe has been replaced by ‘‘conceit,’’ once mystery has been rejected by a wish for complete knowledge and understanding, there is no longer room for faith. The prophetic tone in the works of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s speaks as a warning against the potential consumerism of the relation, the making a commodity of the ‘‘other,’’ once mystery has been replaced by the ‘‘conceit’’ of appropriation. Consequently, these three projects court mystery at every turn; they raise innumerable questions without providing the security of answers. Even if, and perhaps because, these three authors are drastically throwing the concept of God into question—so much so that we will witness the graphic and brutal murder of God in Jabe`s’s Book of Questions—Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s are engaged in a God-promoting project; they are asking us to become more God-conscious, to become more susceptible to awe. Celan implores us: ‘‘let us wash [the word] / let us turn its eye towards heaven,’’ let us engage in this process of awe-building, let us find a language that embodies the heavenly turn. And yet, these three argue again and again, though faith is crucial to existence, it cannot be blind. In the crisis that follows inevitably from the death of the speaking God, and, more painfully and explicitly in the resounding silence that met the Holocaust, it is crucial to restore the possibility for faith. The only way, they argue, that faith escapes being blind is for it to become, rather than a possession, a disposition, an active positioning toward and against all the obstacles that arise to continually challenge this faith. This is a faith that incorporates at once watchfulness for the ‘‘call’’ and a staunch awareness that this call may never come. An ‘‘insomnia’’ that is never relieved by sleep. A faith that has been stripped of teleological content, saving devices, salvation, or redemption.

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Stance of Despite and Because The refrain that plays throughout the work of these three authors is one that demands ethical stringency and strips the ethical principle of all ties to absolutes: despite and because of the nonexistence of a personal God, continue to seek the relation that is most fully captured in dialogue. Despite implies a challenge against, a refusal to accept the injustice of the given condition. It is this tendency—to resist the possibility that no transcendent order exists, to rebel against the silence of God—that manifests itself in ideal-construction. Despite upholds the seductive power of the ‘‘ought,’’ the temptation to rely on what should be as opposed to what is. To act because of a given set of factors is to use this condition as the impetus for movement. Because God is not a saving figure, a figure who will deflect responsibility and accountability from humanity, we will need to harness our capacity for self-reliance, we will need to tap into our reserves of strength. In offering to the reader a faith stripped of saving devices, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s demonstrate a trust in the human spirit to choose this stance of despite and because. An optimism, though contained, peeks through in moments of true solidarity, as when Kafka implores his readers, ‘‘and you must not despair,’’ when Celan leaves as his legacy the words that betray his hope that we will retain a feeling of sanctity ‘‘come the Sabbath,’’ when Jabe`s writes, ‘‘keeping the faith with God means keeping it with man in his quest for truth.’’ In moments such as these, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s reach across to their readers and the full protective and restorative sense of their projects comes to the surface. This tempered optimism suggests as well that these authors believe that the reader is strong enough to accept a doctrineless doctrine, a wayless way, as the means by which to express his or her faith. These authors imply that the human spirit is resilient enough, pliable enough, to withstand a complete and utter breakdown of values and, in the face of this breakdown, refuse simple solutions or fantasies of salvation.

A Note on Organization I am grouping Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s according to two basic models. On one level, all three authors are writing in the space carved open

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by Nietzsche’s ‘‘death of God.’’ Each is responding to and continuing the process of revaluation begun by Nietzsche. On another level, Kafka, having been the ‘‘first’’ to carry the Nietzschean revaluation into the realm of theology, is the more direct precursor to Celan and Jabe`s. The historical divide that the Holocaust creates naturally separates Kafka’s project from the projects of Celan and Jabe`s; for this reason, I will be focusing on the important differences between a post-Holocaust covenant and a pre-Holocaust covenant at the same time as I highlight the shared components among all three ‘‘theologies.’’ Having accepted the challenge presented by Nietzsche, Kafka provides a model for Celan and Jabe`s; at the same time, his model is one that Celan and Jabe`s will occasionally reject because it does not capture the devastating blow of Godsilence that the Holocaust represents for them. The notion of a speaking God is, finally, unacceptable to both Celan and Jabe`s; for Kafka, however, a speaking-God-as-necessary-construct is the cornerstone of his ethics, even as he finds that a negative theology closely resonates with his project as well. Kafka’s project is, perhaps, the least systematic of the three. That is, while Celan and Jabe`s are also thoroughly unsystematic, their projects—represented by volumes that respond to and build on each other—lend themselves to a chronological approach more easily than Kafka’s aphorisms, fragments, and free-standing literary works do. Indeed, none of these projects are teleological (railing, as they do, against teleology as a closing off of possibility); nevertheless, the development and extension of particular strands of thought are more clearly discernible in the overarching projects of Celan and Jabe`s. The organization of the chapters reflects the precarious business of teasing out the ‘‘positive’’ components of projects that are grounded primarily in negation. In the chapter on Kafka, I first highlight general tendencies and recurring motifs in Kafka’s work, using his parable of Abraham as a seedbed for the prevailing assumptions of Kafka’s ‘‘theology.’’ The remainder of the chapter traces the dialectical nature of Kafka’s emerging theology. I suggest that Kafka’s project can be considered according to a three-part model: his ‘‘description’’ of the human condition; his rejection of saving devices; and the ‘‘prescription’’ that grows out of this rejection and captures the reality of the human condition, as Kafka sees it. This prescription is, in effect, his theology. In the Celan chapter, I trace the development of the notion of cove-

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nant and relation through Celan’s volumes of poetry. For him, the covenant, like the poem, is always ‘‘en route,’’ headed-toward. And, like the poem, it is grounded in the moment of exchange. The encounter grows more intimate for Celan, until language is no longer able to contain it. For Celan, in many ways like Buber, the moments of the most productive and intimate encounter occur outside of speech—in an extra-verbal dialogue. His language, then, progresses toward this kind of dialogue, toward a speech in silence that reflects a growing familiarity between the self and the other. At the same time, Celan is torn by the paradoxical imperative facing both Kafka and Jabe`s: the covenantal structure, a structure that must account for the ethical relation, finds its legitimacy only in the sustained separation of self and other. The collapse of boundaries between self and other, heaven and earth, that eventually takes place in the final volumes of Celan’s poetry somehow reflects the failure to sustain the covenantal structure. I suggest that it is this perceived failure—in Celan’s mind—that overcomes him with despair. In the chapter on Jabe`s, I explore the massive revaluation of the notion of God played out in Jabe`s’s septology, The Book of Questions. Jabe`s is explicitly grappling with Nietzsche’s proclamation—his volumes move through the violent murder of the absolute, speaking God to a reconstruction of a silent divine, and, finally, to the reinscription of the Law in this silence. The Book of Questions embodies a fundamental paradox: the necessity for the ‘‘other’’ is always met by the equally pressing necessity to acknowledge the death of the ‘‘last Other’’ (that is, God). I regard Jabe`s’s Book of Questions in many ways as the culmination of Celan’s notion of hindurchgehen and as a reconfirmation of Kafka’s binding ‘‘Law.’’ That is, Jabe`s describes a passing through the depths of deepest despair, of the abyss consisting in, as Celan writes, ‘‘the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech.’’ The movement is one of passing through nihilism to a stronger, more thoroughly binding sense of ethics. The other is necessary, because the other is the source of Law, but the other must be regarded in the full awareness of the death of the God of absolute values.

I Franz Kafka: Creating a Theology of the Void Kafka’s true ancestors, the substance of his flesh and spirit, were an unruly crowd of Talmudists, Cabalists, medieval mystics resting uneasy beneath the jumble of heaving, weather-beaten tombstones in Prague’s Old Cemetery, seekers in search of reason for their faith. He was their child, last in a long line of disbelieving believers, wild visionaries with split vision who found two answers to every question and four new questions to every answer in seeking to probe the ultimate riddle of God. Nightmare of Reason, Ernst Pawel It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted. You suggest that there is some faith-value in this? One cannot not-live, after all. It is precisely in this ‘Cannot, after all’ that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form. Blue Octavo Notebooks, Kafka

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Setting the Stage Once, during one of their customary strolls around Prague, Kafka stopped, turned to Gustav Janouch, and pointed to the Old Synagogue, reminding Janouch of the ghetto walls that used to enclose it. Janouch replied, ‘‘ ‘The walls have gone, anti-semitism remains.’ ‘The walls have been replaced within,’ said Kafka. ‘The synagogue already lies below ground level. But men will go further. They will try to grind the synagogue to dust by destroying the Jews themselves.’ ‘I don’t believe it,’ [Janouch] exclaimed. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ Kafka turned his face to [him]. It was sad and withdrawn. There was no light in his eyes’’ (Janouch 139). Though we have been duly warned against taking Janouch’s word at face-value, so many years passing between the events and his accountings of them, it is not only Janouch who brings to light Kafka’s sensitivity to his Judaism and his understanding of the complexity of the political situation of the Prague Jews. Janouch only confirms, rather, what Kafka demonstrated time and again in his journals and personal relationships: Kafka’s Judaism is central to his work. And, while it is perhaps dangerous to view Kafka as a prophet of the cataclysm that was to roll over Europe little more than a decade after his death and to consume his sisters in its fury, nevertheless, he did inhabit a world of foreboding. Living in that world, Kafka developed a theology—rigorous and complex—that Celan and Jabe`s find sustainable, in many regards, after the Holocaust. His theology revolves around a God who has either retreated or who does not exist; at the same time, it encourages faith and demands individual responsibility despite and because of this absence. From his position within a rapidly decaying world, Kafka chose to return to his Jewish roots and to build on them. This return is marked by a deep ambivalence, by a sense of alienation on many levels. Neither fully familiar with, nor wholly conversant in, the religious structures and theological complexities of Judaism, Kafka nevertheless relies heavily on these structures. Robert Alter writes, ‘‘Kafka’s . . .

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landscapes . . . have been ruthlessly shorn of all the outward trappings of tradition, but the classic Jewish triad of revelation, law, and commentary virtually defines his imaginative world, whose protagonists at once cannot do without these categories and cannot understand them, tolerate them, live by them’’ (17). Because Kafka is a product of assimilation, because his belief is questionable (one can argue, that is, that his theology is governed more by expedience than by actual belief ), his commitment to these structures is quite telling. The unstated set of questions guiding Alter’s claim above—namely, why do these structures resonate so strongly for Kafka? Why does this ‘‘classic Jewish triad’’ remain intact, even as the specific content of these forms blurs with every passing moment? Why does this source remain vital for him even though he may be only superficially proficient in its details?—is worth pressing further. Kafka’s Abraham: A Subversive Midrash Kafka’s masterful reworking of the story of Abraham is a prime example of his simultaneous return to and break from tradition; it serves as a Midrash in the classical sense, placing him squarely in the company of those ‘‘disbelieving believers,’’ those ‘‘wild visionaries who found two answers to every question and four new questions to every answer in seeking to probe the ultimate riddle of God’’ (Pawel, Nightmare of Reason 100). At the same time, it is a thoroughly subversive Midrash, working not only to illuminate the gaps and spaces in the original text, but undermining and literally rewriting the original text as well. Strategically, thematically, structurally, this parable demonstrates in microcosm Kafka’s radically inventive theology. A close analysis of the text reveals that here, in this rewriting of the Akedah, faith is exploded into the ridiculous, and God strangely becomes powerful only after his reality is called into question. The Abraham of tradition is ousted, replaced finally by a figure (un)worthy enough in Kafka’s estimation to serve as a more appropriate model for his theology.1 I cite the parable here in its entirety: Abraham falls victim to the following illusion: he cannot stand the uniformity of this world. Now the world is known, however, to be uncom1 The following discussion of Abraham is extracted from my article, ‘‘ ‘Oder richtiger’: Franz Kafka’s Ethics of Precision.’’

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monly various, which can be verified at any time by taking a handful of world and looking at it closely. Thus this complaint at the uniformity of the world is really a complaint at not having been mixed profoundly enough with the diversity of the world. I could conceive of another Abraham for myself—he certainly would have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer—who was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable; the household needed him, there was perpetually something or other to put in order, the house was never ready, without having something to fall back on, he could not leave—this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘‘He set his house in order.’’ And, in fact, Abraham possessed everything in plenty to start with; if he had not had a house, where would he have raised his son, and in which rafter would he have stuck the sacrificial knife? This Abraham—but it’s all an old story not worth discussing any longer. Especially not the real Abraham; he had everything to start with, was brought up to it from childhood—I can’t see the leap. If he already had everything, and yet was to be raised still higher, then something had to be taken away from him, at least in appearance: this would be logical and no leap. It was different for the other Abrahams, who stood in the houses they were building and suddenly had to go up on Mount Moriah; it is possible that they did not even have a son, yet already had to sacrifice him. These are impossibilities, and Sarah was right to laugh. Thus only the suspicion remains that it was by intention that these men did not ready their houses, and—to select a very great example—hid their faces in magic trilogies in order not to have to lift them and see the mountain standing in the distance. But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty youngster that was his child. True faith is not lacking to him, he has this faith; he would make the sacrifice in the right spirit if only he could believe he was the one meant. He is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his son he would change on the way into Don Quixote. The world would have been enraged at Abraham could it have beheld him at the time, but this one is afraid that the world would laugh itself to death at the sight of him. However, it is not the ridiculousness as such that he is afraid of—though he is, of course, afraid of that too and, above all, of his joining in the laughter— but in the main he is afraid that this ridiculousness will make him even older and uglier, his son even dirtier, even more unworthy of being

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really called. An Abraham who should come unsummoned! It is as if, at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out laughing. And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called, it having been the teacher’s intention to make the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst one.2

The fundamental flaw of the ‘‘original’’ Abraham—that he has failed to recognize the multiplicity and diversity of the world—sets into motion a casting and recasting of numerous Abraham figures, transitional figures, before Kafka finally rests upon a new Abraham. The reversals and substitutions he goes on to make with regard to this traditional figure suggest a radical transvaluation of Judaic principles, which is yet undertaken within the confines of the traditional strategy of commentary and exegesis. The Abraham of tradition—the Abraham apparently overthrown in the first moment of the parable— adheres to the ritualistic basis of faith. For this Abraham, belief comes through action, though his belief turns out to be flawed. Kafka’s chosen Abraham—the Abraham he settles on after considering several transitional figures—uses belief to determine action, or, better, his belief, though thoroughly hazy and unreadable, compels action of a certain type. The first transitional figure—‘‘who was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable’’—suffers from a kind of paralysis that inhibits action. Here, the inhibited action is of a very specific type: this Abraham is perfectly functional in the world, perfectly engaged in quotidian existence. His belief system is only partial, however; it is not large enough to provide for a leap of faith that will take him out of the mundane realm. The movement of this section is telling: Kafka breaks away from a commentary on the ‘‘real Abraham’’ (who surfaces again in the next paragraph), creates an alternate version of this ‘‘real2 The ‘‘Abraham’’ parable, presented in The Basic Kafka as a cohesive text, is actually a combination of two separate texts. The first section of the parable is taken from the Notebooks (55). The rest of the parable (beginning with ‘‘I could conceive another Abraham’’) is extracted from a letter written to Robert Klopstock in June 1921 (Collected Works 333).

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ity,’’ then returns to the original paradigm, as though to grant legitimacy to the alternate version. What seems actually to occur is that, in the friction of playing these two Abrahams off each other, they are conflated, the creation merges into the original, and both are found equally suspect. The movement from one to the other is subtle, almost undetectable, so that only the phrase ‘‘this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘He set his house in order’ ’’ announces the shift. ‘‘This Abraham’’ is the result of the friction, the seeming synthesis of original and creation—but, only seemingly, because in fact ‘‘the real Abraham’’ is to be distinguished from ‘‘this’’ one, set apart by his exemplary status (‘‘especially not the real Abraham’’). What of these ‘‘other Abrahams’’ invoked like shades or shadows never brought fully into existence? In their collective haziness, these others embody the principle of multiplicity that the original Abraham overlooks. Their most tangible act—the ‘‘intention that these men did not ready their houses’’—however, is shrouded in suspicion, doubt, even accusation that their deliberate disregard of the call to Mount Moriah finds its justification in the assumption that worship can be divisible from ritual sacrifice. Hypothesis and conditionality force the conclusion of the ‘‘Abraham’’ parable, producing the uncanny sensation that the hypothetical, imagined creation—the ‘‘what if ’’—has not only been brought to life but also become the representative model of value and judgment. The distinction between the Abraham of Kafka’s imagination and the Abraham of tradition is once again made clear—the latter inspiring rage; the former, laughter. In ‘‘this’’ Abraham, fear of failure and, it would seem, self-loathing mingle with his desire to fulfill the command. Significantly, faith and belief are divided from each other, such that ‘‘true faith is not lacking to him, he has this faith; he would make the sacrifice in the right spirit if only he could believe he was the one meant.’’ Here, faith governs action while belief governs intention; it is not that he fails to deliver the act, but that he fails to deliver it in the ‘‘right spirit.’’ Invoking the traditional figure of Abraham, and now shifting the focus of the story from earlier explorations of Abraham’s reaction to the call to the response of the crowd to his being called, Kafka engages Kierkegaard in an implicit dialogue. This dialogue becomes, increasingly, a challenge of Kierkegaard’s conclusions; here Kafka’s conflicted but committed stance on faith and belief hazily begins to take shape.

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‘‘Could it have beheld him at the time,’’ ‘‘the world would have been enraged at’’ the Abraham of tradition. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible provides no account of the world’s response, no indication that rage might be an appropriate response to Abraham’s decision to carry out the command that would require the sacrifice, the murder, of his most beloved son. Kierkegaard does provide for the possibility of this response, in fact for the probability that rage would be the response if Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac had been consummated. However, he ultimately dismisses the validity of this response by opting, rather, for the ‘‘teleological suspension of the ethical.’’ In his dismissal of the crowd as the voice of a lesser code of justice than that which issues from the divine, Kierkegaard forces a chasm between (authentic) individual expression of faith and (inauthentic) conformity of the individual to the human collective. For Kierkegaard, thus, the leap of faith necessitates a leap away from humanity, a refusal of being-inthe-world. The rage of the collective directed at his Abraham stems from a faulty and incomplete perception of truth and justice; the rage, thus, is finally unwarranted. Kafka, rather, imagines the voice of the crowd merging into his Abraham’s internal voice, such that ‘‘he is afraid . . . , above all, of his joining in the laughter.’’ The voice of the crowd is by no means easily discarded, and becomes, on the contrary, an increasingly insistent voice—a voice that very well might perceive reality with clearer eyes than Abraham’s. With the subtlest of shifts, Kafka challenges the central claim of tradition and, likewise, Kierkegaard’s reading of tradition: namely, that Abraham’s resignation to sacrifice his son is a response to an external call, a call directly from God. Perhaps, Kafka suggests, this call was self-imposed, internal? Abraham responds to a voice that at once appears to be coming from the outside—a voice that can be heard by everyone and therefore invites public scrutiny— and a voice from within. This Abraham presumes himself to be summoned and, in the connected guilt and wish tied up in this presumption, imagines himself ‘‘even more unworthy of being really called.’’ Yet, the suspicion that Kafka raises surrounding his ‘‘having come unsummoned’’ might also be read as the undoing, the rejection, of an external call that, while largely misguided in its choice of addressee, in fact did occur. The placement of the exclamation—‘‘An Abraham who should come unsummoned!’’—encourages such ambiguity, such variously plausible interpretations. The exclamation can

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be attributed either to the crowd or to Abraham: an indication of judgment, spoken by the crowd or imagined by Abraham, that concurs with and reinforces Abraham’s feelings of unworthiness. In either case, the judgment appears to be the same: whether Abraham imagines the call or the call is ‘‘real,’’ both he and the crowd conclude that he cannot possibly have been legitimately summoned. The error lies in his hearing, he must have heard wrong—either he imagined erroneously or he misunderstood God’s message. But Abraham misses, as we as readers might miss, a crucial detail, a crucial factor when he gives in to his fear. It is only after he starts out on his journey to Mount Moriah that he is in danger of being regarded a ridiculous madman. In the moments before he commits to this action, the call is private, unwitnessed, and he is forced to make a choice: heed the call and risk looking foolish (although not murderous, Kafka insists) or refuse the call. The call is perhaps private for Kafka, but the response is profoundly public, entirely social. If the narrative that ensues is the description of a thought process born out of Abraham’s refusal, it provides the basis and justification for the paralysis that we imagine must follow his intense self-scrutiny. We can imagine that this Abraham, like Prufrock, fails to act entirely because he has convinced himself of the simultaneous weight and worthlessness of any action he might take. We can just as easily imagine, however, that this narrative continues in the space where Abraham does act, that, despite the consequences he fears will follow from his actions, perhaps because the consequences will validate his own sense of self, Abraham chooses an impossibly difficult task. Both possibilities remain equally uncertain, equally hypothetical, and the narrative suddenly announces its parabolic message, or so it seems: It is as if, at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out laughing. And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called, it having been the teacher’s intention to make the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst one.

In his essay ‘‘Devant la loi,’’ Derrida traces the central motifs of ‘‘Before the Law,’’ namely, law and submission, guard and guardian, to

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Kant’s categorical imperative. This link provides a significant point of reference for our discussion of ‘‘Abraham.’’ The second formulation of the categorical imperative reads: ‘‘Act as if the maxim of your action were by your will to turn into a universal law of nature’’ (Derrida, ‘‘Devant la loi’’ 133). Indeed, in ‘‘Abraham’’ it is precisely this ‘‘as if ’’ (est ist so wie wenn) that announces the parabolic moment, the pedagogical message that the narrative goes on to deliver. The ‘‘as if ’’ performs the function of simile as well as statement of conditionality. As simile, the message acquires distance from its literal expression; Abraham’s predicament is not identical, but only bears resemblance, to that of the student. Yet, in this element of distance, a community of like experience is uncovered—distance, paradoxically, allows for the universal, unifying, message of which Abraham’s condition, only ‘‘as if ’’ that of the student, serves as exemplary. Compassion and solidarity are born here, in the suitably detached description of this Abraham with whom we have moved through so many transitions and substitutions. If Kafka’s Abraham has been assigned the task of providing a universal law by means of his action, what precisely is this action, and what is the universal law that is to follow from it? I’ll venture a possible answer. Abraham acts despite and because he cannot discern the origin of and reason for the call. He confounds internal with external, submission with compulsion, punishment with blessing. He is, above all, humble—but with a humility tempered by the accompanying belief that his life is tied to a mystery and puzzle far greater than he. There is nothing in Abraham’s action that disregards the response of the crowd; on the contrary, their judgment becomes inseparable from his own. Abraham, finally, commits to a task with the full knowledge that it is doomed to ridiculousness; the absurdity of the call by no means frees him—he senses—from the responsibility to carry it out to the best of his ability.

Comedy and Covenant The laughter directed at Kafka’s Abraham—the laughter of the God summoned into dialogue with him, of those who surround him, and of Abraham himself when he inevitably joins in—is the laughter at the center of Kafka’s work. It is manifested sometimes by a desperate

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hilarity, sometimes by a resigned chuckle, but it is laughter nevertheless that resounds throughout the tears. Milan Kundera’s hypothesis in his Testaments Betrayed, that comedy is the predominant mode in Kafka’s work—for which he takes The Castle as his representative model—could not be more right. And yet, it is important to recognize that the humor that fuels Kafka’s work is humor of a specifically Jewish nature, a humor originating in many ways from the absurdity of being bound inextricably by a covenant, the first absurd glimmers of which emerge in the Akedah and culminate in the Book of Job. Walter Benjamin once made this comment to Gershom Scholem: ‘‘I think the key to Kafka is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects of Jewish theology’’ (Alter 21). In making this comment, Benjamin suggests that Kafka can be understood properly only if the Jewish idiosyncrasies of his work are brought to the forefront. This shifting of interpretive priority, this making central of the marginal, serves to broaden rather than reduce the landscape of the Kafkan text. Indeed, comedy is the recuperative space for Kafka, the realm in which action and movement can take place, the space that lays bare that this is our space to recuperate. Alter explains: Kafka’s fiction hovers between two comic possibilities, one theological and the other nihilistic. If the text under scrutiny is in fact divine in origin, there is a scandalous chasm between Addresser and addressee, and the act of reception is necessarily an absurdity, though perhaps a fruitful absurdity, one that may provide vital spiritual substance. If the text is a mere thoughtless scrap of words tossed off by a capricious creature on the same uncertain footing of a worldly transience as the interpreter, all the engines of interpretation will discover no more than an infinite regress of pointless enigmas, or the reductio ad absurdum of the blank page. (79)

Alter associates ‘‘theological’’ possibility with a relationship— grounded in the text—based on inequality and distance. This is perhaps a restating of Levinas’s relationship of height and transcendence. It is only here, Alter suggests, that absurdity might be ‘‘fruitful,’’ that it might yield a productive exchange between ‘‘Addresser and addressee,’’ text and reader, other and self. This ‘‘fruitful absurdity’’ might be that experienced by the Abraham, Moses, and Job of tradition, an absurdity generated by a God who demands the

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pivotal sacrifice of Isaac, who, when asked to define himself, responds only ‘‘I am that I am,’’ who wreaks havoc and suffering in the life of his most righteous servant. In short, this is an absurdity cloaked in a thundering silence, in a vehemently unanswered question. In Kafka’s work, this is an absurdity that is profoundly—though often hesitantly—religious, a ‘‘fruitful’’ absurdity because it sustains a dialogue with a transcendent party. On the other hand, Alter suggests, ‘‘nihilistic’’ possibility assumes equality between two creatures ‘‘on the same uncertain footing of a worldly transience of an interpreter.’’ Does this relationship of equality resemble Buber’s dialogic relation between I and Thou? Alter locates the potentially nihilistic danger of this relationship in the ‘‘thoughtless’’ and, presumably, secular origin of the text; the ‘‘blank page’’ in this case is terrifying in its whiteness, its absence, its pointlessness. For Kafka, however, as we’ve just seen with regard to his retelling of the Akedah, this ‘‘worldly,’’ ‘‘uncertain,’’ ‘‘transient’’ footing is by no means nihilistic. Rather, it is in this space that the ethical begins to take root. The comic potential associated with this space reflects a deep commitment to life, to the here-and-now, to the present moment. Indeed, the comic potential of the ‘‘worldly and transient’’ echoes the Talmudic command to ‘‘Choose life,’’ a command that Kafka expresses in his question: ‘‘how can one be glad about the world except if one takes one’s refuge in it?’’ (Notebooks 23). Just as Kundera finds the most striking evidence of Kafka’s comic potential in the sexually charged scenes between K. and Frieda in The Castle (he cites, for example, the clumsy lovemaking scene behind the bar, amid ‘‘puddles of beer and other rubbish with which the floor was covered’’ [41]), one might argue that it is precisely this visceral, fleshy, earthy desire that is the peculiar mark of Kafka’s reformulated covenant. Josef K.’s greatest moments of intimacy and connection (though we cannot go so far as to say compassion), the moments when he appears most human, are spent with the numerous women he encounters on the long and circuitous path leading, it seems inevitably, to his death. That a fleeting glimpse of a retreating Fra¨ulein Bu ¨rstner is his last sight before his superior detachment condemns him to die ‘‘like a dog’’ suggests that a relationship able to combine love and sexuality might be his only chance of redemption. This Nietzschean undercurrent of Kafka’s comedy, this ‘‘yes-saying’’ strain, is nevertheless accompanied by what seems to be Kafka’s

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nagging doubt—his agreement with Alter—that the theological can be located only in a vertical relation of height and distance. Only the painful submission to the ‘‘scandalous chasm between Addresser and addressee’’ can produce a grounding suitable for ‘‘religious’’ behavior. In this sense, the comic possibility residing in the theological might well be labeled masochistic. We have only to look at Kafka’s Abraham again to see evidence of punishment as wish-fulfillment; that Abraham potentially summons himself into dialogue with a cruel arbiter of ‘‘justice’’ suggests that any relation with a transcendent source—even one generated by self-laceration—is preferable to no relation at all. Though comedy is the prevailing mode in Kafka’s work, this mode is joined always by what seems to be an equally pressing demand for Kafka, a demand also grounded in tradition, namely, to speak, to bear witness, and in so doing to fulfill the mitzvah of Kiddush HaShem (sanctification of the divine name). ‘‘Choosing life,’’ in this sense, is choosing to sanctify life. Consequently, the comic element is tempered by an element of urgency and desperation. Walter Sokel describes Kafka’s project in this way: ‘‘In a sense, Kafka stands in relation to his writing as Abraham and Isaac combined stand in relation to God. The sacrifice which his divinity (literature) demands of its ‘Abraham,’ Kafka, is his own life’’ (‘‘Between Gnosticism and Jehovah’’ 72). While the existence and nature of the divine in Kafka’s project is entirely questionable, the command associated with this divine remains binding all the same. All that remains is the text that is created in the space of question and command. In this configuration, Kafka offers as a sacrifice the purest form of language that he can to approximate the distance between himself and that of which he speaks. In the same way, then, as Abraham’s (both the Abraham of tradition and Kafka’s Abraham), this sacrifice is made in the shadow of the absurd. The enigmatic imperative that seems to guide this literary ‘‘sacrifice’’—‘‘obey, even if you hear no command’’— requires obedience at the same time as it calls into question the possibility that any ‘‘command’’ has been uttered. And yet, though it does embody a basic absurdity, this imperative may well be Kafka’s reworking of the Shema, the fundamental proclamation of Jewish faith. From the verb lishmoah (to listen, to hear), this proclamation locates belief in a space circumscribed by the relation of call and response. To believe, then, is to hear, to open oneself up to the possi-

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bility of hearing. For Kafka, as we see in regard to his Abraham, to believe is just as powerfully to mishear. The literary ‘‘sacrifice’’ Kafka makes with regard to the imperative above (a way of reading, perhaps, his statement that ‘‘writing is a form of prayer’’[Dearest Father 312]) is also self-sacrifice—he fears he will be destroyed in the process: ‘‘The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me’’ (Diaries 222).

Storytelling and the Lesson of Prometheus Kafka’s artistic vision derives from a method embraced strongly by Jewish tradition—storytelling. For him, only the story captures the dynamic, continuous movement of a people who is reconstituted in the moment of telling, of narrating an event that compels its own telling. He juxtaposes storytelling with painting, a ‘‘fixed’’ mode of representation, explaining that such fixation entirely fails to capture the collective spirit and vitality of Jewish heritage. He tells Janouch, ‘‘In any case, we Jews are not painters. We cannot depict things statically. We see them always in transition, in movement, as change. We are storytellers. A storyteller cannot talk about storytelling. He tells stories or is silent. That is all. His world begins to vibrate within him, or it sinks into silence’’ (Janouch 152). Silence, as we learn from Kafka’s parable ‘‘The Silence of the Sirens,’’ is potentially deadly, far more deadly to Ulysses than the Siren’s song could ever be. Silence depicts the refusal of communication, the obliteration of the other. This parable suggests a moral: once the dialogue is refused, oblivion will surely follow. The imperative for human speech becomes more urgent as questions posed to the divine are met with silence. Guided by the urgency of telling a story that needs to be told, and knowing full well that even infinite tellings will fail to grasp the story in its entirety, Judaism is governed by the constant awareness that speech is crucial to its survival. The act of storytelling is an act filled with compassion and reciprocation. The story can be told only to one who listens, and only to one who has granted permission to its being ever so slightly altered in its retelling. The story reaches across to

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its listeners, establishing a bond and a space for participation in its outcome. Kafka’s aphorisms and parables alike bear the mark of this kind of storytelling. That is, they reflect the dynamic complexity of his world, while refusing to provide clear pedagogical direction. Kafka’s use of the aphorism, in particular, bears a resemblance to Nietzsche’s—in both cases the aphorism is used to emphasize the de-systematization of so-called knowledge, a knowledge more akin to our illusions of certainty and the misguided belief that knowledge can be systematized. Rather than instruct or clarify the subject at hand for a clearly imagined reader, Kafka’s parables and aphorisms reflect only the uncertainty, the vague and ambiguous nature, of the subject that they can only tentatively approach (Sheppard 14). A striking example of Kafka’s use of parable is his ‘‘Prometheus’’: There are four legends concerning Prometheus: According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed. According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself. According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable. (Basic Kafka 152)

Kafka provides here four competing legends concerning this hero. When all is said and done, however, when each version is exhausted, Kafka concludes, not with an affirmation of one legend at the expense of the others, but with an assertion that each legend is equally insufficient in determining the ‘‘truth’’ because ‘‘There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.’’ In this parable, Kafka captures the type of non-mythical mytholo-

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gizing so prevalent in the Kabbalah. A method used to maintain the distance between speech and the ineffable, it describes, rather than explains away, the indescribable workings of an inexplicable world. Scholem writes that, in contrast to the decidedly anti-mythical approach characterizing the rabbinic tradition, the Kabbalah experiences a resurgence of mythical thinking which is at the same time wholly different from classical myth: ‘‘Kabbalistic speculation derives a peculiar note from its endeavor to construct and describe a mythical world by means of a thinking that excluded myth. Here in the realm of mysticism and mystical experience, a new world of myth arose out of the theosophical contemplation of God’s secret life considered as the central religious reality’’ (Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 99). This new type of myth is constructed, therefore, to describe the purely indescribable or, rather, to describe that there is the indescribable. Central to the type of theology that Kafka goes on to propose is the combination of the ‘‘positive’’ element of storytelling—positive in the sense that it contains a direct imperative, to continue to speak—with the ‘‘negative’’ element of Kabbalistic mythologizing—negative in the sense that the void, absence, incomprehensibility becomes the subject of speech.

Modernism, ‘‘Jewish’’ Modernism, and the Problem of Language Many of the paradoxes and irresolvable problems of modernism—the problematized subject, the suspicion of language as an incomplete means to confront reality, the transformative power of art3 —are mirrored in the paradoxes so central to the Jewish theological tradition. The ‘‘Sprachkrise’’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, best captured by Hofmannsthal’s ‘‘Letter of Lord Chandos,’’ is a poignant example of the crossovers between the Kabbalistic and the modern contention that language always misses its mark. Through this short text, Hofmannsthal revived the profundity of the negative, the richness of silence over speech that is so preva3 Lorna Martens highlights these concerns as the most prevalent of modernism, and devotes a chapter of her book Shadow Lines: Austrian Literature from Freud to Kafka to ‘‘the transformative power of art,’’ from which I have taken this phrase.

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lent in the Kabbalah. The urgency and ambivalence associated with the mystic’s dilemma—to bear witness to a source that defies linguistic expression—are manifested on the more secular plane of modernism in the ‘‘vacillation between a radical skepticism about the efficacy of language, and an intoxication with language, a revelry in its expressive, mimetic, and aesthetic possibilities’’ (Alter 61). Though modernism and Judaism share an enormous number of concerns, given the political and historical environment of the late nineteenth-century Jew, there is a divide between these worlds that cannot be overlooked or softened. Jewish separatism, underlined by the emergence of Zionism (both a response to increasing levels of anti-Semitism and an outgrowth of Enlightenment nationalism), runs parallel to European modernism. While the Jewish condition served often as a particular example of the kind of alienation that modernism attributed in general to the human condition, the actual situation of the European Jew was marked by a persecution and marginalization that remained mostly theoretical in secular modernism. Kafka’s brand of modernism, therefore, is constantly informed by his position as a European Jew and, even more crucial, as a Prague Jew for whom all the questions posed by a unique linguistic and cultural predicament were heightened. In their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari outline the linguistic situation of the Prague Jew, explaining that this group of people had four languages at their disposal: Czech, Yiddish, German, and Hebrew. Each one of these languages brought with it a certain set of associations, which they describe, respectively, as ‘‘rural . . . disdain/cultural/fear . . . bureaucratic/referential . . . mythic’’ (25). The only acceptable, ‘‘paper language’’ (Bensmaı¨a xvi) was German—a language dominated by Goethe4 and representative of a culture to which they, as outsiders, did not have ‘‘legitimate’’ access (Alter 29). At the other end of the spectrum lay Hebrew, the ‘‘sacred’’ language, which, with the advent of the first Zionist Congress, was 4 Kafka explains the debt owed to Goethe, not without some bitterness, in his diary: ‘‘Goethe probably retards the development of the German language by the force of his writing. Even though prose style has often traveled away from him in the interim, still, in the end, as at present, it returns to him with strengthened yearning and even adopts obsolete idioms found in Goethe but otherwise without any particular connexion with him, in order to rejoice in the completeness of its unlimited dependence.’’ Diaries 152.

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undergoing its own brand of revolution. For the Jews in Prague, particularly those connected with the emerging Zionist sentiment, the question of whether a sacred language could be adapted to secular concerns was a pressing issue. These historical conditions blended seamlessly with the emphasis on the sanctity of language in Judaism. To be cut off from language is to be, quite literally, cut off from the means of creation. Kafka was well aware of the tension that surfaced from such a destabilization of language. For him, the destabilization within this fourfold set of languages perhaps intensified the instability characterizing the relation to God that I will describe in depth later. In a language-stratified community such as Prague, the search for the pure language (Weissberg 138)5 —the very notion that language itself represents the ‘‘Holy of Holies’’—is both a theological concept and a concept kept alive and palpable through cultural conditions. Kafka, seeking this pure language and at the same time caught in this web of linguistic possibility, chooses a type of language that will overcome the boundaries of each syntax offered to him. He is well aware that the first step in his creative project is to create the language with which he will choose to express himself, because he is fundamentally cut off from those languages most available to him. Finding himself at the crossroads of four essential languages, each with its particular resonance, Kafka begins his over-arching revaluation by transfiguring language to mirror his message of fragmentation and alienation. Without attempting to minimize his own impression that a Jew speaking German is analogous to ‘‘a gypsy [stealing] a German child from its cradle’’ (Letters 289, cited in Deleuze and Guattari 17), Kafka remains sheepish but insistent that his voice be rendered in German. He places his stamp on this ‘‘stolen’’ language, however; his German is clear, sparse, bare, and often reductive, a noticeable departure from the language of his predecessors. According to Scholem, the position of the mystic within any given religious system is both subversive and conservative (Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 7). I suggest that Kafka adopts this position in regard 5 Benjamin discusses this type of language at length in his essay ‘‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Men.’’ His description of this type of language as that which represents the luminous word of God to which we had access before the Fall mirrors, and was greatly influenced by, Kafka’s conceptions of the same. See Handelman, Fragments 20–33 for a more detailed discussion.

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to both theology and literary tradition. In the same way as Kafka operates from within the Judaic tradition in such a way as to gain momentum from it and finally depart from the letter of its law, he nods to his literary precursors, placing himself both within and beyond the terms that they have set. Those precursors with whom he seems to share the greatest affinity were engaged in similar projects and embraced similarly mystical or existential messages—Flaubert, Goethe, Mallarme´, and Kierkegaard, to name a few. The spectrum of experience that he was aiming to encompass was a spectrum by no means first embarked upon by him. Again, he placed himself consciously both within and against the ‘‘tradition,’’ which for him came to signify both the purely Jewish aspects of his culture and the more assimilated, shared tendencies that came to be known as modernism. Because Kafka has transcended the boundaries of tradition—in both his chosen form and his subject matter—he can be aligned with any number of movements, and has been, from Platonic and later Kantian Idealism to Romanticism (Sokel, ‘‘Von der Sprachkrise zu Kafkas Poetik’’ 43–44), Expressionism (Kraft), and, most particularly, Symbolism (Anderson 83) and Existentialism (Ries 31). He has been described, among other things, as a heretic (Jayne 33), an agnostic (Updike xx), a gnostic (Sokel, ‘‘Between Gnosticism and Jehovah’’), an atheist (Franz Heller), and a saint (Brod 132). All and none of these designators apply. Therefore, we cannot say, as Bensmaı¨a does, that Kafka is ‘‘writing against the current and from a linguistic space that is radically heterogeneous with respect to his great predecessors’’ (xiv). We can say, however, that Kafka’s brand of modernism is almost an entirely different matter from that of his predecessors and contemporaries, precisely because it is a uniquely Jewish modernism. Kafka speaks from the margins, from a position of separation and alienation, paradoxically, to show that Jewish theology is deeply embedded in universal concerns. This promotion of a ‘‘universal Judaism’’ is not to suggest, however, that Kafka joined the ranks of ‘‘disbelieving believers,’’ as Pawel would have it, without first having to overcome an immense ambivalence, a sense of shame and bitterness concerning the people for whom he came to speak and with whom, nevertheless, he identified himself. It is arguable, moreover, that Kafka never did ‘‘overcome’’ this ambivalence. While he tries to dissociate himself, pleading no affiliation with these people—‘‘What have I in common with Jews? I

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have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe’’ (Diaries 252)—it is ultimately in the fold of Judaism, with Lo¨wy’s Yiddish Theatre as its most pure and unabashed example, that Kafka finds himself at home. While he was by no means spared from (the now-cliche´d) ‘‘Jewish self-hatred,’’ Kafka never strayed far, in his personal relationships or his guiding convictions, from Judaism. Paradoxically, Kafka’s deep ambivalence serves to strengthen his ties and bonds to a tradition that is already grounded in uncertainty. Brod writes: Perhaps there have been men who have had a deeper, that is to say, a less questioning faith than Kafka’s—perhaps also there have been men with even more biting skepticism—that I don’t know. But what I do know is the unique fact that in Kafka these two contradictory qualities blossomed out into a synthesis of the highest order. One might gather its importance into this sentence: Of all believers he was the freest from illusions, and among all those who see the world as it is, without illusions, he was the most unshakable believer. (176)

Kafka’s skepticism serves his faith, which is grounded in an incessantly questioning stance. In choosing this stance, not only does he participate in the tradition of the Midrashim, but he also aligns the Midrashic tradition with the spirit of the Nietzschean revaluation. The model that he provides suggests that faith is compatible with the loss of illusions. This model is by nature ambivalent, divided as it is by the desire to look for truth precisely where the possibility for truth is shattered. Where the reigning skepticism of modernism rendered any specific religious paradigm insufficient, flawed, and a product of deception, Kafka’s skepticism serves as a bridge to faith. It is in this light—namely, that Kafka’s ‘‘work sets out to affirm a reality that exists, not one that needs to be created all over again’’—that Walter Strauss distinguishes Kafka’s work from mainstream modernism (‘‘Turning Over an Old Leaf ’’ 18). For Kafka, the inapproachable, ‘‘dark area’’ (Martens 11) so palpable in modernism is transformed. He insists that this center is in need of being filled with value, that the notion of judgment must be returned to it. Not only is this dark and silent center regarded as newly capable of a dialogical relation with the self, but in Kafka’s world this center demands such a relation. In transforming the notion of center in this way, Kafka suggests

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that the kind of relation between self and other based on the Nietzschean premise of ‘‘beyond good and evil’’ be substituted by a covenantal relationship—a relationship that is directed by a moral grounding even while this ‘‘grounding’’ is necessarily fragmented and shaky.

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The Revaluative Process: Description, Rejection, and Prescription Ricoeur’s description of Nietzsche’s peculiar atheism, expressed by the death-of-God hypothesis, provides a frame with which we might give shape to Kafka’s emerging theology. In Ricoeur’s formulation, religion serves as a bridge to faith; it is in the space of disbelief, of rejection of specific doctrine and normative principles, that, perhaps, a more open-ended disposition begins to take root. Possibility, as well, is always tied to denial—the ‘‘yes’’ reverberates with the strength and power of the ‘‘no.’’ Temporally speaking, the future is bound to the past—the echo of tradition dwells in the space of new possibility. If we are to view this revaluation as a dialectical process, we might identify the components of the process as (1) a description of a given set of structures that form the basis of what is going to be called into question—identifying the ground of ‘‘being,’’ as it were; (2) a rejection of those principles or structures that prohibit the movement away from a specified perspective—a fundamentally destructive process; and (3) a prescriptive response to the previous rejection—a fundamentally constructive process, rebuilding in the space of ruin. Admittedly, this dialectical model is a bit reductive; Kafka’s project is by no means this neat or systematic, nor is it teleological in the way that this model might suggest. Given, however, that Kafka’s value as a ‘‘theologian’’ can be best located in the productive element of his project—that is, in what he does say concerning how we might live life in a way that is both spiritual and ‘‘healthy’’ (in that this way is in accordance with who we are)—it seems appropriate to use this model as a means of highlighting what Kafka goes on to promote after he has ‘‘cleared the way’’ of obstacles.

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Description: Exposing the ‘‘ground of being’’—Kafka’s assessment of the human condition The Problem of the Individual The place and worth of the individual in Kafka’s world is intensely problematic; the alternating modes of description point to a struggle between the humanistic aims of Kafka’s project and the equally powerful aim of this project to dissolve the ego. On one level, the individual ego is the obstacle to all human affairs, prohibiting the submission of self to other. Indeed, Kafka instructs us to favor the collective ‘‘other’’ over the self: ‘‘In the struggle between yourself and the world,’’ he instructs, ‘‘second the world’’ (Reflections 52). On another level, the self is the building block of the relation, and here Kafka instructs us to use the other to confirm what we already know to be true: ‘‘Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe’’ (Reflections 75). The collective ‘‘other,’’ in this case, becomes a mirror for the self in the purest sense. A brief glance back at the ‘‘Abraham’’ parable reflects the double imperative Kafka gives to us as readers. Kafka’s Abraham uses the laughter of the crowd to confirm his own feelings of foolishness. At the same time, the laughter seems to emerge only after the initial, and private, exchange of call and response. Abraham’s sense of self is in this capacity prior to the self ‘‘given’’ to him by the laughing crowd. However, that he’s afraid that he will join in their laughter suggests that the power of the other is a sizable power—that the other can and does effect change in Abraham’s actions and perceptions. Add to this the mysterious nature of the call itself: in Kafka’s reworking of the story, Abraham becomes a character not only worthy of being called—he is not only passive recipient of the call—but worthy of calling—he is active instigator of the call. The individual self, for Kafka, is likewise caught in the crosshairs of passivity and action— the self both acts and is acted upon in his project. The danger inherent in allowing for a self that has the power to act, that is, the danger that this self will potentially get caught up in its own creative power and, in so doing, become isolated and separated from the collective ‘‘other’’ (the formulation of the self that Kafka again and again strug-

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gles against in Kierkegaard’s retelling of the Akedah), is countered by the voice of the ‘‘other.’’ Whether this ‘‘voice’’ is created or not— whether the Law that persecutes Josef K. is real, whether the God who singles Abraham out to be humiliated, punished, and made an example of is actually a figment of Abraham’s own overactive superego—does not seem to be a relevant question for Kafka. Rather, he focuses more persistently on the necessity to head off the danger that he senses harbors on the periphery of his project, a project that grants creative power, even only potentially, to the self. ‘‘Original’’ Sin and Two Types of Truth It is for the purpose of resisting the character that Kierkegaard’s leap of faith encourages, and the character that Kafka’s self-as-creator veers toward—the individual who renounces the world—that Kafka dwells so heavily and explicitly on the notion of sin. Kafka’s theology derives much of its complexity from an extended analysis and reformulation of the Fall and its significance in human experience (Hoffmann 23). At the same time, his treatment of sin reflects a clear departure from Jewish tradition. Kafka’s depiction of original sin bears great consequence on the possibility for individual action. In a parable entitled ‘‘Paradise,’’ Kafka re-enacts the Fall and describes the nature of the sin responsible for it. Curiously, this sin concerns both positive and negative action—something that we both did and have failed to do. He says, ‘‘we are sinful not only because we have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten from the Tree of Life. The state in which we find ourselves is sinful, irrespective of guilt’’ (Notebooks 37). Insisting on sin as a condition, rather than an act, Kafka comes much closer to Augustine’s formulation of original sin. The Talmud stresses, ‘‘when God created man He created him with two impulses, the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer ha-ra, both the good and [the] evil inclination’’ (Plaut 33). The Mishnah goes further to explain that each inclination represents a mitzvah or an averah, an act that either has upheld the commandments or demonstrates a transgression of the Law. In both traditional interpretations, action, as opposed to condition, is the pivotal concern. For Kafka, rather, sin describes an existential condition, a condition that appears to precede action. Yet, insofar as Kafka attaches our guilt to something that

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we have not yet (noch nicht) done, he has opened up the possibility for agency and, with it, the possibility that this state of sin, ‘‘irrespective of guilt,’’ may be rectified. Here, Kafka has departed from the Christian view of original sin as well, aligning this proactive stance with the same motivation he will later use to create a ‘‘commandment.’’ In essence, Kafka conflates the Judaic code of action with the Christian sense of condition, leaving neither view intact. In a circuitous manner, Kafka, having explored a notion so foreign to Judaic thinking, returns to an interpretation of the Fall event that is similar to the view promoted in the Talmud: namely, that humans have the potential for both good and evil. It is precisely this dual capacity that bears the mark of being human. That Kafka has chosen to emphasize the Tree of Life as a condition of our sinfulness has powerful implications in terms of the existential thrust of his project. Again, this choice of emphasis cloaks his brand of existentialism in the garments of tradition. For instance, the Tree of Life represents the written Torah in the Zohar (Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 46). According to the Zohar, we have been cut off from this Torah as a result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge; metaphorically, we have chosen the oral Torah over the written, the Torah that will always only be ‘‘the hard shell of the Torah, indispensable in a world governed by the powers of evil’’ (Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 68). The oral Torah results from the Fall—in this ‘‘fallen’’ state, we are condemned to the eternal search for the absolute through language that we initially refused. At the same time, and we will see this again in a more pronounced way in Jabe`s’s work, the commentary that the oral Torah enforces is itself the mark of human freedom. It is both blessing and curse, then, that we have lost access to the written word. We have, in essence, fallen into a material world, and this has barred our entrance into a spiritual world. Kafka maintains an ambivalent stance before this materiality, at times encouraging us to ‘‘take refuge in it,’’ at other times manifesting an almost gnostic disdain for the material world as the distortion of the ‘‘truth’’ (he tells us, for instance, ‘‘there is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution’’ [Notebooks 29]). ‘‘Truth’’ is further complicated in Kafka’s project:

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For us there exist two kinds of truth, as they are represented by the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. The truth of the active principle and the truth of the static principle. In the first, Good separates itself off from Evil; the second is nothing but Good itself, knowing neither of Good nor of Evil. The first truth is given to us really, the second only intuitively. That is what is so sad to see. The cheerful thing is that the first truth pertains to the fleeting moment, the second to eternity; and that, too, is why the first truth fades out in the light of the second. (Notebooks 43)

The tension between the active and the static principles of ‘‘truth’’ is central to Kafka’s emerging theological project. The second type of truth renders value judgments impossible. The given tendency, however, the first type of truth ‘‘given to us really,’’ leans toward division and separation, toward a code that admits of transgression and, thus, of Evil. Curiously, Kafka has reversed the traditional claims of the account of creation in Genesis—here, separation applies to a given condition that is subsumed by the unifying tendency of the second type of truth, a truth, nevertheless, given its own measure of primacy because it is attached to Life and reigns over eternity. The blurring over of the first type of truth serves as a warning that looms over Kafka’s theological project: we need to return to a way of thinking that does allow for division and value judgments; at the same time we need to honor Life, we need to allow for the possibility that categories of ‘‘knowledge’’ perhaps are valuable only because of the way in which they order and organize the present moment. Such categories have no hold over eternity, however. Kafka’s ‘‘warning’’ points to the juggling act between transcendence and immanence, between the normative and the descriptive elements, that characterizes his theology. The balance between these ‘‘truths’’ is precarious, but crucial, for a project that aims at establishing a code of ethics grounded in movement. The Zohar also explains that the Tree of Life, being absolute, ‘‘was bestowed upon a world in which Revelation and Redemption coincided’’ (Scholem, Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 68). Because we have lost access to this source, this is no longer the case. Revelation, rather, becomes a continuous, unfulfilled process, spurred on by exegesis, and redemption is no longer an option. Kafka suggests that it is only in the writing of continuous revelation that revelation comes to serve a dynamic purpose. He explains: ‘‘When I say something, it immediately and finally loses its importance. When I write it down

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it loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one’’ (Diaries 223). The commitment to writing, then, become almost pathological obsession for Kafka, is on some level spurred on by the wish for redemption of the lost totality which the Tree of Life represents. Writing, Kafka acknowledges here, is a preservative measure, whereas speech serves only the moment that is always already ‘‘lost.’’ At the same time, the act of writing guards this lost totality, insulates it further from capture; in this sense it is creative as well as redemptive. That ‘‘sin’’ should be the catalyst for this redemptive act that is yet positioned toward the future suggests that, for Kafka, transgression is the necessary reinforcement of boundaries and division, without which a covenant would not be possible. We are again reminded of Abraham. Kafka’s further reflections on the nature of sin help to illuminate the highly paradoxical condition of existence in his world—namely, that condition in which we are ‘‘sinful, irrespective of sin or guilt.’’ He says, ‘‘There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience, they do not return’’ (Notebooks 15). Given that humanity occupies a condition of sin, independent of sinful action, one in which it seemingly ‘‘finds itself ’’ (in dem wir uns befinden), how, then, can sin be so clearly attached to such behavioral defects as impatience and indolence? Regardless of how we may have ‘‘found ourselves’’ to be in this situation, regardless of the actions we took to bring on the Fall, Kafka suggests that mere contemplation of the irreducibly lost past will not have relevance unless it is aligned to action in the here-andnow. In reducing all sin to one major sin, impatience, Kafka implies that action without a reflection of consequence is not to be a feasible substitute for passivity, either. The reduction of sin to impatience, rather, would seem to suggest that Kafka’s project aims toward the future—that the future is always the standard by which the past and present must be gauged. Kafka argues, as he does similarly in his overarching rejection of saving devices, that to look on sin as a passive condition over which we have no control (though the control he gives us is admittedly slight) is to have given up the struggle that is life itself. In language that recalls the predicament of Camus’s Sisyphus (whose ‘‘predica-

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ment,’’ we are told, is the result of transgression as well), Kafka champions the attempt that is doomed to failure: ‘‘If you were walking across a plain, had an honest intention of walking on, and kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you must not despair’’ (Notebooks 21). It is the nature of the journey that regression is inevitable. In the same way as Camus argues, ‘‘we must imagine Sisyphus happy’’ at the end of another day filled with apparent futility, Kafka’s injunction ‘‘and you must not despair’’ locates hope in seeming failure. That he tells us, ‘‘We have not yet eaten from the Tree of Life’’ provides hope as it emphasizes the fact that the task that may provide the means for redemption is, nevertheless, an unfinished task. Indeed, Kafka tells us, the task at hand is endless, but it is life itself: ‘‘The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite’’ (Notebooks 36). It is the resilience to pick oneself up from the inevitable fall that becomes heroic for Kafka (Rees ix). He challenges himself ‘‘to accept the greatest decline as something familiar and so still remain elastic in it’’ (Diaries 200). Championing ‘‘elasticity,’’ flexibility, as the proper disposition with which to greet failure, Kafka provides us with a prescriptive method that retains a decided lack of systematic content. Waiting and Exile The original sin, as depicted by Kafka to represent two seemingly contradictory behaviors—impatience and indolence—exemplifies the paradoxical and impossible existential condition. On the one hand, it is the condition in which humanity finds itself, and it bears superficial resemblance to Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrown-ness). On the other hand, it is no place at all; it is a state representative of nostalgia for a time-before, a state that aches to recapture a nondirected dynamism (a state, Kafka argues elsewhere, as with his discussion of the two types of truth, that is not the original condition) lost in a world where linearity and teleology have taken hold (Kienlechner 54). For having lost this world, we now occupy a condition of waiting and exile. Exile links us to the past, waiting binds us to the future. Both poles require a particular set of behaviors, and both

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reinforce the sinful expressions that make escape from this condition impossible: out of indolence we cling to the lost past, out of impatience we look toward the Messiah who will alleviate suffering. Both behaviors are flawed, because they fail to recognize the present moment as the space for productivity and movement, the place wherein past and future are joined. Perhaps the greatest of paradoxes concerning Kafka’s individual rests in the fact that the individual must grasp hold of this present moment in order to pave the way for the collective. But, by grasping hold of a present that is not meant to be caught, the individual asserts his power in an ultimately destructive way. Ironically, it is only by sustaining the condition of waiting and exile that the individual can finally serve the collective. In this sustained condition of postponed movement, action takes on a decidedly incomplete face. That is, action, in the context of a suspended present moment, always misses its mark. Kafka seems to suggest that, in order to be cleansed of sinfulness, this suspended present moment should align itself with neither impatience nor indolence. Indolence should be avoided by taking refuge in movement. And yet, movement toward what goal? Impatience should be curbed by profound faith that the means to return will eventually be revealed. And yet, they are not revealed. Again and again we see characters holding fast to the wait that is never rewarded, because the one for whom they wait never arrives. However, this refused arrival is not a function of a lack of trying on the part of either the one who waits or the one who is expected to arrive. Take, for example, ‘‘An Imperial Message:’’ The Emperor, or so they say, has sent you—his single most contemptible subject, the miniscule shadow that has fled the farthest distance from the imperial sun—only to you has the Emperor sent a message from his deathbed. He has had the messenger kneel beside his bed and he has whispered the message to him; so important was this message that he has made him repeat it in his ear. He has confirmed the accuracy of the words with a nod of his head. And then, before all the spectators assembled to witness this death—the free-standing, vaulted staircases, all the dignitaries of the empire were gathered in a circle— before them all, he has dispatched the messenger. The messenger sets off at once, a strong and tireless man; sometimes thrusting ahead with one arm, sometimes with the other, he beats a path through the crowd;

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where he meets resistance, he points to the sign of the sun on his breast, and he forges ahead with an ease that could be matched by no other. But the throng is so thick, there’s no end to their dwellings. If only there were an open field before him, how fast he would fly; soon you would surely hear the glorious rapping of his knock on your door. But instead, how vain his efforts are; he is still only forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; he will never reach the end of them, and even if he did he’d be no closer; he would have to fight his way down the steps, and even if he did he’d be no closer; he would still have to cross the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second, outer palace, and still more stairs and courtyards, and still another palace, and so on for thousands of years, and even if he did finally burst through the outermost gate—but that could never, ever happen—the empire’s capital, the center of the world, flooded with the dregs of humanity, would still lie before him. There is no one who could force his way through here, least of all with a message from a dead man.—But you sit at your window and dream it up as evening falls. (Complete Stories 4)

Here, the obstacles are simply too great to be overcome, but the promise that awaits, should they be overcome, is immense: ‘‘. . . and even if he did finally burst through the outermost gate—but that could never, ever happen—the empire’s capital, the center of the world, flooded with the dregs of humanity, would still lie before him. There is no one who could force his way through here, least of all with a message from a dead man.’’ The messenger himself is engaged in a task comparable to the writer’s task—Kafka’s task (Fickert 27): to deliver, to communicate, the profoundly incommunicable. A nearly dead man calls upon the messenger, in a tone so hushed that only he can hear, to deliver a message that is apparently undeliverable. In this sense, the message is guarded; the source from which it derives remains inviolate (Karl 32). Kafka is clear to emphasize that it is not lack of desire on the part of the addressed one—the one who sits patiently and awaits the promised message (‘‘But you sit at your window and dream it up as evening falls’’)—that keeps the message from being delivered. On the contrary, it appears as though desire itself thwarts the arrival of the knowledge-bearing message. We want this message too badly. We are not content with standing before the Law but desperately desire access into it. And while we wait and wait for the access that

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will never be granted, we lose precious time and life—we refuse, out of indolence, Kafka tells us, to eat from the Tree of Life. And yet, impatience is given a more fundamentally sinful status. To wait or not to wait for this message? In other words, does the quality of the wait bear any significance? Should we be waiting in any particular fashion? While Kafka begs us to find a condition free of impatience and indolence, he veers perilously close to nihilism. He asks, ‘‘Why is it meaningless to ask questions? To complain means to put a question and wait for the answer. But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered. No distance divides the interrogator from the one who answers him. There is no distance to overcome. Hence meaningless to ask and wait’’ (Diaries 343). The nature of faith espoused by Kafka implores us to occupy and sustain indefinitely, enduring and accepting, a condition of silence never alleviated by an answer. Though ‘‘meaningless to ask and wait,’’ this is precisely what Kafka asks of his readers, at times recommending a passive reception of a forthcoming world—‘‘There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can’t do otherwise, in raptures it will writhe before you’’ (Notebooks 54). Kafka suggests that the moment of exile, like revelation, is perpetual: ‘‘Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in the world unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may be there permanently, no matter whether we know it or not’’ (Notebooks 31). The reference to the eternal repetition (die ewige Wiederholung) of our exile echoes the eternal return, the test of the demon, outlined in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (section 341) and further emphasizes the existential imperative demanded by this condition: to live in such a way that one can affirm life in all its complexity; to be able to say ‘‘yes’’ to the demon’s question. In making the condition of exile perpetual, and in aligning this condition with the possibility that we may perpetually reside in Paradise, Kafka suggests that the very act that has ‘‘condemned’’ us is also the act that will save us.

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At the same time, Kafka also aligns ‘‘redemption’’ with suffering: ‘‘Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive’’ (Notebooks 42). Furthermore, suffering must occur in a collective sense, and perhaps it is this collectivity that alleviates personal judgment—that is to say, we are all being judged in a similar fashion for similar misdeeds. In demonstrating this principle, Kafka draws upon Christ as a model of suffering: We too must suffer all the suffering around us. Christ suffered for mankind, but mankind must suffer for Christ. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit. (Notebooks 49)

Significant to this suffering, both collective and individual, is that ‘‘there is no room for justice in this context.’’ Suffering, rather, has been stripped in Kafka’s project of any redemptive or normative value—there is no teleological component to suffering; it simply is the condition of being human. For the projects of Celan and Jabe`s, Kafka’s view of suffering as a given, providing no possibility for justice or fear or ‘‘the interpretation of suffering as a merit,’’ is foundational. Stripped of these possibilities, the immense suffering of the Holocaust that Celan’s poetry confronts and the agonizing pain of exile out of which Jabe`s’s Book of Questions emerges will not be justified or explained away. The Wayless Way In an article entitled ‘‘The Garments of the Torah: Staying Before the Law in Kafka’s Doorkeeper Legend,’’ Mark Anderson explores the condition of waiting and its relation to the ‘‘path’’ that prevails in Kafka’s work: ‘‘According to Kabbalistic teaching (as explained by Scholem) there is a single path . . . ‘auf welchem jene einzelne Seele die Tora erfaßt.’ According to this tradition, however, only in the

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Messianic Age will the individual soul grasp the Torah in this fashion. Kafka’s text would then reflect the condition of exile and waiting that precludes the Messianic union of individual soul, Jewish law, and God’’ (86). Kafka’s comments concerning ‘‘the way’’ would suggest that he is familiar with this Kabbalistic teaching, but hesitant and profoundly ambivalent about accepting it in its entirety. He provides contradictory accounts of the ‘‘way,’’ arguing at times that there exists only one path, and at others that there are infinite paths. He speaks of a ‘‘true way,’’ finding it ‘‘along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along’’ (Notebooks 13). Though this way appears precarious, and will indeed cause us periodic stumbling, he suggests here that it does exist. It is singular, linear, goal oriented, and situated, if not precisely, in close proximity to the ground, the earth, the here-and-now. He explains in another breath, ‘‘there is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation’’ (Notebooks 23). We are left peering endlessly toward some future goal, without a decisive means to attain it. The response to this predicament, it would seem, varies in Kafka’s estimation: the freedom to choose a way is the mark of human freedom; and it can bring with it exhilaration in light of the vast possibilities, the sense of embarking on uncharted territory, or it can breed despair and inertia. Kafka responds to this range of possibility—a challenge that he raises to the level of the aesthetic—alternately, sensing that each possible reaction carries within it the seed of the other. At another point, Kafka examines the chaos in which these possible paths, and he himself, reside. Endless possibility can breed fear as well, and it is a fear that he has felt acutely (Jayne 24): ‘‘The truly terrible paths between freedom and slavery cross each other with no guide to the way ahead and are accompanied by an immediate obliterating of those paths already traversed. There are a countless number of such paths, or only one, it cannot be determined, for there is no vantage ground from which to observe. There am I. I cannot leave’’ (Diaries 249). Because we are not presented with the option of transcending our condition in order to gain perspective on it— ‘‘there is no vantage ground from which to observe’’—we remain caught in the mass of possibility itself. We must learn to navigate our

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way through an endless mire of forking paths, none of which leads to a clearly delineated goal. How then, to choose? In his parable ‘‘The Destination,’’ Kafka provides an example of the confusion inherent in seeking this nebulous path: I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call. I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: ‘‘Where are you riding to, master?’’ ‘‘I don’t know,’’ I said, ‘‘only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.’’ ‘‘And so you know your destination?’’ he asked. ‘‘Yes,’’ I answered, ‘‘didn’t I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination.’’ ‘‘You have no provisions with you,’’ he said. ‘‘I need none,’’ I said, ‘‘the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’’ (Basic Kafka 185)

Everything about this destination is described in the negative, with the exception of the final line—a positive assertion that the journey ‘‘is truly immense.’’ In the context of this parable, miscomprehension is the prime mover for individual action—‘‘The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse, and mounted.’’ Yet, a call is heard—there is, in other words, an external force to which this individual must submit—‘‘In the distance I heard a bugle call.’’ This call remains in need of personal interpretation; it cannot be shared with anyone—‘‘He knew nothing and had heard nothing.’’ In addition, the call carries knowledge of only a negative quality, that is, it demands only that the listener move, not to any designated area, but ‘‘away from here.’’ This hazy non-place, in turn, becomes a specified destination—‘‘Away-From-Here, that is my destination.’’ The necessity to get ‘‘Weg-von-hier’’ seems to carry within it its own lack of fulfillment, and, paradoxically, this lack is viewed as a stroke of luck: ‘‘the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’’ The good fortune lies precisely in the vastness of the journey. There is no mention of the misfortune should he ‘‘die of hunger along the way.’’ ‘‘Weg-von-hier’’ begs a connection to Baudelaire’s ‘‘Anywhere out of the world.’’ And yet, this would appear to be a false connection, or

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only a superficial one at best. Baudelaire’s ‘‘escape’’ is possible only if the world can be left behind. The urgency of the escape—when the poet’s ‘‘soul’’ finally ‘‘explodes’’ with an almost hysterical ‘‘anywhere, anywhere, so long as it is out of this world’’—suggests the inevitable futility of escape. Transcendence, in this poem, seems impossible; no horizontal jump—so long as it is in this world—will allow the poet to fare any better. We might imagine, however, that, given Kafka’s constant implorings that we affirm life, the sense of his ‘‘Weg-von-Hier’’ is different from Baudelaire’s seeming condemnation of the world. We might imagine, for instance, that, as it is for Baudelaire, the vertical path has been cut off for Kafka, but that, unlike Baudelaire’s, the trajectory of ‘‘escape’’ continues—is propelled—along the horizontal path. If this is the case, it is only in the belief—wish-fulfillment or not—that this world has been imbued with the spark of the divine that a horizontal movement brings with it the promise of hope (Sokel, ‘‘Between Gnosticism and Jehovah’’ 76). The ‘‘truly immense journey’’ never leaves the realm of the earthly, though a transcendent realm (at least in the sense that the bugle sounds from elsewhere) seems to inspire this journey. Kafka tells us that we are doubly separated from this realm, as this realm is from us: ‘‘We are separated from God on two sides: The Fall separates us from him, the Tree of Life separates him from us’’ (Notebooks 37). It is precisely this condition of separation, division, and rupture— what Kafka views as the human condition—that forms the basis of the kind of covenantal relationship that Kafka promotes. The echo of the transcendent forces engagement, movement—often restless, always without teleological intent or closure—on the level of immanence. It is in the reciprocation between these realms, felt most palpably in separation, in division, that the covenant is most precariously sustained for Kafka. Part of the difficulty of communication and the frustration that accompanies this difficulty, then, is the apparent intimacy, encompassed and permitted by the covenant, that will finally not allow for comprehension. Though a particular type of relationship (in the case of ‘‘The Destination’’ we have a master/servant relation) would seem to dictate specified roles, and, with them, comprehension of the other party in the relation, this is not the case. The relationship itself does nothing to clarify the ambiguity of the situation; though connected by the relation, each party is still left fundamentally alone in the attempt to decipher the command placed upon

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both. In addition, it is through the ambiguity of the command that solidarity is eventually forged. In Kafka’s formulation, ‘‘hier’’ can be only transversed, not transcended, by the ‘‘Weg-von-hier.’’ The question/answer formulation of the dialogue between master and servant in this parable suggests the type of communication that must be forged on this horizontal plane, once the means for vertical communication is seemingly removed (Kienlechner 55). Though the servant cannot understand the exact significance of the journey that his master is about to embark upon, this in no way hinders him from demonstrating concerns about his master’s welfare. Communication, in this light, coincides with Kafka’s understanding of revelation—that is, the content remains unknown, but the process itself is strictly enforced. In the same way that ‘‘there is a goal, but no way,’’ the perpetual movement described in ‘‘The Destination’’ is more indicative of the fact that process is to be valued over product. That is to say that productivity lies precisely in engaging in a thwarted dialogue, a dialogue that reaches out to horizons other than those that inscribe the moment of dialogue. The goal to be reached, likewise, transcends the boundaries of space. The goal is existential; it involves finding the metaphorical space ‘‘away from here’’ that provides new possibilities. Again, this ‘‘space,’’ which is really a non-place, is described only in terms of its negativity, and only in relation to something positive (that is, tangible): the ‘‘here’’ away from which the master is ‘‘always’’ riding. ‘‘Here’’ becomes, in this formulation, a marker of identity rather than location; where there is individual ego, there is always the need for flight. ‘‘Freedom,’’ the Law, and the Double-Bind of the Covenant Freedom, for Kafka, describes a condition of literal and figurative ambivalence, of being bound by and torn between two often-conflicting paths: He is a free and secure citizen of this earth, for he is attached to a chain that is long enough to make all areas of the earth accessible to him, and yet only so long that nothing can pull him over the edges of the earth. At the same time, however, he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven, for he is also attached to a similarly calculated heavenly chain. Thus if he wants to get down to earth, he is choked by the heavenly collar and chain; if he wants to get into heaven, he is choked

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by the earthly one. And in spite of this he has all the possibilities, and feels that it is so; indeed, he even refuses to attribute the whole thing to a mistake in the original chaining. (Reflections 66).

The double intention of the term ‘‘secure’’ (gesicherter) in the phrase ‘‘free and secure’’—meaning secured to, used in the German to suggest a passive and dependent state, also implies being secured within the parameters of a given environment (the German avoids the word sicher, which would imply an active state of security, of being certain)—further clarifies our condition. The ‘‘chain’’ that binds us at once to ‘‘heaven’’ and to ‘‘earth’’ allows for (but also limits us to) all ‘‘earthly’’ possibilities (‘‘only so long that nothing can pull him over the edges of the earth’’); at the same time, this ‘‘free and secure citizen of heaven’’ has provisional but binding access to a spiritual realm. Linking freedom to ‘‘security,’’ Kafka’s notion of ‘‘freedom in chains’’ implies that our possibilities are in fact limited by a protective mechanism that manifests itself in a punitive and visceral way (the chain chokes us). Walter Sokel argues that this double ‘‘chaining’’ reflects the nature of the covenant in Judaism. The covenant compels a relationship to a source that is both immanent and transcendent—it responds, in other words, to the split nature of God. He explains: The paradox within the God of Genesis lies in His double nature. He is a God of immanence, creator and ruler of the universe. But He is also a God of transcendence, who stands outside His world, unrecognized by it, an unknown God to all except a select few of His creatures. He is a stranger to the world that He Himself has made. He re-enters this world only by making the covenant with a special individual, Abraham. (‘‘Between Gnosticism and Jehovah’’ 70)

Significantly, there is no choice presented by Kafka’s chaining or Sokel’s ‘‘double-bind.’’ That is, this covenant does not provide one with the option to choose which aspect of the divine to uphold, to bind oneself to. Rather, it demands a paradoxical positioning, a positioning that requires letting go of the logical proposition of non-contradiction (the ‘‘either/or’’) and embraces instead a logic of mutual inclusion (the ‘‘both/and’’). This shift in logical priority will have powerful consequences for Kafka’s emerging theology, a theology that might be best approached by means of Benjamin’s description of Kafka’s project as ‘‘Ein Sieg u ¨ber Kierkegaards Paradox’’ (a victory over

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Kierkegaard’s paradox) (Goetschel 86). In any case, metaphorically, the simultaneous bond to a source of transcendence and immanence describes an existential condition that involves both faith in an absolute and affirmation of the here-and-now. Scholem describes this condition as representative of the most basic tension in Judaism, the tension, namely, between purity and living reality. The balance between these two factors, he suggests, ‘‘has always been precarious’’ (Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 89). For Kafka, this tension is central to his notion of freedom, and it is no less ‘‘precarious’’ in his project. Indeed, Kafka’s ‘‘freedom in chains’’ implies an irreconcilable set of imperatives: to uphold an absolute (Kafka tells us, in this light, that he can achieve ‘‘happiness, only if [he] can raise the world to the level of the true, the pure, the immutable’’ [Diaries 387]) and to live life, to experience life as a dynamic process that has been stripped of any ‘‘goal.’’ Kafka complicates the notion of freedom further: ‘‘Your will is free means: it was free when it wanted the desert, it is free since it can choose the path that leads to crossing the desert, it is free since it can choose the pace, but it is also unfree since you must go through the desert, unfree since every path in labyrinthine manner touches every foot of the desert’s surface’’ (Notebooks 49). According to this account, freedom exists in choice and desire, lack of freedom exists in compulsion. But freedom and the lack of freedom coincide almost imperceptibly here—‘‘going through the desert’’ is a compelled action (‘‘you must go through’’) that may be mediated by the choices that are made throughout the journey and by the adaptation of desire to this compulsion (the decision to look at the journey as something that one wanted in the first place). As ‘‘Before the Law’’ famously illustrates, in Kafka’s system freedom is always conditional and relative to the Law, to the source of compulsion. Indeed, Kafka tells us, we are at the mercy of these impenetrable laws, but we derive our only happiness from them: ‘‘Free command of the world at the expense of its laws. Imposition of the law. Happiness in obeying the law’’ (Diaries 396). Perhaps most relevant to our discussion of freedom is the exchange between the priest and K. that takes place after the priest recites the parable. This exchange, as well, models Kafka’s hermeneutic strategy, highlighted by the priest’s injunction that follows and seemingly interprets the parable, namely, ‘‘it is not necessary to accept everything

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as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’’ K. responds with anxiety and fear to the multiplicity of meaning that can arise from exegesis: ‘‘a melancholy conclusion. It turns lying into a universal principle’’ (Basic Kafka 181). Yet it is precisely in the ‘‘danger’’ that a lie may be interpreted as truth that freedom emerges in Kafka’s project. Compulsion—necessity—endures even if truth does not. If freedom lies in being bound to the Law, then our doorkeeper is the freer of the two. This possibility is explored by the priest, who suggests, ‘‘bound as he is by service, even at the door of the Law, he is incomparably freer than anyone at large in the world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeper is already attached to it. It is the Law that has placed him at his post; to doubt his integrity is to doubt the Law itself ’’ (Basic Kafka 181). Equally conceivable, however, is the possibility that the man from the country is freer than the doorkeeper, a possibility that the priest also concedes: ‘‘The man from the country is really free, he can go where he likes, it is only the Law that is closed to him, and access to the Law is forbidden him only by one individual, the doorkeeper. When he sits down on the stool by the side of the door and stays there for the rest of his life, he does it of his own free will; in the story there is no mention of any compulsion’’ (Basic Kafka 179). His ‘‘freedom’’ had led him to a kind of imprisonment all the same. Though he is not ‘‘compelled’’ to remain (that is, no external force makes this demand of him), compulsion nevertheless becomes the self-imposed condition of his long and futile wait. He believes himself compelled—just as Abraham believes himself to be summoned—and this is sufficient to bind him to the Law.

Rejection of ‘‘Saving’’ Devices The Deus ex machina Kafka’s deliberate ‘‘construction’’ of God—best exemplified in the ‘‘Abraham’’ parable, where God becomes a speaking, acting God only after Abraham summons himself into dialogue—is simultaneous with his systematic debunking of traditional conceptions of God, conceptions that he seems to suggest will never lead logically to ethical behavior. Perhaps the most notable example of this debunking tendency is Kafka’s rejection of Pascal’s deus ex machina. Kafka explains:

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Pascal arranges everything very tidily before God makes his appearance, but there must be a deeper, uneasier skepticism than that of a man cutting himself to bits with—indeed—wonderful knives, but still, with the calm of a butcher. Whence this calm? This confidence with which the knife is wielded? Is God a theatrical triumphal chariot that (granted the toil and despair of the stagehands) is hauled onto the stage from afar by ropes? (Diaries 376)

While doubt is for Kafka the fundamental condition for faith, as it is for Pascal, doubt cannot be simplified or rectified by claiming even partial knowledge of the nature of God. Kafka invokes Pascal here as a way of relating how ‘‘usually the one whom you are seeking lives next door.’’ This phenomenon, Kafka continues, ‘‘is not easy to explain, you must simply accept it as fact.’’ A self-evident fact that eludes explanation: ‘‘It is so deeply founded that there is nothing you can do about it, even if you should make an effort to. The reason is that you know nothing of this neighbor you are looking for. That is, you know neither that you are looking for him nor that he lives next door, in which case he very certainly lives next door’’ (Diaries 376). There is nothing of the nature of this neighbor that we can come to know, save that he is right in front of us, in the closest proximity to us. Any type of artificial construction, any conscious manipulation concerning the whys and whereabouts of this neighbor, are futile. In the same way, Kafka suggests, we may concoct various faces for God, forcing him into the role of the Deus ex machina who appears, graciously, to rescue us from the troubles we have gotten ourselves into. Christ may have been one such ploy, Kafka tells us, one such grand gesture designed to alleviate the burden of suffering, and to instill calm where anxiety should rightly be. Kafka tells Janouch: ‘‘Christ? He is an abyss filled with light. One must close one’s eyes in order not to fall into it’’ (Janouch 166). The lack of ethical stringency behind the wish for these types of figures—those who will alleviate our suffering—is rejected consistently by Kafka. For Kafka, doubt is an integral force, and should be used to guide one to a leap of faith. The object of faith is left problematic, is summoned through faith because it is problematic. More so, the object of faith is fundamentally inexplicable—belief is a solitary enterprise, able to be shared with others only as a particular type of experience, the true contents of which will never be known. Kafka suggests: ‘‘Whoever has faith cannot define it, and whoever has none can only

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give a definition which lies under the shadow of grace withheld. The man of faith cannot speak and the man of no faith ought not to speak’’ (Janouch 165). In this formulation of faith, Kafka emphasizes the incapacity of language to relate experience. Conversely, language here is associated with hypocrisy, with a lapse, perhaps, of humility—‘‘the man without faith ought not to speak.’’ Language here serves only to cloud the uncharacterizable truth of experience. Sprechen, to speak, is identified as precisely that action in which the faithful cannot engage. Silence comes to render more closely the essence of the divine– human encounter. The Negligible Messiah As crucial as Kafka’s transformation of the Abraham legend is to understanding the creation of the speaking God, so is his reconfiguration of the Messiah to determining the importance of the individual in this system. For Kafka, the condition of waiting and exile becomes perpetual—it is no longer a temporary state and can no longer be relieved by the coming of the Messiah. In discounting the importance of the Messiah as a redemptive figure, Kafka rejects one of the most basic aims of Hasidism, namely, to hasten the coming of the Messiah. Waiting and exile, as perpetual, are connected to the continuous nature of revelation; in this perpetual space, revelation continuously unfolds and discloses the negative nature of God. Emphasizing the non-relievability of this space as the basis for the human condition, Kafka effectively makes the Messiah’s coming irrelevant. Kafka suggests, rather, that we should embrace the condition of waiting without regard for the fulfillment of this condition: ‘‘The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all’’ (Notebooks 29). Only when we have renounced the Messiah’s importance to our salvation—only when we have taken the utmost responsibility for our actions and accepted them as unredeemable—will he peek over the horizon. And, at that point, we will no longer need him. Just as God’s arbitrariness necessitates a human code of ‘‘justice,’’ the Messiah’s not coming encourages the kind of behavior that would prove the world’s readiness for its coming. In this way, the notion of a Messiah seems to be something of an afterthought in Kafka’s

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configuration. In other words, the coming of the Messiah only reflects the fact that humanity has become ready for its coming; the Messiah is the symptom of salvation, not its cause. In this sense, one might ¨ berdraw a connection between Kafka’s Messiah and Nietzsche’s U mensch. The importance of both these figures in each project lies in the fact that they reflect the achievement of a kind of world that is ready for them—they are merely the crowning achievement, without which the goal will still have been met. Making the Messiah negligible to human affairs, Kafka stresses the importance of action divorced from the divine. And in this light we see perhaps Kafka’s most puzzling explanation of the Messiah’s coming: ‘‘The Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism is possible in faith—as soon as nobody destroys this possibility and nobody tolerates that destruction, that is when the graves will open’’ (Notebooks 27). Though individualism stems from a misconception that we are alone in the world, that the self is the measure of all things, it is only individualism that will set us free. Faith is a collective condition—the way in which it is upheld, however, has to be entirely personal, untouched by dogma or systematized theology. The paths to faith are innumerable, and upon each the individual embarks unguided. At the same time, ‘‘unbridled individualism’’ speaks almost as apocalyptic warning—the consequence of the reign of the ego, should we feed into the misconception that we are alone. In this sense, the Messiah, like the God prodded into humiliating Abraham, is also a punishing force. Unbridled individualism chronicles the slide into solipsism; if this rejection of the collective is the only means of ‘‘causing the graves to open,’’ perhaps the coming of the Messiah is the most horrific symbol of the triumph of the isolated ego. As if to warn, ‘‘be careful what you wish for,’’ ‘‘salvation’’ here speaks more of the closing off of possibility, the retreat of dialogue into monologue. And yet, ‘‘unbridled individualism’’ is joined significantly to faith. In the same way as Kafka will go on to create a commandment founded on human weakness, here the power of the individual is tempered by faith, the individual is shackled by its submission to the other. Strength, that is, comes through weakness. Kafka seems to suggest, regardless of where the way lies, if a way is offered to us, that it is only in this fearsome mass of possibility that we may even find entrance to it. There will be no external bearer of relief to this situation in which we find ourselves. Relief comes only

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through suffering, and no Messiah can deprive us of this rite of passage. ‘‘The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary . . .’’—deemed unnecessary, the Messiah has no jurisdiction here; even more so, in Kafka’s project the Messiah is at once a figure concocted out of a fundamental negation of this world and a symbol of our reluctance to let go of the ego. At the same time, it is also a symbol of deferred satisfaction of desire, and, in this way serves a paradoxically healthy function in Kafka’s project—the Messiah’s not coming ensures the perpetual striving toward its coming. The absent Messiah facilitates the Faustian (Goethe’s Faust, that is) rejection of closure and passivity that is so central to Kafka’s project. Worthiness, therefore, has nothing to do with redemption; moreover, Kafka intimates that to be worthy may mean precisely to suffer perpetually without hope of redemption—to suffer in spite of redemption that may never come. By aligning faith to suffering in this way, specifically by connecting belief to the Messiah’s not coming, Kafka has carved open a place for faith that is defined entirely in the negative. In doing so, he constructs a space for authors like Celan and Jabe`s, who are writing in the shadow of the Holocaust. How can faith be maintained in the face of silence, these authors ask? Because God remained silent. Because God did not become personal, therefore limited, and because suffering remained the path to human dignity. Each of the charges against the speaking God of the covenant becomes evidence for the possibility of a God who precedes the covenant. And this God, ultimately, is the only one that can be trusted.

Kafka’s ‘‘Prescription’’: Filling the Void Creating a Commandment Though he rejects all saving devices, Kafka clearly views his artistic task in a quasi-prophetic manner. Using human weakness as his starting point, so as ‘‘not to have missed anything,’’ Kafka launches into his own revaluation of values—from the void, he seeks to create a commandment: It is not inertia, ill will, awkwardness—even if there is something of all this in it, because ‘‘vermin is born of the void’’—that cause me to fail, or not even to get near failings: family, life, friendship, marriage,

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profession, literature. It is not that, but the lack of ground underfoot, of air, of the commandment. It is my task to create these, not in order that I may then, as it were, catch up with what I have missed, but in order that I shall have missed nothing, for the task is as good as any other. It is indeed the most primal task of all, or at least the reflection of that task, just as one may, on climbing to heights where the air is thin, suddenly step into the light of the far-distant sun. And this is no exceptional task, either; it is sure to have been set often before. . . . I have brought nothing with me that life requires . . . but only the human weakness. With this—in this respect it is gigantic strength—I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were a right to represent. (Notebooks 51–52)

Crucial to our understanding of this formulation of a ‘‘commandment,’’ of Kafka’s replacement of the ground beneath our feet, is that it is entirely deliberate, strategic, and necessary. At the same time as it is deliberate, it is founded upon weakness, failure, impotence, and, if we are to read into the statement ‘‘vermin is born of the void’’ the echo of a statement that Kafka makes elsewhere regarding the Jews of Prague (‘‘Isn’t the natural thing to leave the place where one is hated so much?—For this, Zionism or national feeling is not needed. The heroism that consists of staying on in spite of all is that of cockroaches which also can’t be exterminated from the bathroom’’ [Letters 208]), a healthy degree of self-loathing. The cornerstone of a new commandment—a new covenant—is precisely this failure and tendency to self-deprecation. The new ‘‘humanism,’’ which Nietzsche’s revaluation makes possible, paradoxically locates human dignity in the deepest recesses of human incapacity. And yet, this new commandment is wed to ‘‘the most primal task of all,’’ presumably, the task to make meaning, to order chaos, to seek the eternal absolute in ‘‘the light of the far-distant sun.’’ Arming himself only, and abundantly, with human weakness, Kafka depicts himself as the representative voice of his time—a voice attempting desperately to fashion something positive out of the negative. Indeed, as he sees it, so-called ‘‘positive’’ doctrines (which he rejects for their presumptions of closure), previously powerful, are now diminishing: ‘‘I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity—admittedly now slack and failing—as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl—now flying

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away from us—as the Zionists have’’ (Notebooks 52). As he chronicles the passing of these systems, Kafka betrays both nostalgia and relief; the nurturing ‘‘hand’’ and ‘‘hem’’ are now quickly fading relics of an era that is opening itself up to the power of the negative. Kafka suggests that the ‘‘doctrine’’ (though his of necessity must be an anti-doctrine) that he will go on to create is one that breaks from tradition, one that signifies that he himself is either an end or a beginning—‘‘Ich bin Ende oder Anfang.’’ After Kafka, that is, theology must be regarded in an entirely new way. Theology comes to embrace the ‘‘death of God’’ as a necessary moment in the evolution of belief. At the same time, he describes his project as an ‘‘assault on the last earthly frontier’’ (Diaries 399), claiming that he is writing what might have turned out to become a ‘‘new, secret, doctrine, a Kabbalah,’’ ‘‘if Zionism had not intervened.’’ He further clarifies that this ‘‘assault’’ is ‘‘launched from below, from mankind’’; such an assault is a ‘‘metaphor,’’ Kafka claims, for a pursuit that ‘‘originates in the midst of men’’ at the same time as it ‘‘carries one in a direction away from them.’’ This all-too-human project of value-construction stakes its claim on the supra-human, daring it to become a viable measure for human affairs, however deliberate its construction might be. Creating a Speaking God/Consequences of a Speaking God (Abraham reprise) In many ways, Kafka’s conception of God is most clearly reflective of the negative theology traditionally represented by thinkers such as Maimonides, Meister Eckhart, and Spinoza (Goetschel 85). In this framework, the knowledge that it is possible to glean of God is always knowledge of a negative nature, knowledge that God embodies all things indescribable, inexpressible, ungraspable through language. The only type of knowledge that can be ‘‘trusted’’ of this God is that which is gathered by direct, intuitive contemplation and connection with the divine. This knowledge is necessarily non-verbal—it has to be, because language already represents disconnection, distance, from the object of which it speaks. The mystical union with the divine, however, aims for the union that existed before the Fall into language. Kafka’s notion of sin suggests that the separation brought on by language necessarily imposes a separation within conscious-

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ness, and with it the knowledge of the Fall that keeps humans mired within their sinful state. Something like the Husserlian thesis that consciousness is always consciousness of something, always aiming outside the self and implying division, is at work in Kafka’s notions of language and sin. At the same time, however, this conception of God jars against the imperative to speak in Kafka’s project. How can a silent God, a God wholly absent from human affairs, command speech? We might look again at the Abraham parable as Kafka’s attempt to negotiate this paradox. In this parable, God chooses humiliation as his mode of correction. Punishment, it seems, is the only possible way of responding to Abraham’s transgression. And it is the nature of his transgression that seems to be so crucial in determining the face of a God that will be able to command speech. Because Abraham has transgressed through speech itself, the dialogue that he pursues with God is precisely that for which he is condemned. He summons himself into direct conversation with God; on the basis of the covenant described in the Hebrew Bible this would seem to be entirely legitimate. And yet, it is for this failure to ‘‘correctly’’ interpret the stipulations of the covenant that he is punished. What are these stipulations Kafka constructs that read so differently from traditional theology? In some sense, these stipulations seem to embrace a God that has a dual nature (a nature that, we will soon see, comes together in the ‘‘indestructible element’’). That is, the figure of God maintains at once its separate and unified nature. Once God is summoned into dialogue with Abraham, the bond between human and divine is established. But, to the degree that God’s response seems not to follow from the logic of the covenant—that is, that Abraham’s summoning God is an expression of devotion to God and, therefore, should not be punished—God is further and further divided from the human world. Nevertheless, though God remains divided, Abraham is forced to unify his subjective nature with the more important collective sphere. And he is forced—compelled—to do so, because God’s actions are incomprehensible. Though God remains fundamentally problematic—neither wholly personal nor impersonal, but somehow a subjective reflection of the wish for a personal God that becomes powerful the moment that he is created—there is yet a commandment associated with him. Kafka’s ‘‘new Kabbalah’’ would have us seek the silent revelation, the revelation of nothingness at the heart

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of the divine, and yet not rest content with this. He seems to stipulate that we must draw God into a conversation, set the terms of the dialogue (and therefore create the illusion of a personal God), then submit to God as though He initiated contact. That Abraham can now summon himself into dialogue with the divine suggests his stature before the call. Abraham, more than a creature worthy of being called, becomes in Kafka’s view, a creature worthy of calling. He is such a creature by virtue of his being human. Perhaps more ethical, indeed more productive than a divine that eludes form and shape is the human capacity to endow the divine with such form—to create a God engaged in dialogue with humanity. Dialogue grows from existential, human concerns—a silent God cannot serve as an ethical model. To create from nothingness a God that speaks and commands speech—this is the primary ethical act. Therefore, it is crucial for Kafka to depict an Abraham who summons himself, so that he may create the God who responds to this selfsummoning and demands further speech. It is this covenant—one directed not from God to Abraham, but reaching from Abraham to God—that circumscribes the realm of ethics for Kafka. And it is this covenant that will become more and more urgent to uphold as God’s voice becomes ever fainter during the Holocaust. This crucial turn hinges upon giving Abraham agency, in allowing him to conjure God out of the whirlwind, just as Job does. So, while the God that Abraham binds himself to is a God who appears to be ‘‘capriciously unjust,’’ and suspends Abraham in a state of ‘‘punitive terror’’ (Goebel 78), he is yet a God whose power has been given to him by humanity. The ramifications of creating a speaking God are potentially, often inevitably, self-destructive in Kafka’s world. The God of judgment and punishment, given life by a humanity starved for a divinely ethical figure, turns on his creators. Has this God been given free reign, or was his revolt expected in the first moments of creation, to which the question must be posed: Why create a God that promotes human suffering? On one level, the punitive nature of God would seem to be an internalization of guilt—guilt for having usurped God’s power of language, for having seized the secret of creation, for having made God negligible. Kafka promotes a radical theology—a system in which God is separated from his commandment and, thus, from the realm of ethics. In this way, Kafka continues in the line of the Kabbalists, giving, through language, inordinate power to humanity to cre-

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ate and, with this power, inordinate responsibility. Can it be that Kafka’s God inflicts punishment, because Kafka senses that the deliberate creation of a commandment is a transgression of the highest order? Indeed, in this theology God is made all-powerful only after he has been made negligible. The simultaneity of divine power and impotence—echoed by the simultaneity of human power and impotence—is a prevailing motif in Kafka’s fiction. Gregor’s metamorphosis, for instance, thoroughly blurs the question of fate versus agency. Is his metamorphosis reflective of a punishment? Or is this, perhaps, the most creative means open to Gregor through which he might opt out of his life? If he does have agency, is this initial moment of creative non-engagement the impetus for a punishment—his death—that follows? Similarly, does Josef K. call his own guilt upon himself ? Or, does he become more and more guilty only after having been labeled—chosen?—as guilty (‘‘without having done anything wrong’’) by an external force? Does he submit to his sentence, or is he the author of his own execution? The ‘‘worlds’’ engaged in dialogue in Kafka’s fiction—internal, external, human, and perhaps divine—collide then separate, only to collide again—a perpetual dance of volition and submission. Take, for instance, ‘‘The Judgment.’’ When Georg’s father sentences Georg to death by drowning, we see such a collision of worlds. If we are to read Georg’s father as a God-figure, he is then acting in accordance with the creation method employed in Genesis 1. He creates, brings into being, by language alone—‘‘I sentence you now to death by drowning.’’ The mere utterance is sufficient to make the sentence real. Creation, in this sense, is connected inextricably to Georg’s destruction. If the father is to be seen as God, then the locus of power resides in him alone. As such, he does not need to reveal the logic or illogic of his sentence. The logic is his alone, to be understood by him alone, and Georg can only fall further into error if he attempts to decipher his father’s intentions. If, however, Georg bestows upon his father his power to destroy—and there is much evidence to suggest that he does (for instance, he must voluntarily cross the threshold into his father’s room)—the locus of power finds its origin in Georg. Georg, then, is partaking in the creation of his own sentence. His obedience to the words of his father, his unquestioned acceptance of the sentence suggests not a blind acceptance of a logic that he cannot understand, but a perceptiveness concerning the working

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of the system that will eventually destroy him. Worlds intertwine, and partial knowledge is countered by faith and ultimately death. Partial knowledge creates a rift between human and divine that will become irreparable. Georg helps to create the world to which he submits. Paradoxically, the unity between these two worlds becomes the condition for the chasm that will separate them. Unity is substituted by distance, height, and separation. What may have begun as a relationship on equal footing—Buber’s dialogic relation—gives way to Levinas’s unequal relation. Power is granted to the ‘‘other,’’ and to this ‘‘other’’ the self willingly submits. Kafka pores endlessly over the ethical implications of both types of relation. The mystical void that exists before the rupture of the Fall is a source without distinction, without division, and, therefore, without ethics. The God who occupies this space is a pre-ethical Godhead, a God that lacks self-awareness. Logically speaking, arbitrariness can be discovered only in a system of order, a system that includes distinction and division. It is the dedication that Kafka feels to this God that allows him to create a system that has ‘‘no room for justice.’’ At the same time, however, Kafka rails against a law that would promote the arbitrary, saying: ‘‘But the law cannot merely be imposed upon the world, and then everything left to go on as before except that the new lawgiver be free to do as he pleases. Such would not be law, but arbitrariness, revolt against law, self-defeat’’ (Diaries 397). The ‘‘cannot’’ here is Kafka’s ultimate plea for judgment and justice—as if to say ‘‘we cannot allow this kind of system.’’ Again, the urgency behind this plea stems from the assumption that there is an inextricable connection between the systems we create and the type of action that these systems promote. At the same time, by forcing an equation between arbitrariness and self-defeat, Kafka suggests that there is something in our nature that not only craves order, but also locates self-preservation in order. The nature of the self, in other words, tends toward Levinas’s unequal relation between self and other—to submit to the other is to preserve the self. Curiously, Kafka’s rejection of the arbitrary, his favoring of the relation grounded in distance rather than equality, coincides with what seems to be a desire (always thwarted) to hold any God-figure—created or otherwise—accountable for its actions. Consequently, there are numerous anthropomorphized God-figures (figures that might be taken for ‘‘God’’ or are somehow connected to

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this ‘‘God’’) in Kafka’s fiction, such as the old Commandant prophesied to return to the penal colony, or Georg Bendemann’s father, or the henchmen of the ‘‘Law’’ in The Trial, or Klamm’s coterie in The Castle. Kafka forces these figures to become personal, even if they remain altogether mysterious. In making these figures personal, he gives them consciousness; in giving them consciousness, he opens up the possibility that they can be held responsible for their actions and judgments. And yet, accountability is never ultimately achieved for these figures. In other words, they are never held responsible or asked to answer for their actions; rather, their becoming personal necessitates a greater degree of punishment for their ‘‘subjects.’’ Kafka’s theological strategy here is markedly different from Celan’s and Jabe`s’s. For Celan and Jabe`s, a necessary preliminary stage in the revaluative process is not only to make God accountable, but also to indict this God for his actions. Only after holding a personal God responsible for an apparently egregious breach in a covenant based on speech and action can Celan and Jabe`s go on to create (or give sanction to) an impersonal, silent God. For Celan and Jabe`s, a God that can speak, that can act in human affairs, must be found guilty of not having spoken, not having acted. At the same time, though indictment is a necessary phase of their revaluation, it is also a necessarily temporary phase in a project that focuses more persistently on human responsibility. For Kafka, accountability and judgment remain persistent categories in human affairs (he tells us: ‘‘my sole concern is the human tribunal, which I wish to deceive, moreover, though without practicing any real deception’’ [Diaries 387]); however, it is the speaking, personal God (created by necessity) that enforces these categories. For Kafka, the speaking God is never entirely ousted by the silent, impersonal God—indeed, this God is deliberately constructed as a necessary illusion. Kafka cannot reconcile an impersonal God with the ethical imperative to which he so strongly subscribes, because speech is ultimately the marker of transgression—what marks transgression, rather—in his theological project. Kafka’s Abraham, for instance, is called to the front of the room, humiliated by speech, and it is this moment of humiliation that paradoxically allows for the possibility that the ‘‘call’’ has external reality. Punishment is, naturally, evidence of judgment, even if the ‘‘justice’’ of the punishment remains questionable. At the same time, in giving the figure of God a

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voice that is capable of judgment, Kafka exposes what might be a transgression of a higher order: in essence, this God-figure has been forced to conform to human standards, to submit to self-definition, to become narrow and limited, to represent order. The guilt, it seems, stemming from this transgression, is enormous, and Kafka in effect punishes humanity for the audacity of wishing for and dreaming up a God of justice. At the same time, this same guilt is the source of an almost voluptuous pleasure, a pleasure connected to creating a system so binding and intimate that punishment is the mark of the deepest connection. Witness, for example, the revelatory moment that the officer in the penal colony imagines his prisoners experience when the excruciating pain of the law inscribed upon their flesh gives way to sublime pleasure, the pleasure of knowledge, just at the point of death. But the moment of merger never comes—true ‘‘knowledge’’ of the crime on the part of the prisoner is really only the officer’s fantasy; as the graphic breakdown of the Harrow suggests, all that remains is pain, distance, and separation from this moment of truth that never really comes. Wish-fulfillment, the fantasy of intimacy, the wish for knowledge in fact make the punishment far more graphic. Destroy Yourself! (In order to make of yourself what you are) Though punishment is often the measure of intimacy in Kafka’s project, the desire for self-destruction in this context is presented as a primarily selfish wish. Paradoxically, the death-wish is also the first inkling of individual expression, the first moment of consciousness that we are separated from, even as we are joined to, all of humanity. Kafka explains, ‘‘one of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: ‘This man is not to be locked up again. He is to come with me’ ’’ (Notebooks 21). The wish to be saved, the wish to be alone in this world, the wish to possess an ‘‘I,’’ are all bound up with a fundamental misconception of the world: that the individual exists unimpeded by its surrounding environment. On the contrary, Kafka suggests, suffering is not to be relieved, and we

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cannot escape the responsibility that we have toward the other simply by invoking death. How to combat this selfish wish? How to act out against the ‘‘I’’ that asserts itself in a purely destructive manner? Quite simply, Kafka suggests, by recognizing the underlying unity that exists between humanity—on both an existential and a spiritual level. Recognizing this requires, above all else, humility: ‘‘Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving’’ (Notebooks 50). Prayer, then, is the means by which the natural wish of the individual to assert itself comes together with the humility that binds one person to another. This relationship is a fundamentally dialogical one. As the Messiah is an illusion dreamed up to soften the responsibility of the individual, and at the same time becomes the punishment for having wished so desperately for an autonomous ego, so too the ‘‘I’’ is constructed to lessen the pain of the world, but also serves as an obstacle to fully participating in the world, if believed in too strongly. The ‘‘I’’ is a necessary construction, without which, Kafka suggests, we would never come to recognize the human bond made unbreakable through prayer. He reminds us: ‘‘We are all fighting a battle. . . . I cannot fight . . . all my own; if for once I believe I am independent, if for once I see nobody around me, it soon turns out that as a consequence of the general constellation, which is not immediately, or even not at all intelligible to me, I have had to take my post over. . . . [Humiliation] of vanity? Yes, but it is also a necessary encouragement and one in accordance with the truth’’ (Notebooks 13). At the same time as the ‘‘I’’ is a necessary construction, this ‘‘illusion’’ also speaks of the truth. In Kafka’s formulation, both the individual and the collective have some measure of truth and some measure of illusion—and both must be ‘‘bought into’’ to a certain extent, so that the productive relationship between the two can be established. To be solitary is a fiction, then, but it is a fiction that can lead

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one back to the community at large, and in this sense, there is a reconstructive power in isolation. The collective, in this sense, provides an alternative to permanent exile. Here again Kafka reverses the position toward the world that Kierkegaard takes. Kierkegaard stresses renunciation of the world in favor of a direct, one-to-one relationship with God. This kind of relationship cannot be found in conjunction with the world, Kierkegaard believes, because the world will not permit the ‘‘teleological suspension of the ethical’’ that is required for the leap of faith. The view toward the collective in this system necessitates a profound misanthropism. Kafka, on the contrary, believes that, ‘‘Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer’’ (Notebooks 31). Renunciation of the world is possible in Kafka’s system, but only as an extension of a deep connection with the collective. But, again, as the individual is ultimately the means by which this solidarity can occur, its destruction must be guarded against at the same time as it is provisionally encouraged. In a reworking of the famous Socratic imperative, ‘‘know thyself,’’ Kafka clarifies precisely what type of destruction must take place—destruction, namely, as a bridge to creation: ‘‘ ‘Know thyself ’ does not mean ‘Observe thyself.’ ‘Observe thyself ’ is what the Serpent says. It means: ‘Make yourself master of your actions.’ But you are so already, you are the master of your actions. So that saying means: ‘Misjudge yourself! Destroy yourself!’ which is something evil—and only if one bends down very far indeed does one also hear the good in it, which is: ‘In order to make of yourself what you are’ ’’ (Notebooks 20). The final line of this aphorism recalls Nietzsche’s enigmatic statement: ‘‘What does your conscience say?—‘You shall become the person you are’ ’’ (Gay Science 270). In both Kafka’s and Nietzsche’s formulations, to ‘‘become who one is’’ is to partake of the profoundest act of conscience, to turn ‘‘evil’’ into good, to ‘‘hear’’ the voice that coaxes self-authentication. Kafka builds on Nietzsche’s call of conscience by positioning the call simultaneously external to and within the self. Significantly, the kind of ‘‘knowledge’’ that Kafka’s imperative above calls for is specifically flawed knowledge; ‘‘misjudgment’’ is the condition for the necessary destruction of the ego in a system in which the collective takes priority over the individual (though the

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‘‘call’’ is situated between self and collective, Kafka instructs us that action must favor the collective—‘‘in struggles between yourself and the world, second the world’’). Misjudgment, it would seem, also involves a movement away from the potentially debilitating delusion that one can be ‘‘master of one’s actions.’’ In this sense, misjudgment represents a higher order of understanding than self-control does. And yet, Kafka thoroughly blurs the issue here, suggesting that we can have self-mastery (‘‘but you are so already’’); in this sense, misjudgment represents moving past the given of self-mastery to take on a greater challenge, namely, self-loss. The ‘‘true’’ self—‘‘what you are’’—lies on the other side of this loss; its attainment is tied to giving up one’s ‘‘judgment,’’ letting go of what one thinks one knows. Just as Abraham’s mishearing opens up the possibility for dialogue with an external party, so misjudgment allows for a self that can be defined through the collective. The Indestructible Kafka’s construction of the speaking God coincides with his description of what he calls the indestructible—what appears to be the first principle at work in his ontology. His formulations of the indestructible resemble his reconfiguration of the story of Abraham, and ultimately determine the ethical thrust of Kafka’s system. So central to Kafka’s system is the notion of the indestructible, in fact, that Hoffmann names the ‘‘archimedean point’’ (18) of Kafka’s work this aphorism: ‘‘Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god’’ (Notebooks 29). Just as belief in a self that is ‘‘master’’ over its actions is a barrier to finding the ‘‘true’’ self, so belief in a personal God prohibits understanding of the indestructible element. One misplaces one’s trust into a limited fiction and, in so doing, misses out on what might be the element that transfigures the ‘‘real’’ in such a way as to join internal with external. The above aphorism is central to the type of ethical and existential imperative that Kafka goes on to describe in his reduction of belief to being: ‘‘Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately,

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being indestructible, or, more accurately, being’’ (Notebooks 27). The reduction of belief to the ground of being (‘‘Glauben heißt . . . sein’’) is an ontological reduction that becomes an ethical, and fundamentally existential, imperative: to be. In being, one cannot help but believe— belief, that is, is so firmly embedded in human action that it is entirely indistinguishable from existence itself. Existence, consequently, is for Kafka a primarily religious condition. The strategy of seeming reduction that Kafka employs in this aphorism is similar both structurally and thematically to his reformulation of Abraham. The incessant paring down of belief, signaled here by the phrase ‘‘oder richtiger’’ (or, more accurately), echoes the transitional method with which Kafka approaches the figure of Abraham. In both cases, Kafka betrays a wish for precision, for ‘‘accuracy,’’ but ‘‘accuracy’’ is relative to the revaluative process in which Kafka is engaged. In other words, by means of transition, Kafka’s Abraham becomes an appropriate model for his emerging theology; by means of reduction, belief is wed to being, and Kafka’s existential project becomes theological.1 In both his formulations of the indestructible, Kafka throws the possibility of an entirely transcendent God—that is, a God wholly separate from human affairs—into question. Rather, it appears that Kafka conceives of the indestructible as the embodiment of both transcendent and immanent aspects of the divine. Hoffmann describes how these aspects can coexist in Kafka’s system by linking the above aphorisms concerning the indestructible with another aphorism that Kafka wrote the same day, namely, ‘‘In German the word ‘sein’ stands for both the verb to be and for the possessive pronoun his’’ (Notebooks 28). Kafka offers no explanation for this etymological connection, but the silence following Kafka’s discovery is profound and coaxes interrogation. An accident of language may be responsible for a devastating error of perception, namely, that personal possession is inextricably joined with existence. Yet, Kafka tells us elsewhere, ‘‘there is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation’’ (Notebooks 25). Possession is the illusion by which we simultaneously comfort and imprison ourselves. And possession has infected belief, confusing a state of being (some1 See Hawkins, ‘‘ ‘Oder richtiger’’ for a more thorough development of the connections between the ‘‘Abraham’’ parable and the aphorism. Portions of the above discussion are extracted from this article.

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thing one can be) with something one can have, consequently turning the focus of belief to tangible, material rewards such as salvation or redemption. From this strange accident of language, it seems to follow that that which objectively is can have its subjective counterpart in the individual reflection of the real. This explains, perhaps, another aphorism in which Kafka describes the indestructible: ‘‘The indestructible is one; it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings’’ (Notebooks 33). Though the internal and external are irrevocably linked by virtue of the indestructible, it would seem that the individual representation of the same is given precedence over the objective—‘‘From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true’’ (Notebooks 16). The impetus to truth must come first from within—systematizing, theorizing are futile attempts to fix the unfixable, that which always eludes capture. Yet, Kafka also suggests that the indestructible, while apparently generated from within the self, is not to serve as a source of isolation from others. The indestructible, then, as in the cases of Kafka’s constructed God-figure, the reconfigured self, and the Law, is positioned within the hermeneutic circle. The lines between inside and outside are necessarily blurred because the point of origin is left, finally, unaccounted for. In this sense, if the indestructible is to be joined with these other constructions, the hermeneutic exchange between internal and external has surprising and critical consequences: the moral sphere becomes moral, in Kafka’s estimation, precisely because it resides at the point of contact between the internal and the external. The Trial provides a striking example of this clash of boundaries (Robertson 107). Josef K.’s death at the hands of the Law—‘‘like a dog’’—can be read as a visceral and violent internalization of the call (just as, in the penal colony, the judgment is literally inscribed on the flesh). K.’s self-perception finally meets and merges with the perceptions of those around him; he comes to view himself as others view him, as ‘‘guilty.’’ While the moral sphere must be internalized in Kafka’s vision, and while the call must be viscerally felt, internalization also necessitates death. The clash of boundaries is also a col-

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lapse of the boundaries that are necessary for the dialectic of call and response to continue. Alarm Trumpets of the Void: The ‘‘ethical’’ aesthetic This ‘‘moral’’ sphere is in the domain of the aesthetic for Kafka; the final ‘‘triumph’’ over Kierkegaard’s paradox for Kafka is his conviction that the aesthetic has to become the vehicle for the ethical. An important component of an ethical aesthetic is its linguistic insufficiency, its incapacity to capture, by means of language, the entirety of the various strands of relation—between self and other, human and ‘‘divine,’’ etc.—that it nevertheless sets out to bear witness to. The ethical aesthetic, in many ways like the notion of a negligible Messiah, functions for Kafka as a means of sustaining a stance of striving toward; this aesthetic does not permit of satisfaction, culmination, or closure of any kind.2 In this way, the ethical aesthetic promotes a stance that is primarily, and profoundly, other-oriented, outward reaching; aiming toward an indescribable and hazy external, this stance recognizes all the same that the barest modicum of description and illumination of this ‘‘other’’ depends upon the individual artist, upon artistic self-expression. The artist, in this way, is called upon to breathe life into the other at the same time as the life-of-the-other tugs and prods at the artist, forcing its weight, demanding to be heard. Adorno developed his conception of art from Kafka, suggesting that the purpose of art, like philosophy, is to say what cannot be said (‘‘um zu sagen, was sie nicht sagen kann’’) (Goetschel 87). This ‘‘purpose,’’ then, embodies and embraces failure; such an aesthetic gains power and strength precisely because it chooses as its object something that cannot be caught. Kafka explains: ‘‘Art flies around the truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before’’ (Notebooks 39). Curiously, this type of aesthetic is guided by the instinct of self-preservation—‘‘with the definite intention of not 2 In a series of conversations concerning Kafka between Scholem and Benjamin, Scholem argues that incompletion is the key into Kafka’s art and the only way that his ‘‘theology’’ can be understood (Schwopenhau ¨ser 75).

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getting burnt.’’ Only if the self is preserved in the encounter can art serve its function of revealing glimmers of a truth that remains mostly cloaked in shadows. The strategy for such self-preservation would seem to be circumspection, speaking around; dancing safely on the periphery, such art pierces through the dark void. What does this ‘‘dark void’’ consist of ? Kafka suggests that it is a misunderstanding to think of this void as ‘‘empty.’’ As he attempts to explain the nature of the void, he again invokes the death-wish, suggesting that full participation in this space of void necessitates death, necessitates the loss of self, which is already a kind of deception: ‘‘To die would mean nothing else than to surrender nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing, but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility’’ (Diaries 243). ‘‘Surrendering nothing to the nothing’’ is a conscious impossibility; perhaps because the very assertion of consciousness is an assertion of self, is an assertion that the self is separate from the other. This assertion of self, impossible to avoid because we are conscious creatures, hinders us from recognizing that incomprehensibility does not necessarily mean emptiness. We do not have to be able to understand something in order for it to be; indeed, our very need to understand might prohibit such being from revealing itself to us. Kafka suggests that we do possess this understanding intuitively, but that we undermine our very understanding by wishing to control and master intuition: ‘‘Knowledge we have,’’ Kafka stresses. ‘‘Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it’’ (Notebooks 39). In order not to ‘‘strive against’’ such knowledge (Erkenntnis)—which might represent the knowledge of Good and Evil (Wilkins 104), from ‘‘Baume der Erkenntnis’’—we have to, paradoxically, eradicate division by erasing consciousness; we have to stop trying so hard even though (and perhaps because) the nature of existence, Kafka explains, is one of constant striving. Art—the ‘‘ethical aesthetic’’—facilitates this precarious and increasingly odd positioning by allowing us, as Kafka suggests, to ‘‘be the truth’’ even if we can’t ‘‘see’’ the truth: ‘‘Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else. Not everyone can see the truth, but he

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can be it’’ (Notebooks 31). Part and parcel of ‘‘being the truth’’ is to participate in truth’s retreat—to insulate the truth from capture. Such a ‘‘retreat’’ echoes strongly the Lurianic principle of tzimtzum—God’s creation by means of self-withdrawal. At the same time, granting power to absence, courting a profound nothingness that refuses to be penetrated by language, Kafka directs his ‘‘art’’ to the en sof, the ‘‘without end,’’ depicted in earlier Kabbalistic teachings as the ultimate manifestation of the divine. Scholem describes the paradox of presence within absence that the mystical divine embodies: If there were a breach, a nothing, in the earliest beginning, it could only be in the very essence of God. And this is the very conclusion at which the Jewish mystics arrived, while retaining the old formula. That chaos that had been eliminated in the theology of the creation out of nothing reappeared in a new form. This nothing had always been present in God, it was not outside Him, and not called forth by Him. It is this abyss within God, coexisting with His infinite fullness, that was overcome in the Creation, and the Kabbalistic doctrine of the God who dwells in the depths of nothingness, current since the thirteenth century, expresses this feeling in an image which is all the more remarkable in that it is developed from so abstract a concept (Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 102).

As Kafka sets about finding a type of art, an aesthetic, that ‘‘dazzles us’’ with the truth, he conflates the assumptions and principles of negative theology, specifically Kabbalah, with the model of a speaking God-as-necessary-construct. The void, voiceless and non-causal, calls for a bearing witness; such a bearing witness, we have seen, coincides with the punitive mark of intimacy. Speech and silence form the poles—at once separate and related—of the ethical aesthetic. The ‘‘abyss,’’ the nothing, is ‘‘the very essence of God’’ in Kafka’s formulation. At the same time, this nothing, given voice out of necessity, commands an endless task: to find a language compatible with the abyss. Kafka suggests that language, being an outgrowth of the flawed world of the senses (here, again, he espouses a protoGnosticism as an integral component of his theological project), is by nature insufficient, by nature elusive. Just as Kafka’s ‘‘commandment’’ grows out of human weakness, and, thus, weakness proves to be a strength, the very insufficiency of language allows, paradoxically, for the specific type of language that will provide for our ‘‘being the truth,’’ even if it never enables us to ‘‘see the truth.’’

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Kafka writes, ‘‘For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relation’’ (Notebooks 30). This description is steeped in negation. Yet, if we were to extract the phrases that Kafka uses (even as negative properties) to describe language, this is what we uncover: allusively, approximately, comparative, corresponding, phenomenal world, property, relation. Given that Kafka tells us elsewhere, ‘‘it is in this negation that it takes on form’’ (Notebooks 54), we might be able to tease out a positive description of language from all of this. A language compatible with the void (that is God) is a language that seeks relation, correspondence, and approximation, rather than appropriation or identity. As well, it is a language that is intimately tied to the world of phenomena, to experience, to life, to the body. The language that ‘‘flies around the truth’’ preserves itself and the truth around which it flies because it is a metaphorical language, or, perhaps better, because it is a language that uses metaphor to function as simile: a language that coaxes similarity, likeness, without insisting on sameness. We come back again to ‘‘Abraham.’’ The parabolic moment of this piece is announced by the phrase ‘‘it is as if ’’ (Es ist so wie wenn). It is as if Abraham’s peculiar predicament is similar to the predicament of the unfortunate student. But, to say ‘‘as if ’’ is to keep the conversation open, is to allow for other possible ways to explain and interpret Abraham’s predicament. Abraham and this soon-to-be-humiliated student meet for a moment, come together by means of a shared experience, but then they retreat back into their own, unique frame of reference. We leave the parable of Abraham, not with the assumption that Abraham has become this student, not with the notion that he has been subsumed into this anachronistic world, but, rather, with two equally compelling stories to ponder, each with its own horizon. To say ‘‘as if ’’ is to acknowledge that there is no language for ‘‘exactly’’ or ‘‘precisely’’—but this incapacity has burst open, has multiplied, the possibilities for encounter. The language of ‘‘as if ’’ enacts the meeting-without-merger. Kafka’s Wager: ‘‘Grace’’ in the hypothetical space ‘‘I try to be a true attendant upon grace. Perhaps it will come—perhaps it will not come. Perhaps this quiet yet un-

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quiet waiting is the harbinger of grace, or perhaps it is grace itself. I do not know. But that does not disturb me. In the meantime—I have made friends with my ignorance’’ (Janouch 98).

The space of the ‘‘as if ’’ is also the hypothetical space—the realm opened up by possibilities allowed for but left unexplored. For Kafka, this is the space reserved for ‘‘grace.’’ In what reads suspiciously like a nod to Pascal’s wager, Kafka confesses: ‘‘Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment’’ (Diaries 180). The ‘‘as if ’’ slides into the ‘‘even if ’’; just as allusive, peripheral, language positions itself before an impenetrable void, a nothingness that eludes capture, the ‘‘even if ’’ here is fueled by a profound negation. Despite the possibility—the probability, Kafka often seems to suggest—that salvation will never come, action is undertaken in the shadow of hypothesis. Certainty about the outcome of action is no longer a criterion guiding action. Having ‘‘made friends with [his] ignorance,’’ Kafka suggests that it is precisely the condition of unalleviated non-knowing that should become the impetus for action. In this new configuration, action is undertaken for action’s sake. It is disconnected from the fruits of action, it disregards reward or gain as motivation. Action such as this (deeply reminiscent of the principle of karma-yoga in Hinduism and of right action in Buddhism) rejects the ego, negates individual desire as the basis for behavior. At the same time, using Pascal’s wager as the means of promoting this type of action, Kafka clearly does not reject individual will or desire altogether. Pascal’s wager asks us to consider what would be the most expedient path to take with regard to belief and the corresponding existence of God to legitimate this belief. If God does not exist, and we believe in him, well, we’ve lived in accordance with our beliefs. If God does exist, and we believe in him, so much the better. If God does not exist, and we do not believe in him, what’s the harm? If, however, God does exist and we do not believe in him, how very sad for us! Pascal argues that, given the very possibility of the fourth option, we would do well to avoid disbelief. If we want to cover our bases, so to speak, we might as well believe. Something of this argument-from-expedience is retained in Kafka’s claim. So, too, is the fundamental egoism (if what is really at stake is our own salvation) that guides us to take this wager. Thus, we have to consider why Kafka invokes a model that provides the theological precedent, in

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many ways, for Kierkegaard’s ‘‘single one,’’ the individual who stands alone before God, isolated, alienated, but nevertheless in profound connection with God. In the same way as Kafka argues, ‘‘the Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism is possible in faith,’’ he argues here that we are each responsible for our own destiny. To ‘‘be worthy at every moment’’ of salvation is to adhere to the burden of individual responsibility never lifted, is to not expect this burden to be lifted. At the same time, individual responsibility has to be aligned with the collective—to suggest that we are each responsible for our own destiny is by no means to reject the voice of the ‘‘crowd.’’ Rather, the individual, in Kafka’s formulation, is always already connected to the community; salvation, then, cannot be understood apart from this entangled relation between self and other. Kafka’s ‘‘wager,’’ then, would seem to be a conflation of expedience and anxiety, a messy and precarious balancing act of desire and renunciation, self-assertion and self-denial. His wager originates in Pascal’s all-encompassing doubt, in Kierkegaard’s gut-wrenching anxiety; unlike Pascal and Kierkegaard, however, he asks us to use doubt and anxiety as the springboard, not to belief, but to action that might, but need not, indicate belief. His wager originates in the ego—in the basic fear of self-loss and the will to self-preservation— but it casts off pure ego by emphasizing other-oriented action over self-serving belief. Kafka’s wager would have us aim for a secularized version of the first option of Pascal’s wager, where the non-existence of God has no real bearing on the way we live our lives. At the same time, his wager is also deeply connected to Jewish tradition, where action precedes belief, where, one might argue, belief is negligible to action. And yet, we are reminded of Kafka’s reduction of belief to being, his ‘‘oder richtiger’’ aphorism. If, after all is said and done, ‘‘glauben heißt . . . sein,’’ what does it mean to believe when belief has been stripped of any teleological content, when ‘‘there is no room for justice,’’ when ‘‘ignorance’’ is the only hope for ‘‘grace’’? It means, perhaps, tenaciously holding to life in spite of, because of, the regression that is inevitable in this stance. ‘‘If you were walking across a plain,’’ Kafka reminds us, ‘‘had an honest intention of walking on, and yet kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the

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ground, and you must not despair.’’ And you must not despair: this is, finally, the positive element that directs Kafka’s theology, the prescriptive moment that binds grace-perpetually-deferred to vehement belief-as-mode-of-action. Despair, Kafka instructs us, is not an option. And indeed, he suggests, we are capable of the kind of belief he promotes, a belief that has no ‘‘real’’ basis, but nevertheless is a testament to our will not-to-despair. He writes: ‘‘It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted. You suggest that there is some faithvalue in this? One cannot not-live, after all. It is precisely in this ‘Cannot, after all’ that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form’’ (Notebooks 54). The hypothetical space, the space reserved for grace, insulates this profound negation that is itself the positive form. One cannot not-live, after all—it is here that negation outdoes itself, here that a logical impossibility eases into being the Talmudic injunction ‘‘Choose life.’’ In this basic affirmation of life there is a fierce hope, or, rather, there is the possibility to choose hope over hopelessness. Kafka writes, ‘‘that I recoil from no humiliation can as well indicate hopelessness as give hope’’ (Diaries 314). Kafka’s response here, his ‘‘recoiling,’’ further develops the hypothetical stance required for ‘‘grace.’’ He positions himself against a void that has powerful repercussions. His response assumes judgment, assumes a relationship that holds him accountable. Like his Abraham, Kafka experiences humiliation, he perceives himself to be judged. While this perception might very well be the mark of an internal feeling of guilt, while it might indicate, as it does in the case of Abraham, a conversation that has been self-generated, finally, the external reality of this humiliating source has no bearing on the effect of the perception, namely, action that reinforces a connection to the other, action that challenges self-complacency. Indeed, we might well experience hopelessness as a result of this irreparable divide between reality and the behavior we seem to want to enforce; if we are causing ourselves unnecessary pain and suffering by binding ourselves to something that may not even exist, let alone command such a bond, we are justified in such hopelessness. But, we might also extract some hope from the fact that we are creatures who, when faced with the incomprehensible, choose to operate within a moral code. That we are capable of feeling judged, moreover, that we are capable of and willing to create a framework

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that upholds justice—even if, Kafka tells us, ‘‘there is no room for justice’’—suggests a commitment to community. Even if, because, there is ‘‘no room for justice’’ in the equation he has set before us, Kafka has not alleviated us of the responsibility to strive continuously toward a world where, hypothetically, justice might be possible. Kafka has left the artist, as he has left us, in an increasingly irresolvable and difficult position, one that mirrors the paradoxical ‘‘freedom in chains’’ characterizing the human condition. On the one hand, the artist is bound to the void; that is, the artist must remain content in the knowledge that the void is inexplicable and will remain so despite any attempts to capture it. On the other hand, the artist must embrace the type of responsibility that humanity bears in occupying a position of partial and flawed knowledge. Put simply: the artist must engage in a God-promoting project, even as the notion of ‘‘God’’ is pulled and prodded virtually beyond recognition. To create a God who speaks and commands ethical behavior through speech is to create a limited God—one bound by human shortcomings. The artist must promote this limited God even as he/she emphasizes the fact that this God is a human construct. Therefore, the work of the artist is twofold; to hasten the loss of illusions at the same time as he/she builds up illusions that inspire ethical behavior. Each and every time a question is put forth, for example, the questioner is laboring under the illusion that someone is listening, that someone may answer. This may be a momentary lapse, but nevertheless it is one that must be engaged in in order that the questions continue. The artist is tied to the task of pursuing unanswerable questions. In affecting this lapse again and again, the artist chooses, effectively, to fail without hope of redemption. Kafka challenges the artist to push his/her work to the breaking point—the point of no return: ‘‘Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached’’ (Notebooks 16). This is the point, ironically, that brings the only type of certainty possible in a world without salvation—the certainty that one’s questions will continue to go unanswered. It is also at this point of resignation that the slightest bit of hope begins to glimmer through: ‘‘A heavy downpour. Stand and face the rain, let its iron rays pierce you; drift with the water that wants to sweep you away but yet stand fast, and upright in this way abide the sudden and endless shining of the sun’’ (Diaries 271).

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It is this imperative that Kafka places upon the artist—to stand fast in the face of unalleviated suffering, to maintain and demonstrate faith in a God who very well might not exist. He has no conception of the magnitude of this imperative for those who will be forced to put this faith to the most painful test possible. And yet, the mode of faith prescribed by Kafka is one that Celan and Jabe`s find sustainable in the wake of the Holocaust. Kafka provides the capacity for a faith circumscribed by the question, a faith that is a condition, a way of being-in-the-world, rather than a prescribed set of behaviors. Reconfiguring faith in this way, Kafka has also emphasized that the covenant is a human construction, a necessary construction that is conducive to ethics. Like Kafka’s dynamic faith, the covenant is upheld only by the most rigorous questioning; only the challenge continuously describes the boundary between self and other, human and divine. It is this element of dynamic challenge, underlined by the desperate need for faith in both God and humanity, that Celan and Jabe`s carry most powerfully into their work.

II Paul Celan: The Silence of Relation A word—you know: a corpse. Let us wash it, let us comb it, let us turn its eye towards heaven. —Celan, ‘‘Nocturnally Pouting’’

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Toward a Logic of the ‘‘Both/And’’ About a week before he took his own life, Paul Celan quoted to a friend Kafka’s famous but cryptic aphorism: ‘‘But happiness, only if I can raise the world to the level of the pure, the true, the immutable’’ (Diaries 387). Without wishing to suggest that Celan’s suicide is his most definitive act, I would like to propose that this aphorism describes the primary aim of Celan’s literary project—the aim, that is, of purifying a deeply fallen world. In this chapter, I will explore what purification means in the context of Celan’s poetry. Like Kafka, Celan suspects that the covenant, the formal commandment, is the structure through which the ‘‘true and immutable’’ come into being. In the same manner as an author such as Elie Wiesel, Celan witnesses the failure of covenantal theology to account for the Holocaust. His task, then, in the wake of World War II, is to pick up the pieces of a shattered, but necessary structure and put them together in such a way that the new representation will yet reflect the enormity of the experience. The ‘‘pure, true, and immutable’’ are more precarious on this side of the Holocaust than they were for Kafka, who sensed, but could not know, the horror that was coming. Celan expresses his difficult faith through rebellion, challenge, accusation. He wrestles with the image of God as both a speaking and a silent force, and he condemns both faces for their complicity in, and failure to provide a sufficient means of understanding, the Holocaust. Ultimately Celan, like Wiesel, places this condemnation within the larger question of human ethics and responsibility. His method, however, is far more aligned with Kafka’s; like Kafka, Celan is engaged in a comprehensive revaluation of values—not unlike Nietzsche’s wideranging project1—that uses literature as its vehicle. 1 Celan expressed his sympathy for, and perhaps ideological connection with, Nietzsche in an inscription of ‘‘Gespra¨ch im Gebirg’’—‘‘In memory of Sils Maria and Friedrich Nietzsche, who—as you know—wanted to have all anti-Semites shot.’’ Quoted in Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew 140.

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As a native of the Bukovina region of Romania, Celan, in his childhood, was influenced by a number of different sources that would come together later to form his diverse religious, philosophical, and literary approach. In his home, he spoke High German, but Bukovina was a multilingual region, and he grew up surrounded by Romanian, Ukranian, and Yiddish. As well, Celan’s father insisted on his attaining a ‘‘proper’’ Jewish upbringing, and this included learning Hebrew, in which he became fluent.2 He had access to, but did not immerse himself in, the Hasidic culture that informs and shapes so much of Wiesel’s writing. More fully versed and acquainted with the texts, practices, and language of his Jewish faith than Kafka was, Celan still maintained the ambivalence that was part and parcel of being an assimilated Jew of Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. This ambivalence is absolutely central to Celan’s sense of a failed project. Though fully conversant in the complexities of Jewish theology, a topic that he pursued with greater interest toward the end of his life (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 96), Celan never quite felt entirely connected with the group for whom he felt compelled to speak. But it is also this ambivalence, perhaps, this unshakable sense of isolation and division that translate into an intuitive familiarity for the reader of Celan’s poetry. For all its distance and separation, Celan’s poetry promises a homecoming—a coming home to a world steeped in uncertainty and sustained by the tireless posing of unanswerable questions. There are any number of movements with which Celan has been connected—symbolism, existentialism, deconstruction, to name a few—and for each of these alliances there is a counter-argument that seeks to undermine the connection. What has resulted from this type of point/counterpoint is the sense that Celan’s work is caught in the bind of a systematic ‘‘either/or,’’ such that to suggest that he aligns himself with one pole of argument is to imply that he rejects the other. I do not believe that this is really the case. Rather, it seems to me that the key to understanding Celan perhaps lies in the acceptance of the ‘‘both/and,’’ in the conjunction, rather than the division, 2 Felstiner provides an account of Celan’s childhood and early adulthood in Chapter 1—‘‘Loss and the Mother Tongue’’—of his book. I have taken my comments primarily from this source. Israel Chalfen’s Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth provides the most comprehensive biographical account of Celan’s younger years to date.

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of seemingly disparate modes of criticism; this is especially true because many of these movements are integrally related. Like Kafka, Celan is part of a literary tradition that he both helps to shape and, in many ways, surpasses and defies. And, as with Kafka, the influences and impulses that find a home in Celan’s work are various and at times seemingly incompatible. That Celan’s poetic project, for instance, aims simultaneously for a Nietzschean transvaluation and a reinstatement of the Platonic world of forms is an irreconcilable paradox. Nevertheless, both tendencies exist. His poetry is both hermetic (shrouding itself, increasingly, for instance, in Hebrew) and an act of the most intimate encounter (‘‘poems are en route: they are headed toward . . . toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps . . .’’ [‘‘Bremen Prize Speech,’’ Collected Prose 35]). It addresses itself to an indeterminate and shifting ‘‘Du’’ at the same time as it chronicles the loss of self, the desperate attempt at self-expression, as the lyric ‘‘I’’ begins to splinter, fragment, dissolve. It is both redemptive and subversive. It looks to redeem a lost language, a lost world (‘‘the region from which I come to you—with what detours! . . . will be unfamiliar to most of you . . .—it was a landscape where both people and books lived’’ [‘‘Bremen Prize Speech,’’ Collected Prose 33]) and to create a new language (‘‘Mein- / gedict, das Genicht’’) (‘‘My / poem, the noem’’) (‘‘Weggebeizt’’/‘‘Etched Away,’’ Poems 238).3 It is a project that both facilitates a passing through (hindurchgehen) the gruesome and painful space of memory and loss to tentative hope and vehemently rejects any ties to Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung—the past will never be ‘‘overcome’’ in his poetry. His project enacts tikkun olan (the mending of the world) at the same time as it indicts, accuses, condemns, and blames the Christian world for its complicity in the Holocaust. His poetry regards language at once as the powerful vehicle for creation and as insufficient, incomplete. It compels us, at once, toward speech and toward silence. In his book ‘Das Andere’ Paul Celans oder von den Paradoxien relationalen Dichtens (Paul Celan’s ‘Other’, or the Paradoxes of a Poetics of Relation), Michael Jakob takes the question of Celan’s hermeticism directly into the heart of his ethical project, suggesting that Celan’s peculiar hermeticism serves his aim of uncovering a rela3

Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are Michael Hamburger’s.

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tional core of being—that is, the hermetic is a function of the relation between self and other. This relation, he continues, is, as Levinas also insists, one characterized primarily through ethics and responsibility (Basic Philosophical Writing 225). Jakob suggests that we must move toward the ethical, that the relation between self and other is not a given, but has to be pursued; he argues, moreover, that Celan’s movement over the course of his volumes models this progression from an isolated ‘‘Ich’’ toward a ‘‘Du’’ that remains ultimately, always, other. This process, which he describes as the ‘‘Du-ifikation der Gedichte’’ (thou-ification of the poem) (191), derives from the original centrality of the self, an impulse, Jakob explains, that leads to the two principal interpretations of Celan’s poetry as either hermetic or dialogical. It is a mistake to view these interpretations as mutually exclusive. They are, rather, part and parcel of the same project: to bring into dialogue that which is wholly other (65). Refusing to collapse these two tendencies into one, even as he recognizes how one serves the other, Jakob exposes the tension that emerges in the space between dialogue and monologue, communication and obfuscation, speech and silence, as a necessary tension. It is this element of necessary tension that defines and describes the ambivalence that characterizes the ontological basis and model of Celan’s ethical imperative. Celan’s poetry aims at a meeting-withoutmerger, a relation of distinct parts, a relation in separation. Jakob’s notion of ‘‘Du-ifikation’’ illustrates that this process is both Celan’s goal and his eventual destruction; the necessarily divided parts inevitably collide, destroying the autonomous, monologic self. That is, Jakob explains, the Ich–Du relation, which the Ich views from a perspective of loss, is a reductive relation rather than a productive or constitutive one. At the same time, in overcoming its naturally monologic, isolated tendency, Ich grows into a fuller sense of self, a self enclosed by the relation (243). As the self loses its sense of centrality, we begin to see a new insistence on imperatives placed upon the Du to maintain this relation. It is here that I take my point of departure. Using Jakob’s basic paradigm of progressive movement toward the other, and his suggestion that Celan’s hermeticism indicates a growing sense of relation, I will trace how the breakdown of Celan’s language coincides with the increasing connection between self and other. At the same time, this

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movement is constantly informed by Celan’s theology. Like Kafka, Celan is grounded in both the hermeneutic tradition of Rabbinic Judaism and the mystical tradition of, most particularly, Lurianic Kabbalah. Therefore, the ‘‘other,’’ the ‘‘Du’’ for whom Celan’s poetry is intended, is at once both human and divine, both proximate and distant.4 The conflation of these realms has crucial implications for the larger question of covenantal theology after the Holocaust, the question that, I believe, frames Celan’s poetic endeavor. Indeed, the covenant is a relational structure that, Celan appears to suggest, must be upheld for the sake of ethics. But, as the relational, the ethical, is not the given condition but, rather, something to be pursued and achieved, so is the covenant. The covenant, like the poem, is ‘‘en route,’’ ‘‘headed-towards.’’ The covenant becomes, in Celan’s project, a process; it is itself continuously unfolding. Rather than a rigid structure, the covenant is a form that comes to embody dynamic movement. To reestablish the covenant along these lines of movement, Celan indicts the seemingly fixed notions of both the speaking and the silent God. As well, he challenges humanity to uphold a structure that no longer has discernible content. Like Kafka, he is deeply concerned with fashioning a divine image suitable for and appropriate to a dynamic and changing commandment. Like Jabe`s, he demonstrates over the course of his poetry that a stance of questioning is a necessary one for humanity to model in the refashioning of the divine image. The relation between self and other, Ich and Du, is the cornerstone upon which Celan builds his case for a post-Holocaust covenant. Despite and because of death, rupture, loss, exile—all conditions that characterize him as both a thoroughly Jewish and a thoroughly modern author—Celan insists upon relation. This insistence has a peculiar result. Monologue becomes dialogue, as Jakob suggests, but this dialogue is marked always by its silent core. That is, the relation between Ich and Du becomes uncontainable, impenetrable, by language. Curiously, as Celan’s poetry moves further and further away from ‘‘penetrable’’ language, as it seemingly becomes more and more hidden and hermetic, the Ich–Du relation grows 4 For a more comprehensive discussion of the multiple possibilities that the Du represents in Celan’s poetry, see Gadamer.

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stronger and stronger. It is as if this relationship itself outgrows language. As the covenant is reestablished, less and less can be said about this union. The language that can come toward it, that itself partakes of the covenant, is a language that brings into itself the ‘‘nothingness’’ to which it bears witness. Therefore, paradoxically, as Celan’s language is reduced to silence, it speaks more accurately both of the divine that it addresses and the relation upon which this divine image will be sustained. Levinas describes Celan’s project as one that speaks in a ‘‘language of and for proximity . . . a sign made to the other, a handshake, a speaking without speech—much more important in its ‘inclination’ than its message’’ (‘‘Being and the Other’’ 17). I will draw most heavily on the assumption of both Levinas and Jakob that Celan’s project is a fundamentally ethical one, that it is the ‘‘gesture’’ toward the other that establishes the ethical basis of his poetic project. It is precisely this gesture that suggests to me that Celan is aiming for a universal ethic.5 Indeed, Celan speaks not only to a select few, but to anyone who has the strength to listen. The apparent shattering of the covenant after the Holocaust is not limited in its implications for Jewish faith, but extends to the global reconstruction of ethics. Moving chronologically through Celan’s volumes of poetry. I will explicate a number of poems from each, focusing on those that deal most explicitly with his connected aims of theological revaluation and linguistic reduction as a vehicle for this revaluation. But by following a chronological order, I do not wish to imply that his ‘‘development’’ is linear. On the contrary, Celan demonstrates the cyclical movement at the base of Jewish mysticism. To this extent, we can perhaps understand the movement of his poetry as an expression of Benjamin’s maxim: ‘‘origin is the goal’’ (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 252). The seeds of the Ich–Du relation are present in the first volumes, and the occasional reversions to monologue are present in the last. The hope implied in the search for the other vacillates with the despair and frustration yielded by this same search. I am convinced that, by 5 The movement I am making from particular to general relies on one taken most notably by Theo Buck. Positing that Celan uses the particular Jewish experience as the grounding for the general Modern experience, pointing to the indivisibility of the particular and the general in Celan’s poetry (36), Buck provides the basis for moving Celan’s work from the narrow confines of Jewish studies into the wider realm of ethics.

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closely following the development of Celan’s poetry, we can make some sense of his suicide from within the context of his primarily outward-reaching, dialogical project. Because, I think, we need to make sense of this. On the surface, it appears a contradiction that a man so compelled to communicate would silence his own voice. And yet, his suicide reflects the almost natural culmination of his poetics—he is finally consumed by the relation he is bound, for the sake of ethics, to create.

4

Counting and Recounting ¨chtnis Mohn und Geda Mohn und Geda¨chtnis (‘‘Poppy and Memory’’) depicts Celan’s selfconscious awareness of his poetic task. Both reluctant and resigned, Celan plunges into the void. This void is one of stifling plenitude, of pain, compulsion and memory; Celan will never find his way back once he takes his first step inside. Yet this is a task that holds promise even as it promises danger. It is here, in this first volume, that we are introduced to the symbolic world of this void. It is a world in exile, but at the same time steeped in intimacy and familiarity. It is a world, we learn, of journey, and a journey that is taken in the presence of Celan’s dead mother: Der Reisekamerad Deiner Mutter Seele schwebt voraus. Deiner Mutter Seele hilft die Nacht umschiffen, Riff um Riff. Deiner Mutter Seele peitscht die Haie vor dir her. Dieses Wort ist deiner Mutter Mu ¨ndel. Deiner Mutter Mu ¨ndel teilt dein Lager, Stein um Stein. Deiner Mutter Mu ¨ndel bu ¨ckt sich nach der Krume Lichts. The Travelling Companion Your mother’s soul hovers ahead. Your mother’s soul helps to navigate night, reef after reef. Your mother’s soul whips on the sharks at the bow. This word is your mother’s ward. Your mother’s ward shares your couch, stone by stone. Your mother’s ward stoops for the crumb of light.

Using ‘‘deine’’ as his means of address, Celan speaks to himself as both stranger and trusted friend. The repetitive genitive construction of this poem perhaps betrays an inherent belonging, intimacy, and connection (Glenn 59). It is this connection that is the source of both pain and promise. Should his sense of alienation overcome him, he

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need only to remind himself—‘‘deiner Mutter Seele schwebt voraus.’’ Darkness will remain, but it becomes navigable with her presence. Immediately, language is linked to this journey, as that which will both protect—‘‘dieses Wort ist deiner Mutter Mu ¨ndel’’—and, perhaps, rehabilitate—‘‘deiner Mutter Mu ¨ndel bu ¨ckt sich nach der Krume Lichts.’’ ‘‘Stein um Stein,’’ the language of the mother bears witness to the dead. With the linking of the mother to language comes the admission of Celan’s redemptive task—language becomes all at once the vehicle for return, and, specifically, it is the language of the mother that affects this return. Felstiner relates, ‘‘just after the war a friend wondered how Celan could go on writing poems in the language that fashioned Endlo¨sung and judenrein, slogans meant to obliterate such things as his poetry. Celan answered, ‘only in the mother tongue can one speak his own truth; in a foreign tongue the poet lies’ ’’ (‘‘Translating Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’’ 242). Only the mother tongue can render the truth of the European Jewish experience. And, as Theo Buck’s title Muttersprache, Mo¨rdersprache (Mother-tongue, Murder-tongue) suggests, ‘‘Muttersprache’’ is, and must remain, inextricably connected with ‘‘Mo¨rdersprache’’ for Celan. It is perhaps in this light that we can approach Celan’s conception of language in terms of a hindurchgehen, a going-through (Fynsk 162): language must go through its own death, reach its own cataclysm, before it can emerge again cleansed. He writes in his Bremen Prize Speech: ‘‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all’’ (Collected Prose 34). Through the ‘‘thousand darknesses of murderous speech,’’ his mother-tongue will bring him; through the night, his mother will navigate him. In the presence of the woman dearest to him, Celan embarks on a journey to find the language that protects and is protected by their relationship. It is worthwhile to pause here to point out the striking difference in method between Elie Wiesel and Celan in this matter. While Wiesel deliberately chooses a foreign language as his means for expression, Celan insists that his poetry can have resonance and power, that it can only be successfully redemptive, only in German. Ellen Fine

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suggests that Wiesel chooses French because it is entirely unfamiliar with his Hasidic background; even its linguistic frame jars against the contents of his message (6). French and Hasidism are cultures foreign to each other, and, for this very reason, Wiesel finds in French a creative space, undefiled by and nonthreatening to his project. Redemption, for Wiesel, somehow seems to come in the form of allowing the dead to rest undisturbed by a familiar voice. To serve a similar aim of redemption, Celan chooses to work solely in German after the war; though there are any number of languages open to him—Russian, Romanian, French, Yiddish, Hebrew—and though his voluminous translations bear the mark of his linguistic capacities, only German serves his poetic task. I should qualify this statement. Celan’s German brings into itself each one of these languages, and I will be commenting later specifically on his unique incorporation of Hebrew into his poetry. The importance of Celan’s choice of German to the central philosophical and ethical thrust of his poetry cannot be overemphasized. Redemption begins on the cultural and linguistic level. Celan confronts the murderers directly. He refuses to give them another victory by silencing the original voice of the dead. ‘‘Ich singe vor Fremden’’: The ‘‘Natural’’ Monologic Condition However reluctant his journey may be, Celan feels compelled to take it. There is a sense in this first volume that he embarks alone and that his words will go unheard. In ‘‘Nachtstrahl’’ (‘‘Night Ray’’), for instance, he seems to speak his worst fear—‘‘Ich singe vor Fremden’’ (‘‘in front of strangers I sing’’) (56)—as though fully aware that his poetry is going to be met with hostility and miscomprehension. Yet, at the same time he calls upon the other, places imperatives upon the reader, invites one into his world. The collective imperative, the imperative to actively seek the truth (Szondi 52), is present along with his sense of isolation. This imperative has multiple levels. Perhaps most important is his call to remember—‘‘Du denk mit mir’’ (‘‘together with me recall’’), a call that reveals at the same time a kind of death-in-life—‘‘wir waren tot und konnten atmen’’ (‘‘we were dead and were able to breathe’’ (‘‘Erinnerung an Frankreich’’ / ‘‘Memory of France’’ 52). This conjunction of death and life can be read in at least two ways. It recalls the death-in-life of the camp inmate, the

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Muselman (Levi 82).1 As well, it suggests that active remembrance can bring the dead back to life. Celan invokes both historical memory and ethical awareness with this image, and this double invocation will remain throughout his work. At the same time, Celan implores his readers to cast off systematic thinking, logic, distinction. ‘‘Ins Nebelhorn’’ (‘‘Into the Foghorn’’), for instance, makes plain that he is dependent upon an implied you to guide him to his intended goal: ‘‘reicht euch das Dunkel, / nennt meinen Namen, / fu ¨hrt mich vor ihn’’ (‘‘proffer yourselves to the dark, / speak my name, / lead me before him’’) (66). Much like Kafka’s injunction to ‘‘breathe in the air and the silence’’ (Diaries 365) the stance that Celan encourages this unnamed (but significantly plural) ‘‘you’’ to take is one that requires an embrace of the void, of darkness. ‘‘Speak my name’’ places the lyric ‘‘Ich’’ precariously in the position of the divine, in a position, nevertheless, that coaxes its own annihilation; the name of God, according to Kabbalistic tradition, holds the key to the mystery of the divine—whoever utters it gains power over the divine. And yet, perhaps this is what the unnamed ‘‘Ich’’ desires? To be disempowered? At the same time, the implied ‘‘you’’ provides the ‘‘Ich’’ with a sense of vindication, ‘‘speaking [his] name’’ they condone the solitary journey into darkness, the solitary meeting of the subject ‘‘before him.’’ As in Kafka’s ‘‘Before the Law,’’ the stance of ‘‘before’’ suggests a profound isolation, which will inevitably end in futility—‘‘no one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it’’ (Basic Kafka 176). With the categories of self and other already terribly blurred, it is here in this volume that Celan vindicates himself as poet, almost as if he doubts his own ability and/or his right to speak. ‘‘Vom Blau, das noch sein Auge sucht, trink ich als erster’’ (‘‘I am the first to drink of the blue that still looks for its eye’’) (67), he says. He is both first and last, the speaker of ‘‘Leeres und Letztes,’’ the keeper of ‘‘some empty and last thing’’ (‘‘Die Jahre von dir zu mir’’/ ‘‘The years from you to 1 Levi writes, ‘‘their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselma¨nner, the drowned, form the back bone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.’’

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me’’) (58). He gives his poetry as a gift of sorts, but it is a gift that is seemingly created both in and of the void. There is no return here. In ‘‘Chanson einer Dame im Schatten,’’ he writes: ‘‘Er ist einer, der hat, was ich sagte. / Er tra¨gts unterm Arm wie ein Bu ¨ndel. / Er tra¨gts wie die Uhr ihre schlechteste Stunde. / Er tra¨gt es von Schwelle zu Schwelle, er wirft es nicht fort’’ (‘‘He’s the one who has what I said / He carries it under his arm like a bundle. / He carries it as the clock carries its worst hour. / From threshold to threshold he carries it, never throws it away’’) (54). This poem ends on a note of loss and non-reciprocation. ‘‘Was ich sagte’’ is imparted to one who carries it away without return. He concludes of this one who has received the message, ‘‘der gewinnt nicht. / Der verliert’’ (‘‘That one doesn’t win. / He loses’’). At the heart of this poem is the same impulse that resonates throughout ‘‘Gespra¨ch im Gebirg.’’ ‘‘A failed dialogic,’’ Ezrahi describes it, that ‘‘becomes a kind of self-proliferation’’ (270). The self in this scenario produces endlessly for an other who does not participate in the relation. As Celan implies in the first breathless, uninterrupted sentence of this so-called ‘‘Gespra¨ch,’’ much has been lost, the world has been effectively abandoned, and it is here that dialogue is pursued with almost hysterical intent—‘‘One evening, when the sun had set and not only the sun, the Jew, the Jew and son of a Jew, went off, left his house and went off, and with him his name, his unpronounceable name, went and came, came trotting along, made himself heard, came with a stick, came over stones, do you hear me, you do, it’s me, me, me, and whom you hear, whom you think you hear, me and the other . . .’’ (Collected Prose 17). Frantically seeking the other—‘‘ho¨rst du mich’’—the ‘‘ich’’ hurries to establish a relation that is undermined by the persistent assertion of self—‘‘ich bins, ich, ich.’’ Curiously, this self-assertion mirrors the divine response to Moses’s inquiry in Exodus: ehiyeh ashar ehiyeh (‘‘will be that I will be) (Weissenberger, ‘‘Der Rhythmus in Paul Celans Dichtung’’ 123). This assertion precludes any real dialogue. Somehow this divine model, this refusal to definitively answer the question of identity, has become an obstacle. The mystery once attached to this refusal now brings with it a menacing threat, the fear of which is betrayed by the repetition of ‘‘ho¨rst du mich?’’ Felstiner suggests that Celan is making an explicit allusion here to the Shema, the basic proclamation of Jewish faith—‘‘Hear O Israel,

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the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One’’ (Poet, Survivor, Jew 144). What was once the premise of faith—that God did ‘‘hear’’—has now been thrown radically into question. Similarly, Shema contains within it the root shem—name. To listen, therefore, is to sanctify the divine name. The name that was previously bound to the command to hear, to heed, to listen—a command that ultimately reinforces a kind of dialogue—has been altered, not least because it is now rendered in the German ‘‘ho¨rst du.’’ There is no longer a voice to heed. The connection has been broken; all that remains is question. ‘‘Za¨hle die Mandeln’’: A Cautious Dialogic Celan takes it upon himself to repair this broken connection, not to erase the questioning of ‘‘ho¨rst du mich,’’ but, like Job, to bring this questioning into the realm of faith. Perhaps the clearest example of Celan’s acceptance of his task, and a statement of his own intentions, comes at the close of Mohn und Geda¨chtnis—‘‘Za¨hle die Mandeln.’’ Za¨hle die Mandeln, za¨hle, was bitter war und dich wachhielt, za¨hl mich dazu: Ich suchte dein Aug, als du’s aufschlugst und niemand dich ansah. ich spann jenen heimlichen Faden, an dem der Tau, den du dachtest, hinunterglitt zu den Kru ¨gen, die ein Spruch, der zu niemandes Herz fand, behu ¨tet. Dort erst tratest du ganz in den Namen, der dein ist, schrittest du sicheren Fußes zu dir, schwangen die Ha¨mmer frei im Glockenstuhl deines Schweigens, stieß das Erlauschte zu dir, legte das Tote den Arm auch um dich, und ihr ginget selbdritt durch den Abend. Mache mich bitter. Za¨hle mich zu den Mandeln. Count the almonds, count what was bitter and kept you awake, count me in:

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I looked for your eye when you opened it, no one was looking at you, I spun that secret thread on which the dew you were thinking slid down to the jugs guarded by words that to no one’s heart found their way. Only there did you wholly enter the name that is yours, sure-footed stepped into yourself, freely the hammers swung in the bell frame of your silence, the listened for reached you, what is dead put its arm round you also and the three of you walked through the evening. Make me bitter. Count me among the almonds.

Here Celan asserts his necessity and compulsion to write and takes on the mantle of speaker and witness. A solemn vow to ‘‘za¨hle, was bitter war und dich wachhielt,’’ he commits his cause to speaking of the other’s pain. ‘‘Za¨hle’’ will later become united with ‘‘erza¨hle’’ in ‘‘Oben, gera¨uschlos’’ (Sprachgitter). This dual imperative, to count and recount, is first given form here. To count the countless dead—a futile task in and of itself, unless taken in the spirit of the dead, that is, unless part of the tradition of transmission and continuity. Specifically using ‘‘Mandeln,’’ a symbol that connotes Jewish custom, Celan speaks of the particular intention of his poetry: to bear witness to the victims of the Holocaust. This intention, while grounded in the particular, becomes attached to a more general, universal aim for a redemptive ethics. Addressed simultaneously to Celan himself and the ‘‘you,’’ ‘‘za¨hl’’ here already implies ‘‘erza¨hl’’—it already urges memory. Celan accepts his role, but only on the condition that the dead continue to speak and the reader also engage him-/herself in this task. He admits here to a kind of hermeticism—‘‘ich spann jenen heimlichen Faden’’—but a hermeticism that nevertheless remains open and familiar to the ‘‘Du’’ that both inspires the writing and is the one to whom this writing is addressed. To the degree that Celan speaks of poetry as a ‘‘homecoming’’ (Heimkehr), we can perhaps see a subtle connection here between ‘‘heimlichen’’ and ‘‘heimatlich.’’ His poetry is a bringing one home to oneself precisely by means of this

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‘‘guarded’’ (behu ¨tet) language. Only with this kind of speech—speech that reveals to those who listen as it conceals from those who reject— does one fully reclaim one’s identity: ‘‘Dort erst tratest du ganz in den Namen, der dein ist, / schrittest du sicheren Fußes zu dir.’’ And, in coming home, in the return of Name to other, the dead embrace both Celan and his once more ‘‘addressable you.’’ As if waiting for the mystery to have revealed itself, as though anticipating this return, the ‘‘listened for’’ is brought back into the relation, a relation all at once described by silence—‘‘schwangen die Ha¨mmer frei im Glockenstuhl deines / Schweigens, / stieß das Erlauschte zu dir, / legte das Tote den Arm auch um dich, / und ihr ginget selbdritt durch den Abend’’ (‘‘freely the hammers swung in the bell frame of your silence, / the listened for reached you, / what is dead put its arm round you also / and the three of you walked through the evening’’). It remains the realm of night and bitterness, the terrain upon which this journey continues, but in ‘‘counting [himself] among the almonds,’’ Celan is no longer alone.

Von Schwelle zu Schwelle Counting himself in, committing to and engaging in the task of writing, Celan moves tentatively from the isolation of the self—the monologic subject—toward a communion with the other. In ‘‘Von Schwelle zu Schwelle’’ he continues this movement, both giving his readers further imperatives and revealing something of the nature of the subject that he seeks. The poems I have chosen for close reading from this volume—‘‘Mit wechselndem Schlu ¨ssel,’’ ‘‘Na¨chtlich geschu rzt,’’ and ‘‘Sprich auch Du’’—are all directed by the same active ¨ voice, a voice that encourages participation on the part of the reader, and is as of yet clear and strong. The Dynamic of Internal and External ‘‘Mit wechselndem Schlu ¨ssel’’ (‘‘With a Variable Key’’) reveals the tension between inside and outside, illustrating that the poetic voice creates while subject to the elements of creation: Mit wechselndem Schlu ¨ssel schließt du das Haus auf, darin

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der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt. Je nach dem Blut, das dir quillt aus Aug oder Mund oder Ohr, wechselt dein Schlu ¨ssel. Wechselt dein Schlu ¨ssel, wechselt das Wort, das treiben darf mit den Flocken. Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortsto¨ßt, ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee. With a variable key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that spurts from your eye or your mouth or your ear. You vary the key, you vary the word that is free to drift with the flakes. What snowball will form round the word depends on the wind that rebuffs you.

With subtle echoes of Heidegger’s claim that ‘‘language is the dwelling-place of being’’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 146, 189–91), Celan once again connects home to word. ‘‘Dwelling’’ will be replaced in the later volumes by the more active command to build (bauen), to create a space for dwelling. The home, once unlocked, opens itself to greater silence—‘‘darin der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt.’’ That ‘‘left unspoken’’ is as of yet a product of the outside world, the silence that the poet breathes into speech. The key that will unlock this world—this world of intimacy and familiarity—is both dynamic— ‘‘wechselndem’’—and grounded in the wound of suffering—‘‘Je nach dem Blut, das dir quillt / aus Aug oder Mund oder Ohr, / wechselt dein Schlu ¨ssel.’’ But the ‘‘key’’ is bound just as closely to life, to the blood that courses through this ‘‘Du’’—a force that compels three physical, sensual, acts, namely, looking (Aug), speaking (Mund), and listening (Ohr). In his ‘‘Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore’’ (1958), Celan makes a statement that becomes one of the guiding forces of his work: ‘‘Wirklichkeit ist nicht, Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein’’ (‘‘Reality is not simply there, it must be

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searched and won’’) (Collected Prose 16). His use of the passive voice here reinforces the malleability of ‘‘Wirklichkeit’’; truth, indeed, is what we make it to be, what we actively promote. That truth ‘‘is not’’ suggests that it cannot be fixed. In this sense we witness the undoing of the second clause; ‘‘searched and won’’ imply closure. Rather, the process of seeking and winning ensures movement. Like Kafka’s ‘‘Weg-von-Hier,’’ Celan’s ‘‘Wirklichkeit’’ is described primarily by means of a simultaneous negation and proliferation. Such is the strength and force of the negative theology in which Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s find their footing. In a world where the negation holds greater power than the positive utterance, where the divine loses its power altogether (the greatest loss is language), speech is paradoxically given back to humanity. In this frozen landscape, the word takes on shape and form as a response and reaction against ‘‘what rebuffs’’ it—the word rejects its having been ignored, it forces a relation. It is this access to language, then, a language usurped from the divine for human purposes, that signals for Celan the first step in rebuilding the covenant. And yet, it is not entirely a human matter. Celan will not go so far as to suggest that the right word, the magical word that conjures being to gather around it, is divorced from external forces. Indeed, it is this outside force that has the last word here—‘‘Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortsto¨ßt, / ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.’’ In the Hebrew, ‘‘wind’’ becomes ruach, the breath and spirit of the divine presence, the Shekinah. Here this presence serves as an obstacle to creation, as if sensing, perhaps, that language signifies loss of freedom. Even a dynamic language, a language of multiplicity and changing perspective, hems in the word ‘‘das treiben darf mit den Flocken.’’ There is a keen tension here between human and divine wills. Yet, existing, as it does, alongside this call for a particular type of language—a language that seeks being—this tension is perhaps more indicative of the hermeneutic method promoted by Celan. This is, in other words, a necessary tension. Embedded in this observation, which is also a call to create—‘‘Wechselt dein Schlu ¨ssel, wechselt das Wort’’—is a set of instructions: find a language that will serve this tension, not attempt to minimize it. This language will be twofold: directed toward the outside, it upholds a relation to it; incorporating a measure of its essence, it represents without defiling.

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The Washing of the Word/The Washing of the World2 ‘‘Na¨chtlich geschu ¨rzt’’ is quite telling in its connections, both cryptic and profound, to Kafka’s own literary project. This poem suggests the conscious affinity that Celan held for Kafka—like Kafka’s, his art finds its point of departure in the realm of ethics, and is ethical insofar as it is directed away from the self in the hopes of reaching the other: Na¨chtlich geschu ¨rzt die Lippen der Blumen, gekreuzt und verschra¨nkt die Scha¨fte der Fichten, ergraut das Moos, erschu ¨ttert der Stein, erwacht zum unendlichen Fluge die Dohlen u ¨ber dem Gletscher: dies ist die Gegend, wo rasten, die wir ereilt: sie werden die Stunde nicht nennen, die Flocken nicht za¨hlen, den Wassern nicht folgen ans Wehr. Sie stehen getrennt in der Welt, ein jeglicher bei seiner Nacht, ein jeglicher bei seinem Tode, unwirsch, barhaupt, bereift von Nahem und Fernem. Sie tragen die Schuld ab, die ihren Ursprung beseelte, sie tragen sie ab an ein Wort, das zu Unrecht besteht, wie der Sommer. Ein Wort—du weißt: eine Leiche. Laß uns sie waschen, laß uns sie ka¨mmen, laß uns ihr Aug himmelwa¨rts wenden. 2 For a more extensive discussion of this poem and its connection to the poem ‘‘Einmal,’’ see Hawkins, ‘‘The Washing of the Word.’’

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Nocturnally pouting the lips of flowers, criss-crossed and linked the shafts of the spruces, turned grey the moss, the stone shaken, roused for unending flight the jackdaws over the glacier: this is the region where those we’ve caught up with rest: they will not name the hour, they will not count the flakes nor follow the stream to the weir. They stand apart in the world, each one close up to his night, each one close up to his death, surly, bare-headed, hoar-frosted with all that is near, all that’s far. They discharge the guilt that adhered to their origin they discharge it upon a word that wrongly subsists, like summer. A word—you know: a corpse. Let us wash it, let us comb it let us turn its eye towards heaven.

In his later volume, Atemwende (Breathturn), Celan’s ‘‘Atemkristall’’ (‘‘Breath-Crystal’’) is located deep within Gletscherstuben (glacier rooms). It is this Atemkristall that comes to represent the core of meaning that remains protected and unapproachable. Here, in this early attempt to capture this unspeakable core of truth, Celan aligns himself with Kafka, but in a whisper, so that only those who strain to hear will catch the connection (‘‘Dohlen’’ translates into the Czech ‘‘kavka,’’ or ‘‘jackdaw’’ from which Kafka’s family name is taken) (Sparr 73). Entering this nether region, this region marked primarily by negation—‘‘sie werden die Stunde nicht nennen, / die Flocken nicht za¨hlen, / den Wassern nicht folgen ans Wehr’’—Celan takes

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stock of his surroundings and finds he is not alone. Or, rather, it is precisely this isolation that becomes the basis for a community. In the pursuit of a kind of death, a connection is forged between proximity and distance—‘‘Sie stehen getrennt in der Welt, / ein jeglicher bei seiner Nacht, / ein jeglicher bei seinem Tode, / unwirsch, barhaupt, bereift / von Nahem und Fernem.’’ Proximity and distance also exist in a hermeneutic relation—the tension here, too, must also be sustained. Perhaps Kafka is invoked here because Celan establishes a similar link between creation through language and the guilt attached to the Fall—‘‘Sie tragen die Schuld ab, die ihren Ursprung beseelte, / sie tragen sie ab an ein Wort, / das zu Unrecht besteht, wie der Sommer.’’ The guilt attached to creation—already a function of the destructive power of language—finds both its symbol and its symptom in the word. The word has become charged with the residue of shame. Emptied out, the word is exhausted of the creative potential it once had. Now it only signifies death, now it is only to be held accountable for the murdered victims, the word itself become a victim of the destruction it helped to foster—‘‘Ein Wort—du weißt: eine Leiche.’’ This is the condition that must be rectified. And, like Kafka, Celan is intent on rectifying, repairing, redeeming the seemingly unredeemable—even if, and perhaps because, he will destroy himself in the process. Aiming for a kind of merger, this isolated ‘‘I’’ will pursue its death in the other—‘‘ein jeglicher bei seinem Tode.’’ The task at hand is stated clearly: ‘‘Laß uns sie waschen, / laß uns sie ka¨mmen, / laß uns ihr Aug / himmelwa¨rts wenden.’’ The word must be cleansed and restored to its meaning. This restoration begins with a turning-toward the divine. At the same time, this linguistic turn, this restoration, presides over the death of ‘‘ein Wort.’’ The use of the non-specific article ‘‘ein’’ here suggests that all language is vulnerable to destruction; and yet, Celan sets ‘‘ein Wort’’ apart from ‘‘das Wort’’—what he speaks of here is not the Word, the Logos, the divine enunciation. It is, rather, human speech that is most vulnerable: speech that hid the most gruesome atrocities behind euphemistic, sterile phrases such as Endlo¨sung. This corpse perhaps serves as an indication that what has a body, what has boundaries and limitations, will eventually die. In the same way as Jabe`s recounts the graphic murder of God in the murder of a woman, Ya¨el, but uses this murder as a means of opening up a space for a divine not contained

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or constricted by bodily limitation, Celan implies here that death presides over, makes possible, the heavenly turn. The task—the linguistic turn—is introduced here as a collective imperative:‘‘laß uns.’’ Let us prove ourselves worthy of this redemptive task (which is also a destructive task and an act of mourning), as if to say, let us make language a God-oriented medium once again. It is here that Celan reveals the first glimmers of the ‘‘Atemwende’’—the breathturn— that will become the defining movement in the approach toward the other. A Language of Shadows A firmer statement of the kind of language necessary for this task comes in ‘‘Sprich auch du.’’ Paradoxically, as the language becomes more clearly defined, the object of this language recedes further and further from view. Any language that is appropriate to this task must somehow speak of this recession even as it facilitates the retreat. It is a language of the pure moment, a language of exchange, a language of the ‘‘Du’’ who is the isolated self ’s saving grace: Sprich auch du, Sprich als letzter, sag deinen Spruch. Sprich— Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja. Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn: gib ihm den Schatten. Gib ihm Schatten genug, gib ihm so viel, also du um dich verteilt weißt zwischen Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht. Blicke umher: sieh, wie’s lebendig wird rings— Beim Tode! Lebendig! Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht. Nun aber schrumpft der Ort, wo du stehst: Wohin jetzt, Schattenentbloßter, wohin? Steige. Taste empor. Du ¨nner wirst du, unkenntlicher, feiner!

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Feiner: ein Faden, an dem er herabwill, der Stern: um unten zu schwimmen, unten, wo er sich schimmern sieht: in der Du ¨nung wandernder Worte. Speak, you also, speak as the last, have your say. Speak— But keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade. Give it shade enough, give it as much as you know has been dealt out between midnight and midday and midnight. Look around: look how it all leaps alive where death is! Alive! He speaks truly who speaks the shade. But now shrinks the place where you stand: Where now, stripped by shade, will you go? Upward. Grope your way up. Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer. Finer: a thread by which it wants to be lowered, the star: to float farther down, down below where it sees itself gleam: in the swell of wandering words.

As he does in ‘‘Za¨hle die Mandeln,’’ Celan reinforces the role of the poet as witness here. But now he addresses the other; he gives the task over to ‘‘Du.’’ What we witness, however, is only a call to speech, only a plea and wish that this ‘‘Du’’—who remains ambiguous— should speak. Indeed, here, as virtually everywhere in Celan’s poetry, Du does not speak. Gadamer asks a pivotal question with regard to Celan’s poetry, especially important in the context of an Ich–Du relation that will become the basis for his newly formulated covenant: Who are You and Who am I? Who is Du here? Perhaps the elaboration of the call to speech, the instruction concerning how

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to speak—‘‘als letzter’’—provides some guidance for this question. Speaking as the last, rather than for the last, suggests that the one who speaks belongs to, is intimately connected to, that condition of ‘‘lastness’’ that compels its speaking. This ‘‘Du’’ is solitary, the very last remaining voice—is this solitary figure a camp survivor, implored here to bear witness to his or her horror? In this sense, ‘‘Sprich’’ urges memory and mourning—a conflation of Jiskor and Kaddish in the later poem ‘‘Die Schleuse.’’ Is this figure the speaking God of the covenant, asked to toll his own death-knell, to account for his silence, the last whisper of a divine who chose not to speak? Is this figure the poet, charging himself with a daunting task that, mirroring Kafka’s claim—‘‘I am an end or a beginning’’ (Notebooks 52)—signals a prophetic urgency? Regardless of who or what this Du might represent (and, indeed, Du might be all of these figures), the lines of relation begin to merge one into the other; ‘‘sag deinen Spruch’’ suggests a parallelism with ‘‘za¨hle mich dazu’’—concentric circles moving outward from the self begin to enclose self and other. ‘‘Auch’’ here implies, perhaps, a contrary voice—a voice prevailed upon to have its say in the face of contradiction. The tension characterizing ‘‘Mit wechselndem Schlu ¨ssel’’ is not surmounted by the inclusion of ‘‘Du.’’ ‘‘Sprich—Doch scheide das Nein vom Ja.’’ Set apart from its conditions, speech is the absolute imperative—but, speech of a very particular type, that which refuses to separate ‘‘yes’’ from ‘‘no,’’ that which refuses to make distinctions. Interestingly, if we are to look again to the Hebrew, this type of speech signifies a return to a pre-covenantal state. Brit mila— literally, the cutting of the word—designates the ceremony of circumcision, the sign of the covenant tracing back to Abraham (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 183; Janz 142; Derrida, ‘‘Shibboleth’’ 24). As though the covenant itself is responsible for separation, distinction, difference, in this moment Celan transforms the covenant into one that will represent unity, but still allow for ambiguity. It is a covenant still bound by speech, still signified by speech, but it has acquired a new meaning—‘‘Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn: / gib ihm den Schatten.’’ Schattensprache, a phrase coined by Ralf Zschachlitz, is a language that allows for ambiguity, a language that speaks of the ‘‘truth’’ because it gathers within itself all the paradoxes and contradictions of its poetic object (Meinecke 35). It has embraced

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subtlety and shades of meaning; it arises from, and remains in, the space of the ‘‘between,’’ the moment of encounter. It is the language of return and relation—‘‘gib ihm so viel, / also du um dich verteilt weißt zwischen / Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittacht.’’ Remaining in this pure moment, this language grasps the dynamic force, it captures life. Here, as throughout Celan’s work, redemption grows out of suffering and death—suffering is not to be overcome, but harnessed: ‘‘sieh, wie’s lebendig wird rings—/ Beim Tode! Lebendig!’’ Echoing Kafka’s challenge to his reader—‘‘. . . be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can’t do otherwise, in raptures it will writhe before you’’ (Notebooks 54)—Celan’s exclamation/imperative implores his ‘‘Du’’ to become receptive to a living world, a world that cannot help but reveal itself. Once again, the outside encroaches upon the inside—but here it evokes elation in doing so. Receptivity to the outside is marked by shadow, marred by light—‘‘Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht.’’ Schattensprache is a vehement rejection of the ‘‘false clarity’’ of light, of reason, promised by the Enlightenment (Zschachlitz 52). Rather, darkness here is a protective enclosure. In a poetic account of the mystical tzimtzum, Celan offers a covenantal alternative that precedes the linguistic bond that ‘‘cutting’’ represents. Gathering into itself the momentum of shadows, language takes part in the divine movement of tzimtzum—shrinkage, reduction—a language that closes in upon itself and incorporates its own creation: ‘‘Nun aber schrumpft der Ort, wo du stehst: / Wohin jetzt, Schattenentbloßter, wohin?’’ (Zons 155). Clarifying his purposes in ‘‘The Meridian’’ (a speech given on the occasion of his receiving the Georg Bu ¨cher Prize), Celan says: ‘‘Enlarge art? No. On the contrary, take art with you into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free’’ (Collected Prose 52). As the divine depicted by Kabbalah constricts, becomes narrower and narrower only in order to expand again, so too should art. Curiously, Celan conflates the traditional hierarchy of the Torah—the vertical configuration, that is, of the divine and the human—with the horizontal immanence of Kabbalah implied by the presence of the Shekinah as he calls for this poetic tzimtzum. ‘‘Steige. Taste empor,’’ he calls. And in this upward movement, the star is pulled down to earth—‘‘ein Faden, / an dem er herabwill, der Stern: / um unten zu schwimmen, unten, / wo er sich schimmern sieht.’’ Celan presses further with this duality of realms

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in his later volumes. It is enough here to point briefly to the tension between heaven and earth that is a focal point for Celan’s revaluation of the covenant. The poem concludes on a note of overfullness, of plenitude—offered by language itself. Language has not been surpassed, but transformed to serve a vaster world. ‘‘In der Du ¨nung / wandernder Worte’’ language now belongs to both humanity and God. But perhaps this overfullness is more representative of an impending hysteria, is more accurately compensation for an increasing level of uneasiness? If, indeed, language does not serve a differentiating function, if ‘‘yes’’ cannot be distinguished from ‘‘no,’’ where can we place justice, judgment, accountability? Perhaps Josef K.’s fear that the range of possible (and necessarily possible) interpretation ushered in by the ambiguity of meaning behind the parable ‘‘Before the Law’’—‘‘it turns lying into a universal principle’’ (Basic Kafka 181)—is not unfounded after all?

Sprachgitter In his work on Celan, Jerry Glenn introduces the volume Sprachgitter (Language Mesh) with a question: ‘‘Does Celan’s ‘Gitter’ imply bars and fences—and thereby separation and isolation—or does it refer to its etymological root and suggest union and order?’’ (92). Set up as another ‘‘either/or,’’ this question provides an appropriate point of departure for this section. It is a useful question because it provides two possibilities that more probably imply, rather than exclude, each other. As Celan’s sense of union and order grows stronger—that is, as he becomes more clearly aware of the implications of both a speaking and a non-speaking God for a covenantal structure—his poetry begins to resist penetration and becomes more and more ‘‘hermetic.’’ We see in Sprachgitter the beginnings of what will culminate in the ‘‘Atemkristall’’—the crystallized core of meaning untouchable by speech and description, nevertheless inspiring its own bearing witness. More and more we see the assertion of proximity, the assumption of relation between self and an other that grows more and more immanent. The poems I have chosen for close reading from this volume—‘‘Mit Brief und Uhr,’’ ‘‘Tenebrae,’’ and ‘‘Schuttkahn’’— describe an almost stifling nearness, a relation that encroaches on the

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boundaries of both self and other, but with this nearness comes only further questioning, further uncertainty. It is also here that Celan develops a strategy to hasten this nearness, a strategy borrowed from Kabbalah. Von Schwelle zu Schwelle leaves us with the creative model of tzimtzum—reduction is, paradoxically, the method that links together language and a non-speaking God. In this volume, he introduces devekuth, the mystical practice of harnessing and directing one’s breath toward the divine, with the purpose of uniting oneself with it. It is not until two volumes later, in Atemwende, that he fully explores this possibility, and transforms the practice to suit his aim of meeting-without-merger.3 Throughout this volume, as well, we begin to see this ‘‘Wirklichkeit,’’ still in the process of being ‘‘searched and won,’’ coming into its own, asserting its objective presence. Pervading this volume is the question Celan asks in ‘‘Allerseelen’’—‘‘Was habe / ich getan? Die Nacht besamt, als ko¨nnt es / noch andere geben, na¨chtiger als / diese’’ (‘‘What did I / do? Seminated the night, as though / there could be others, more nocturnal than / this one’’) (130). In seminating the night, his own creative project gives birth to another, and this, he suggests, occurs in the shadow of an oath annulled by silence— ‘‘Findlige, Sterne, / schwarz und voll Sprache: benannt nach / zerschwiegenem Schwur’’ (‘‘Foundlings, stars, / black, full of language: named / after an oath which silence annulled’’). Set once in motion, Celan has sparked a project into which he himself will be enveloped. His ‘‘I’’ will be eclipsed—seelenverfinstert—in the larger project of repairing a broken covenant. Celan’s self-destruction, then, is necessitated by the meeting between self and other, I and thou. Paralleling this process of destruction is the sense of homecoming that grows stronger and stronger in this volume. Homecoming, paradoxically, will come to signify a loss of self, or, more precisely, a coming home to a truer self—a self defined in its relation to the other. ‘‘Kommst du, schwimmendes Licht?’’ Mit Brief und Uhr: Wachs, Ungeschriebnes zu siegeln, 3 I will not be referring here, in any great length, to the poem ‘‘Engfu ¨hrung,’’ which brings together several strains of Celan’s project. For a detailed explication of this important poem, see Peter Szondi’s ‘‘Durch die Enge gefu ¨hrt’’ in Celan-Studien.

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das deinen Namen erriet, das deinen Namen verschlu ¨sselt. Kommst du nun, schwimmendes Licht? Finger, wa¨chsern auch sie, durch fremde, schmerzende Ringe gezogen. Fortgeschmolzen die Kuppen. Kommst du, schwimmendes Licht? Zeitleer die Waben der Uhr, bra¨utlich das Immentausend, reisebereit. Komm, schwimmendes Licht. With letter and clock Wax to seal the unwritten that guessed your name, that enciphers your name. Swimming light, will you come now? Fingers, waxen too, drawn through strange, painful rings. The tips melted away. Swimming light, will you come? Empty of time the honeycomb cells of the clock, bridal the thousand of bees, ready to leave. Swimming light, come.

As the title suggests, communication is connected here to time, but time is peculiarly envisioned as that which culminates in the name and the light. Time, in this sense, is the moment of meeting. It is a

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time emptied of historical specificity (Scharer 27). And yet, this is also a time that cannot be divorced from the events that have effectively stopped time for Celan. Time accompanies the vehicle of relation—‘‘Brief ’’—as if to suggest that it is written communication that guards and protects from the passing of too much time, that insulates memory from the ravages of time. Yet, Uhr measures time; thus written communication here is conducted in a space that moves unimpeded toward the future. The ‘‘unwritten’’—Ungeschriebnes—is, similarly, sealed in a space emptied of time—‘‘Zeitleer.’’ As in ‘‘Der Reisekamerad,’’ where ‘‘dieses Wort ist deiner Mutter Mu ¨ndel,’’ here protection is linked to language. There is a reversal, however. Here it is the unwritten that insulates the name. Here it is that which is not spoken that finds access to true identity. In his later poem, ‘‘Das Geschriebene ho¨hlt sich’’ (‘‘That which was written grows hollow’’) in Atemwende, Celan describes what seems to be a return to the logic of ‘‘Der Reisekamerad.’’ Curiously, here the written, the spoken, carves open a hollow space—an ‘‘eternalized Nowhere’’ (‘‘geewigten Nirgends’’). It is in this space, carved out and emptied by language, that the promise of being grows—‘‘wer / in diesem / Schattengeviert / schnaubt, wer / unter ihm / schimmert auf, schimmert auf, schimmert auf ?’’ (‘‘who / in this / shadow square / snorts, who / beneath it / shines out, shines out, shines out?’’) (258). The written and unwritten are engaged in a phenomenological exchange, vacillating between exhaustion and plenitude, and creating a space where each is mutually dependent upon the other. The written points beyond itself to the unwritten. Similarly, in this earlier account wax both seals—‘‘zu siegeln’’— and melts—‘‘fortgeschmolzen.’’ Identity, bound together with the name, is both protected and threatened with annihilation. ‘‘Drawn through strange, painful rings,’’ these fingers, appendages that perhaps indicate a more separate identity, are subsumed, dissolved. Into what? As if to gather both tendencies, the protective and the destructive, together into one symbol, Celan invokes the light—‘‘Kommst du nun, schwimmendes Licht?’’ As he will later suggest in ‘‘Chymisch’’ (‘‘Alchemical’’) from Niemandrose, it is this precarious identity, in its most insubstantial state, that is directed toward the divine. ‘‘Schweigen, wie Gold gekocht, in / verkohlten, verkohlten / Handen. // Finger, rauchdu ¨nn. Wie Kronen, Luftkronen / um- / Große. Graue. / Fa¨hrte- / lose. / Ko¨nig-/ liche.’’ (‘‘Silence, cooked like gold, in /

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charred, charred / hands./ Fingers, insubstantial as smoke. Like crests, crests of air / around- // Great, grey one. Wake- / less. / Re- / gal) (182). These hands reach out toward, these fingers strain to touch and embrace, that which is causing them to vanish. This silence destroys and allows to be destroyed, and yet it is repeatedly addressed. The oath, annulled by silence, is also sustained by silence. The mechanism of time’s passage, emptied of time, is naturalized—‘‘Zeitleer die Waben der Uhr’’—and consummated by marriage, but a marriage somehow sealing an already collective community—‘‘bra¨utlich das Immentausend.’’ This community is ‘‘ready to depart’’—to leave behind, perhaps, a naturalized dwelling governed by time? Why this restlessness? Where is the swarm planning to go? As if in answer, it is at this moment, when departure is imminent, that the imploring ‘‘Kommst du’’ becomes a gentle but strong command: ‘‘Komm.’’ What is this light, called upon to make its presence known? We can perhaps look to Celan’s relationship with Nelly Sachs for an answer. What began in 1954 as a correspondence between two poets with similar subjects grew into what would become probably Celan’s most important personal relationship with another writer. If we wish to understand just how central the role of communication, of compassion, is for Celan, we need look no further than his letters to Sachs. I want to point, in particular, to an experience the two shared on one of only three brief occasions of meeting, an experience that would continue to inform both their poetry and their letters to each other. In May 1960, Celan and Sachs met in Zurich. From the hotel window, they witnessed a golden light spreading itself over the water.4 Celan captures this in his ‘‘Zu ¨rich, Zum Storchen’’ written for Sachs, on May 30, 1960. This light (Celan is delighted several years later to find it has a Hebrew name; Gershom Scholem refers to it as ‘‘Ziw’’ in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism) comes to represent the symbol of divine–human connection—the light of the Shekinah. At the point that Celan writes this poem, ‘‘Mit Brief und Uhr,’’ he has not yet had the experience in Zurich that will confirm his belief that such an all4 In his Introduction to Paul Celan/Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, Felstiner recounts the reason for this trip. Sachs had been awarded the Droste Prize for women poets, and the prize was to be given at a ceremony in Germany. Sachs dreaded going back to Germany alone, so she asked Celan to accompany her. They chose, rather than staying for an extended period in Germany, to stay in Zurich (x).

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encompassing presence exists, nor does he have the vocabulary to describe such a presence.5 What we glimpse in this early poem is the hope that self-destruction is guided by a larger purpose, that the dissolution of the ‘‘I’’ implies communion with the source of the light. This hope is connected with another—that this ‘‘light,’’ so crucial to his project, is a light that yet incorporates the ‘‘shade’’ of ‘‘Sprich auch du.’’ In other words, this light is not a clarifying presence, but a presence that is itself undifferentiated and ambiguous. This light is a symbol in which seeming opposites are rejoined. Immanence and transcendence—the exile of the mystical, Lurianic Shekinah and the Shekinah of the Hebrew Bible, depicted most tellingly as the hovering presence of Exodus (Wolosky 213)—are brought together as varying aspects of a unified being. This symbol, then, embraces a central impulse of Celan’s poetry: to collapse heaven and earth, to subsitute the horizontal plane for the vertical— or, more precisely, to allow for the simultaneous existence of both realms that continually speak of the other. Significantly, in this sense, ‘‘Mit Brief und Uhr’’ is followed by a short poem, ‘‘Unter ein Bild’’ (‘‘Under a Picture’’). Under the guise of unity, two worlds exist at once: Rabenu ¨berschwa¨rmte Weizenwoge. / Welchen Himmels Blau? Des untern? Obern? / Spa¨ter Pfeil, der von der Seele schnellte. / Sta¨rkres Schwirren. Na¨h’res Glu ¨hen. Beide Welten (‘‘Swarming of ravens over a wheat billow. / Blue of which heaven? The higher? Nether? / Late arrow that the soul released. / Louder whirring. Nearer glow. Both worlds’’). The logic of the ‘‘both/and’’ takes a firmer hold. Proximity as Problem: The First Indictment of the Divine With the invocation of the light at the close of this poem, one world is conjured into being, and seems to encroach upon the other. Two worlds exist side by side, colliding every so often. Proximity and separation are posited together, indicted together. Having collapsed these boundaries, having allowed this world to reach that world ‘‘above,’’ Celan still invokes the traditional covenant, suggesting that God can be held accountable for his silence. There has been a rup5 In the poem ‘‘Nah, im Aortenbogen,’’ from Fadensonnen, Celan finally names this light—‘‘Ziw, jenes Licht.’’ Related in Paul/Celan Nelly Sachs: Briefwechsel (133).

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ture, he contends in ‘‘Tenebrae,’’ and this rupture, it seems, can be repaired only by God himself (Wolosky 207): Nah sind wir, Herr, Nahe und greifbar. Gegriffen schon, Herr, Ineinander verkrallt, als wa¨r der Leib eines jeden von uns dein Leib, Herr. Bete, Herr, Bete zu uns, Wir sind nah. Windschief gingen wir hin, Gingen wir hin, uns zu bu ¨cken nach Mulde und Maar. Zur Tra¨nke gingen wir, Herr. Es war Blut, es war, was du vergossen, Herr. Es gla¨nzte. Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr. Augen und Mund stehn so offen und leer, Herr. Wir haben getrunken, Herr. Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr. Bete, Herr. Wir sind nah. We are near, Lord, near and at hand. Handled already, Lord, clawed and clawing as though the body of each of us were your body, Lord. Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near.

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Askew we went there, went there to bend down to the trough, to the center. To be watered we went there, Lord. It was blood, it was what you shed, Lord. It gleamed. It cast your image into our eyes, Lord. Our eyes and our mouths are so open and empty, Lord. We have drunk, Lord. The blood and that image that was in the blood, Lord. Pray, Lord. We are near.

As in ‘‘Sprich auch du’’ and ‘‘Mit Brief und Uhr,’’ here there is a call to speech. As though coaxing God into relation by a reassurance of proximity—‘‘nah sind wir, Herr’’—this ‘‘wir’’ asks for its own reassurance, which can be gained only by God’s prayer. Where ‘‘Du’’ remains nameless and ambiguous in the previous poems, here Du is clearly and unquestioningly God. ‘‘Wir sind nah’’ might be read as the reversal of the plaintive ‘‘ho¨rst du mich’’ of ‘‘Gespra¨ch im Gebirg’’; this is an assertion—we are near, we are listening. The next stanza places God and the ‘‘wir’’ of this poem—I would venture, the victims of the Holocaust—into a position where both are victims. Yet, the conditional ‘‘als wa¨r’’ allows for the possibility that perhaps this is not an identical position. Closeness is connected to the body—‘‘als wa¨r der Leib eines jeden von uns dein Leib, Herr.’’ It is by means of this closeness that ‘‘wir’’ has already been tortured— ‘‘gegriffen schon.’’ There is a subtle link to Kafka here: Kafka’s description of the Christ as an exemplary figure of the suffering that describes the human condition is couched in terms of the body, a collective suffering felt individually in the flesh—‘‘we all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form’’ (Notebooks 49). It is here that Kafka makes the explosive statement, ‘‘there is no room for justice.’’ Kafka’s resignation that justice is not a viable category with which to approach suffering, juxtaposed with Celan’s demanding an accounting because of suffering, is telling, and as opposed as these

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two strategies appear, they are directed toward similar ends. Kafka empties the Christ-figure of all superhuman qualities—in Kafka’s project, the Christ-figure is productive only insofar as it serves as a poetic expression of the human condition. Here, Celan places God on trial before the court of human opinion, before, as Kafka would have it, the ‘‘human tribunal.’’ In the process of this trial, God (the speaking God of the covenant) is drained of superhuman qualities as well—‘‘Herr’’ is the object of anger or pity, but he has no power here. As Abraham becomes a figure worthy of calling in Kafka’s parable— and part and parcel of this ‘‘worthiness’’ is recognizing the inapplicability of justice to his case—‘‘wir’’ demands recognition for this torture committed because of a bodily connection, a connection to God’s likeness: ‘‘Herr’’ is prevailed upon to ‘‘pray.’’ God is effectively disempowered here, even as he is called to an accounting for the horrific actions he committed—‘‘Es war Blut, es war, was du vergossen, Herr.’’ God—not man—is taken to task for his having lost the power of the sacred. Indeed, in this account, it is not ‘‘wir’’ who has failed to keep up relations—‘‘Windschief gingen wir hin, gingen wir hin, uns zu bu ¨cken nach Mulde und Maar’’; dehumanized, made into animals ready to feed at a trough and to be ‘‘watered,’’ this movement—‘‘zu bu ¨cken’’—also faintly suggests that ‘‘wir’’ continued, even under these conditions, to bow before God. God’s violation of the sacred, his act of bloodshed, paradoxically leads here to another level of violation, a violation of the second commandment on the part of ‘‘wir.’’ The ‘‘gleaming’’ of God’s violent, and violating, act casts his ‘‘image’’ into their eyes, suggesting the undoing—intentional or compelled—of ‘‘du sollst kein Bild machen.’’ In the later poem ‘‘Bei Wein und Verlorenheit’’ (‘‘Over wine and lostness’’) God’s image—‘‘dein Bild’’—becomes ‘‘bebilderten Sprache’’—imaged language. Here, and in this later poem, this image is precisely what needs to be overcome, rethought, replaced by an alternative vision. The moment that follows this seeming violation recalls the Eucharist, but here, God’s ‘‘crime’’ is literally consumed, internalized—‘‘Wir haben getrunken, Herr. / Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr.’’ The bloodshed and the ‘‘image’’—the marker of violation—are brought together in what is either the sacred blessing over the wine or a simple act of refreshment of those parched, ‘‘open and empty’’ mouths. And this ambiguous act—both sacred and mundane—is sealed by a final assertion of proximity—‘‘Bete, Herr /

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wir sind nah.’’ Is this last statement of ‘‘nearness’’ spoken as a warning? As though to say, ‘‘God, pray for your own survival? Our nearness speaks to our anger, our readiness to call you to an accounting?’’ Perhaps this last statement is spoken as a comfort? Celan’s use of prayer here, as the specific mark of dialogue that ‘‘wir’’ requests from ‘‘Herr,’’ echoes Kafka’s statement: ‘‘the relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer’’ (Notebooks 51). The assertion of ‘‘nearness,’’ in this sense, would seem to hint at a tentative hope— that the covenant that allows the traditional God to be held accountable for a seeming breach also allows for a relationship of human solidarity. That God does not answer here—that he cannot be prodded, coaxed, (bullied?) into dialogue—perhaps makes possible the human turn. Celan reinvokes the traditional covenant in order to bring God back into a type of relation. By predicating ethics, as he does, upon the relation, the bottom drops out of his ‘‘system’’ if he reduces the first cause to the isolated self. ‘‘In the beginning was the relation’’—as it is for Buber, so too is it for Celan. Unlike Buber, however, whose I–thou, while beautifully construed, smacks of a kind of voluntary naı¨vete´, particularly as he goes on to formulate his stance of forgiveness so soon after the war, Celan exposes the pain and brutality upon which the relation is grounded. As well, he continues to remain uncertain of its ‘‘actual’’ existence, but places his insistence upon it alongside the maxim that guides so much of his project: ‘‘Wirklichkeit ist nicht, Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein.’’ We need to seek out, conjure into being, this relation. A short stanza from the poem ‘‘Sprachgitter’’ betrays his wish in the primacy of the relation, but a relation that never brings resolution between self and other: ‘‘Wa¨r ich wie du. Wa¨rst du wie ich. / Standen wir nicht / unter einem Passat? / wir sind Fremde.’’ Written in the conditional form, suggesting a fundamental uncertainty about its ‘‘truth,’’ this stanza nevertheless illustrates the imperative ‘‘ought’’ that characterizes Celan’s position. He reveals this further in his ‘‘Meridian’’—‘‘I am looking for all this with my imprecise . . . finger on a map—a child’s map, I must admit. None of these places can be found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist’’ (Collected Prose 54). A child’s task—this search for the necessary relation that does not exist, but ought to? Perhaps. Or perhaps, as Nietzsche suggests earlier in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it is the child, freed from the confines of

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concretized, systematic thinking, who is the most capable agent of revaluation? In any case, this conditional relation underlines and drives Celan’s project, and, in a sense, is the secular reworking of a covenant that is also formally conditional. At the bottom of this relation is strangeness, distance: ‘‘wir sind Fremde’’—a distance that underlies communion and that itself cannot be reconciled. In Niemandsrose, this communion-through-distance, this affiliation on the basis of a gap in knowledge will grow stronger and be grounded theologically in the Law of the Stranger (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 201; Levinas, ‘‘Being and the Other’’ 19). The Reified Question This relation, clothed in the conditional, indicates the reign of uncertainty in the new covenantal model that Celan will go on to promote. Celan’s ‘‘Schuttkahn’’ (‘‘Rubble Barge’’) serves as a reification of the question as guiding force, and yet as force that is exhausted of meaning. Celan offers here a description of our present condition, and his ‘‘solution’’ to this condition—one that finds its source in mystical Judaism: Wasserstunde, der Schuttkahn fa¨hrt uns zu Abend, wir haben, wie er, keine Eile, ein totes Warum steht am Heck. . . . . . . . . . . Geleichtert. Die Lunge, die Qualle bla¨ht sich zur Glocke, ein brauner Seelenfortsatz erreicht das hellgeatmete Nein. Water hour, the rubble barge bears us to evening, like it we’re not in a hurry, a dead Why stands at the stern. . . . . . . . . . . Lightened. The lung, the jellyfish inflates itself to a bell, a brown

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soul-prolongation arrives at the No breathed bright.

There is a sluggishness here. Heading toward evening, perhaps toward an eclipse of absolutes, we are yet carried by the spirit of questioning. Primo Levi recounts in his Survival in Auschwitz an incident that appears to have relevance here. An officer replies to Levi who dares question ‘‘why?’’—‘‘Hier ist kein Warum’’(here there is no why) (25). Perhaps the most insidious of crimes perpetrated by the Nazis was the intent to remove the ‘‘why?’’ from the heart and soul of a people founded both on challenging and the belief in ultimate justice. This ‘‘totes Warum’’ that ‘‘steht am Heck’’—does it signify a loyalty to the question that has been stripped of all meaning? The question no longer reveals justice—perhaps it never did. To this, Job will certainly attest. This realization, however, threatens the very fabric of the covenant. As though at an impasse himself, Celan breaks off here (he’ll pick up this argument later in Niemandsrose, and take it toward its necessary conclusion), shifts his focus onto the means of reviving the ‘‘dead why.’’ Interestingly, to do so he turns once again to Kafka. Resigning himself to Kafka’s ‘‘belief like a guillotine, as heavy, as light’’ (‘‘so schwer, so leicht’’) (Notebooks 39), Celan emerges ‘‘geleichtert,’’ perhaps lightened of the pain of this ‘‘why’’—a pain that he does not abandon, but rather harnesses as the means for approaching the divine. Yet the burden becomes all the ‘‘heavier’’ when it reveals the profound negation—this ‘‘Nein’’—at its core. This ‘‘No breathed bright’’ (‘‘hellgeatmete Nein’’) is Celan’s introduction of the Atemwende, viewed specifically through the lens of the mystical devekuth of prophetic Kabbalah. Scholem explains that Abulafia, the exemplary figure of the prophetic tradition, diverges greatly from the theosophic Kabbalah, and indeed from traditional Judaism, in his formulations of the concentration of breath with the intent of unifying with the divine (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, fourth lecture). Both Scholem and Buber stress that union is never the ultimate goal, but rather, meeting (Wolosky 228, 231). The distance between self and divine is actually a preservative measure— should the self unite fully with the divine, the result could only be the annihilation of the self. What Abulafia has proposed here, somewhat blasphemously, then, becomes a constant source of temptation and

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frustration for Celan. Celan vacillates continuously between two intense desires—self-annihilation by means of collapsing boundaries between self and other and self-identification by means of dynamic tension with the other. The comfort promised by union is countered by his equally strong wish to sustain the only ethical lines of relation he deems possible—a relation with the other who remains always other. Therefore, he will not allow himself to choose Abulafia’s method, or, rather, he chooses the method but not the goal. Devekuth becomes for him a means of ‘‘Seelenfortsatz’’ (soul-prolongation)— the soul is not annihilated, but sustained. Further, the soul is sustained in its arrival (‘‘erreicht’’) at this No that is itself sustained by breath. Arrival, then, is a constantly unfolding process, and is constantly unfolding in the sphere of negativity, of silence. Devekuth, the turning of one’s breath, as it in enacted here, is process- not goaldirected. It becomes a method of sustaining a relationship founded on difference, rather than a collapse into identity. Somewhat paradoxically, however, difference makes language equally as problematic as identity does. Language can occur only in a world of differentiation; this we learn from Genesis. But it appears that as the relationship grows more and more encompassing, language also fails.

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Building the Space Between Die Niemandsrose Die Niemandsrose (The No-one’s Rose) is pervaded by a growing sense of abandonment that is paradoxically accompanied by a moving-toward the Du. As we saw in the previous volume, Celan is becoming more perplexed about the nature of the divine. In his poetics, the covenant is a problematic structure that needs to be both sustained and transformed. All at once the speaking God of the covenant is superseded by the mystical, silent God, but a trace remains, a longing for a dialogical relationship. Indictment is still a prominent reaction; for instance, the poem ‘‘Es war Erde in ihnen’’ (‘‘There was earth inside them’’) describes activity taking place under the skies of a punishing God—‘‘. . . Und sie lobten nicht Gott, / der, so ho¨rten sie, alles dies wollte, / der, so ho¨rten sie, alles dies wußte’’ (‘‘. . . And they did not praise God, / who, so they heard, wanted all this, / who, so they heard, knew all this’’) (156). The God of the covenant is still held accountable for his breach of covenant, but there is a growing sense that this depiction of the divine is becoming less and less acceptable, less and less capable of serving an ethical purpose. Even by the end of this poem, Celan appears to be moving toward a vision of the divine that will free the self for a connection with the other. Still very tentative, Celan begins to ‘‘forgive’’ God by offering another face for him, by giving joint responsibility to God and humanity, and by collapsing the realms of heaven and earth. Celan is becoming far more mystical here, even offering an account of the Lurianic shvirat hakelim, the breaking of the vessels. The movement of this volume seems to mirror the cryptic line of ‘‘Es war Erde in ihnen’’—‘‘O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du’’ (‘‘O one, o none, o no one, o you’’)— moving from the distinctive, but very narrow boundaries of the speaking God, Celan tests the possibilities of the silent God of nothingness, and finds that it is bound inextricably to the other, the Du. In this chapter, I will be tracing several lines of argumentation that are beginning to converge in Celan’s project. The first is the move-

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ment toward this mystical God, which entails a surpassing of the specific God of the covenant, a movement that strains against the logic of the both/and that Celan also wants to uphold. This is a decisive movement that sparks a series of further revaluative measures: the new prevalence of the ‘‘we’’ over the ‘‘I,’’ the collapsing of heaven and earth, the explosion of possibility grounded in uncertainty. A New Conception of the Divine Just as Kafka can go about his ethical revaluation only after he constructs the ontological base—a commandment constructed on the shaky ground of human weakness—upon which these ethics will stand, Celan pursues a conception of the divine that will support the ethical claims he goes on to make. Interestingly, although still holding to many of the same formal and linguistic strategies as Kafka does, here Celan begins to reverse Kafka’s intentions. Like Celan, Kafka is drawn to a negative theology, to a divine that neither speaks nor acts in human affairs. But, just as strongly he is drawn to a punitive, personal, though still mysterious, figure, whose capacity for punishment is evidence of his continued connection with humanity. Where a personal God serves a crucial poetic and ethical function in Kafka’s project, namely, as the receptacle and bearer of a kind of justice and judgment (even if these categories remain largely impenetrable), for Celan, having directly witnessed the horror of the Holocaust, it is absolutely necessary to overthrow this personal God, this God who has the capacity for speech. The traditional interpretation of the covenant—as a quid pro quo based on obedience and resulting favor and protection by God— leads inevitably to several terrifying conclusions if applied to the Holocaust: (1) that the Holocaust is divine retribution for a transgression committed by the Jews,1 (2) that it is the fulfillment in history of the divine plan that we cannot see in its entirety (Rubenstein 166).2 Two 1 For a full description of this argument, see ‘‘The Dean and the Chosen People’’ in Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz. 2 Rubenstein argues that this is Maybaum’s position, namely, that God was working through Hitler, to fully bring the Jewish people into the realities of the Modern Era. He quotes Maybaum: ‘‘God used this instrument to cleanse, to purify, to punish a sinful world; the six million Jews, they died an innocent death; they died because of the sins of others.’’

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questions must be posed to these interpretations: What possible transgression could have been committed to merit this punishment? What kind of God enters history in this way to fulfill his ‘‘plan’’? For Celan, both are profoundly unacceptable means for judging the Holocaust. At the same time, though he anticipates, and has himself reached, the impasse that Rubenstein later explores so thoroughly in After Auschwitz, he wrestles with the finality of Rubenstein’s resigned conclusion—‘‘If I truly believed in God as the omnipotent author of the historical drama and in Israel as His Chosen People, I had no choice but to accept [the] conclusion that Hitler unwittingly acted as God’s agent in committing six million Jews to slaughter. I could not believe in such a God, nor could I believe in Israel as the Chosen People of God after Auschwitz’’ (3). Celan cannot believe in, nor ask us to believe in, such a God either. But he desperately wants to sustain the formal covenant—the covenant grounded in a dialogical relation—that this God once represented. Again and again in this volume, we are given accounts of the specific God of the covenant being supplanted by the Niemand, the No One, the ineffable God of Jewish mysticism. ‘‘Radix, matrix,’’ for instance, depicts the evolution of ‘‘Wurzel. / Wurzel Abrahams. Wurzel Jesse. Niemandes / Wurzel—o unser’’ (‘‘Root. / Abraham’s root. Jesse’s root. No one’s / root—O ours.’’). Jerry Glenn suggests that Celan traces the history of the covenant from its roots in Judaism to those in Christianity by establishing the continuity between Abraham and Jesse (115). The passage of the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 11: 1–11) that Christians read as a foretelling of the coming of Christ and the ‘‘new’’ covenant is spoken by Jesse. Opting for ‘‘Niemandes Wurzel,’’ Celan seems to disavow the culturally specific claims of the covenant, perhaps implying that both traditions are part and parcel of the same faulty and dangerous thinking. The premises of both Judaism and Christianity are deeply challenged by the Holocaust. Our inheritance, in this post-Holocaust world, is the abandonment of both. Now we are bound, literally and figuratively, to no one, but, strangely, to a personified No One. Perhaps this personification is a compromise to Rubenstein’s position, a means of remaining bound (even if to Nothing), a reinstatement of Kafka’s imperative: ‘‘obey, even if one hears no command’’ (Diaries 257)? ‘‘Psalm’’ offers another instance of this transformation. In this poem, a revised account of creation is offered, attributing our exis-

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tence to the Niemand—‘‘Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, / niemand bespricht unsern Staub. / Niemand’’ (‘‘No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, / no one conjures our dust. / No one’’) (178). Remnants of the divine utterance, captured here in ‘‘bespricht,’’ are conflated with artistic representation—‘‘knetet.’’ It is to this God that humanity is now bound, to this God that one must bear witness—‘‘Gelobt seist du, Niemand. / Dir zulieb wollen / wir blu ¨hn. / Dir / entgegen’’ (‘‘Praised be your name, no one. / For your sake / we shall flower. / Towards / you’’). It is in this God’s image that humanity is created. The connection between human and divine lies in negation. It is in the ‘‘flowering’’ of the timeless negativity of humanity that the ‘‘Niemandsrose’’ is produced—‘‘Ein Nichts / waren wir, sind wir, werden / wir bleiben, blu ¨hend: / die Nichts-, die / Niemandsrose’’ (‘‘A nothing / we were, are, shall / remain, flowering: / the nothing-, the / no one’s rose’’). Now devoid of its historical specificity, this divine figure, along with the human, unfolds constantly in a realm of timelessness. Past, present, and future are made continuous. As humanity and the divine are depicted together in terms of negativity, so too are they brought together in the project of redefining the covenant. ‘‘Bei Wein und Verlorenheit’’ (‘‘Over wine and lostness’’) establishes a strange dialectics of proximity and distance, and suggests that the poet must strive, along with God, in finding an appropriate and ethical model to replace the traditional model. In a strikingly visual representation, we witness this surpassing of the traditional covenant: Bei Wein und Verlorenheit, bei beider Neige: ich ritt durch den Schnee, ho¨rst du, ich ritt Gott in die Ferne—die Na¨he, er sang, es war unser letzter Ritt u ¨ber die Menschen-Hu ¨rden. Sie duckten sich, wenn sie uns u ¨ber sich ho¨rten, sie schrieben, sie logen unser Gewieher um in eine ihrer bebilderten Sprachen.

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Over wine and lostness, over the running-out of both: I rode through the snow, do you hear, I rode God into farness—nearness, he sang, it was our last ride over the human hurdles. They ducked when they heard us above their heads, they wrote, they lied our whinnying into one / of their be-imaged languages. (158)

Both wine and exile, the markers of Jewish tradition and continuity, have become insufficient grounding for theological pursuit. The threat of isolation, depicted once again in this ‘‘ho¨rst du,’’ still echoes the connection declared in the Shema, still remains the impetus for movement. The distinctly monological tone that this phrase acquired in Gespra¨ch im Gebirg is here the mark of relation. In a reversal of ‘‘Tenebrae,’’ here God asserts his nearness, despite any attempts to drive him away—‘‘ich ritt Gott in die Ferne—die Na¨he, er sang.’’ How is this ‘‘nearness’’ to be understood? In the midst of this dynamic struggle between distance and proximity, the poet and God merge; togetherness is established in the chase of God into ‘‘farness’’ by the poet, and both ride together for the last time—‘‘es war unser letzter Ritt u ¨ber die Menschen-Hu ¨rden.’’ Those below who witness this last ride turn what they see into a ‘‘lie’’; they turn this dynamic struggle, this pull between distance and proximity, into a fixed image. They fix this image further by language. The reader is tempted to ask, then, is it this lie—this deliberate act of lying—that forces this struggle to be ‘‘the last’’? Might the struggle have been able to continue if we didn’t need so desperately to fix it, to limit it, to explain away its complexities? And yet, language or, more specifically, the tendency toward ‘‘bebilderten Sprachen,’’ is thoroughly human—it is the most tenacious ‘‘Menschen-Hu ¨rden’’ of all. If God and the poet are working together here to transform the covenant, if their struggle occurs in a space over the merely human, they seem to suggest that the covenant can be established only in a place where language resists becoming imaged, resists reification.

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But, to achieve this type of language is to overcome being human. Like Kafka, Celan does not offer this possibility as an option; he does not resolve the tension that results constantly from the ‘‘double-bind of the covenant.’’ What he seems to be suggesting is that the struggle between the poet and God here mirrors the struggle at the base of being human, and this is a struggle that we have to sustain—we must both embrace human potential and overcome the merely human (like Nietzsche’s all-too-human) tendencies to simplify and reduce the profoundly complex. Part of this tension of being and overcoming is addressed in the type of God that Celan depicts more and more frequently in his later volumes. He attempts a more mystical conception, only to find that indictment here as well, at least on some level, is a necessary starting point for further connection. ‘‘Dein Hinu ¨bersein heute Nacht’’ (‘‘Your being beyond in the night’’) suggests that the mystical God of Lurianic Kabbalism is also bound up with the betrayal of the covenant. He gives an account of shvirat hakelim: ‘‘Gott, das lasen wir, ist / ein Teil und ein zweiter, zerstreuter’’ (‘‘God, so we read, is / a part and a second, a scattered one’’) (164). This account rings hollow, it brings with it no comfort because, ‘‘im Tod / all der Gema¨hten / wa¨chst er sich zu’’ (‘‘in the death / of all those mown down / he grows himself whole’’). This scattered God, does he feed off the dead? Or does he grow stronger in the bearing witness to the dead? Perhaps it is the condition of exile that is more firmly established here, and in this sense ‘‘growing whole’’ implies the further separation of the suffering Shekinah? Curiously, this implication in death does not break connection, but strengthens it—‘‘Dorthin / fu ¨hrt uns der Blick, / mit dieser / Ha¨lfte / haben wir Umgang’’ (‘‘There / our looking leads us, / with this / half / we keep up relations’’). Where is the ‘‘there’’ that our glance leads? With whom do we keep up relations? Moving Past Indictment As we have seen, indictment appears to be the necessary first stage in Celan’s reformulation of the divine. This is a stance that will never lose its power; it is the cornerstone of the development and maintenance of a faith situated in questioning and challenge. The struggle against any clearly delineated and documented conception of the divine—announced in the previous poem by the phrase ‘‘das lasen

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wir’’—is underlined by the hermeneutic imperative of Celan’s poetry. However, in terms of covenantal theology, Celan seems to suggest that this stance of indictment must give way to a larger sense of human responsibility. It is not enough to continue to condemn God for his apparent betrayal of a human-constructed doctrine. We cannot, Celan implies, posit an ineffable, unknowable God and proceed to confine this God by human limitation. Consequently, indictment breaks off precisely when the presence of the other grows stronger, when the Niemand-God and the Du are joined. Zu beiden Ha¨nden, da wo die Sterne mir wuchsen, fern allen Himmeln, nah allen Himmeln: Wie wacht es sich da! Wie tut sich die Welt uns auf, mitten durch uns! Du bist, wo dein Aug ist, du bist oben, bist unten, ich finde hinaus. O diese wandernde leere gastliche Mitte. Getrennt, fall ich dir zu, fa¨llst du mir zu, einander entfallen, sehn wir hindurch: Das Selbe hat uns verloren, das Selbe hat uns vergessen, das Selbe hat uns— On either hand, there where stars grew for me, far

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from all heavens, near all heavens: How one’s awake there! How the world opens for us, right through the midst of ourselves! You are where your eye is, you are above, are below, I find my way out. O this wandering empty hospitable midst. Apart I fall to you, you fall to me, fallen away from each other, we see through: One and the same has lost us, one and the same has forgotten us, one and the same has us—(166)

‘‘Zu beiden Ha¨nden’’ explores this movement away from absolute indictment. Recognition of the omnipresence of the Du is the precondition for acceptance of the Niemand-God. Celan writes, ‘‘Du bist / wo dein Aug ist, du bist / oben, bist / unten, ich / finde hinaus.’’ The Ich frees itself, finds its way out, only in the pervasive being of the Du. We see here again the ‘‘soul-prolongation’’ (Seelenfortsatz) heralded as an integral part of the artistic process in ‘‘Schuttkahn.’’ And, again, the conditions for ‘‘homecoming’’ remain the same— reaching toward the void, a welcoming, perhaps intimate, emptiness, one finds one’s way home—‘‘O diese wandernde leere / gastliche Mitte.’’ Separation is again necessary for union—‘‘Getrennt / fall ich dir zu / fa¨llst du mir zu, einander entfallen sehn wir hindurch.’’ In this divided-union, the imperative that guides the Bremen Prize Speech, ‘‘hindurchgehen,’’ is echoed—‘‘sehn wir hindurch.’’ Just as

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language must ‘‘pass through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech,’’ so too must this relation between Ich and Du overcome the obstacles that keep this relation from fully developing. This ‘‘overcoming’’ begins with a recognition of common experience, an understanding of a similar fate—abandonment—‘‘Das Selbe / hat uns verloren, / Das Selbe / hat uns vergessen.’’ ‘‘Das Selbe’’ inches closer toward the Niemandrose, set apart by means of its sameness. But, the final accusation, which perhaps would have gone on to speak of complicity or conspiracy, remains unvoiced—‘‘Das Selbe / hat uns—.’’ It is as if this type of accusation, once perfectly natural, has become inappropriate, and entirely counter to the larger project of Ich–Du relations. Abandonment, having been forgotten—these are elements that must be spoken, because they are conducive to the ethical project of meeting (Begegnung). Anything else now fails to serve a reconstructive purpose. Toward a Secular Covenant Freed from the accusatory binding to the divine, the self is reconfigured. Celan offers a de-deified version of shvirat hakelim, providing an account of a natural cataclysm that gives birth all at once to the relational positioning of self and other, and to the language that will serve this relation. He writes: Was geschah? Der Stein trat aus dem Berge. Wer erwachte? Du und ich. Sprache, Sprache. Mit-Stern. Neben-Erde. ¨ rmer. Offen. Heimatlich. A Wohin gings? Gen Unverklungen. Mit dem Stein gings, mit uns zwein. Herz und Herz. Zu schwer befunden. Schwerer werden. Leichter sein. What occurred? The boulder left the mountain. Who awakened? You and I. Language, language. Co-earth. Fellow-planet. Poorer. Open. Homelandly. The course? Towards the unsubsided. Your course and mine was the boulder’s flight.

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Heart and heart. Adjudged too heavy. Grow more heavy. Be more light. (208)

In the form of catechism, which we will see again in our discussion of ‘‘Mandorla,’’ Celan uses the question to remind us of the condition of being human. And yet, though he uses the catechism, a strategy that provides set answers, these ‘‘answers’’ serve to conceal more than they reveal. A division clearly marks here the condition from the course of action. The first set of questions guides one toward an understanding of the primacy of the Ich–Du relation. Awakening simultaneously, Du and Ich cannot be separated. Are we to read language, earth, and planet as a fuller explanation of the nature of Du? If so, Ich would be awakened into a relation at once natural and humanly constructed. The recognition of ‘‘I’’ here creates a paradoxical understanding of its position—it is ‘‘poorer’’ for having lost a sense of autonomy, of distinguishability, from the other, but at the same time, possibilities multiply—it is ‘‘open,’’ freed from the alienated self. ‘‘Heimatlich’’ again implies the ‘‘homecoming’’ promised in the Bremen Prize Speech. To come home to oneself is to recognize the interdependence of Ich and Du. Guided by another question—‘‘wohin gings?’’—the second part of this poem is suggestive of Kafka’s ‘‘wayless way.’’ To be ‘‘on course’’ here means to have embraced paradox and ceaseless movement— ‘‘Gen Unverklungen.’’ That ‘‘Stein,’’ the marker upon a gravestone of a loved one to bear witness to his or her death, sets the ‘‘course’’ in motion suggests that this death feeds the new relation. And with this course comes another imperative—‘‘Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.’’ Echoing again Kafka’s ‘‘belief like a guillotine, as heavy, as light,’’ Celan promotes a casting off of boundaries marked by systematic doctrine. Lightness suggests limitless possibility, but brings with it a greater burden: to create meaning in the face of emptiness. Because language is born in precisely the moment that Du and Ich ‘‘awake,’’ it too is placed in the context of simultaneous constriction and limitlessness. Effectively, in de-deifying this account of creation, Celan has taken language from the realm of the divine and placed it squarely in the realm of humanity, and, most precisely, in the space between Ich and Du. We see traces in this of the Kabbalistic teaching that language precedes divine creation. On two levels, this freeing of language from

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the divine is crucial for the remainder of Celan’s project. In terms of the creative power that language embodies, Celan shifts the locus of power from God to man. In the same way as Hasidism holds that the Messiah can be brought to earth by means of concentrated focus— that is, the hand of God can be forced by human action—Celan’s first linguistic move after his revaluation of the divine nature is to suggest that human beings now must use language as a further revaluative measure. It is through the correct and focused use of language that the divine will be given a new face. On a related level, the language used in this process will also be formulated in the space between Ich and Du—it is a product of the void that cannot be crossed. His language creeps toward the Meridian. The divine is never made entirely negligible in Celan’s project, however. On the contrary, the presence of a divine command, perhaps verging on the inaudible, looms behind Celan’s attempts at secularization (Wolosky 194). What we witness is a constant vacillation between presence and absence, being and becoming, proximity and distance, belief and skepticism. As with Kafka’s, Celan’s project rests on the premise that tension between opposing forces should not be collapsed or reconciled. Therefore, we see the curious admission in ‘‘Soviel Gestirne’’—‘‘Soviel Gestirne, die / man uns hinha¨lt. . . . O diese Wege, galaktisch’’ (‘‘So many constellations that are held out to us. . . . O these ways, galactic’’) (162). Compulsion and volition coexist, forming their own constellation of sorts. Something that exists compels response, asserts its own existence—‘‘die man uns hinha¨lt’’— holds the spectrum of dizzying possibility out toward us. At the same time, the future lies unmarked, looms ahead. There is no directive force guiding the way—paths are numerous and uncharted— ‘‘Wieviel, O Wieviel Wege’’ (‘‘How many, O how many paths’’—‘‘. . . Rauscht der Brunnen’’) (. . . Plashes the fountain) (186). Celan’s phenomenological approach is both receptive and active, affirming at the same time being and becoming. It is this approach that informs the kind of language that he will go on to use—a language that must be both evocative and creative because it is directed toward both poles. On the level of metaphor, being and becoming suggest, again, the distinction between condition and prescribed action, representing, in a specifically Jewish sense, exile and waiting. Celan joins Kafka in his embrace of two seemingly contradictory claims—‘‘Alles ist wahr und ein Warten auf Wahres’’ (‘‘all is true and a waiting for the True’’—

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‘‘Dein Hinu ¨bersein heute Nacht’’ [‘‘Your being beyond in the night’’]) and ‘‘Wirlichkeit ist nicht, Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein’’ (‘‘reality is not simply there, reality must be searched and won’’). To ‘‘wait’’ for the True is, in the context of Celan’s project, to be an active participant in its creation. The True is not bestowed upon passive, indifferent individuals, but is to be ‘‘searched and won.’’ Truth-construction is a rigorous business, to be divorced neither from human responsibility nor from the continuity of tradition. Like Kafka, Celan resists all simplistic and reductive notions of the divine. His method is neither deductive nor inductive, but clearly phenomenological—the divine is neither product nor producer of an ethical system, but somehow continually transforms as Celan’s instructions for humanity deepen their focus. Exposed in all its complexity, the nature of the divine becomes the object of an unproductive pursuit, and Celan instead asserts the need for human action. Both accounts of divine creation—Genesis and shvirat hakelim— appear lacking. What must be re-embraced, Celan seems to suggest, is the human potential to model behavior for the divine. Representative of this is ‘‘Zweiha¨usig, Ewiger,’’ which promotes human connection despite the insufficiency of the divine model: Zweiha¨usig, Ewiger, bist du, unbewohnbar. Darum baun wir und bauen. Darum steht sie, diese erba¨rmliche Bettstatt,—im Regen, da steht sie. Komm, Geliebte. Daß wir hier liegen, das ist die Zwischenwand—: Er hat dann genug an sich selber, zweimal. Laß ihn, er habe sich ganz, als das Halbe und abermals Halbe. Wir, wir sind das Regenbett, er komme und lege uns trocken. . . . . . . . . . . . . Er kommt nicht, er legt uns nicht trocken. Two-housed, eternal one, you are uninhabitable. That is why

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we build and build. That is why it stands, this pitiable bedstead,—in the rain, there it stands. Come, beloved. That we may lie here, this is the partition—: He will then suffice himself, twice over. Leave him, let him have himself wholly, as the half and half again. We, we are the rain-bed, let him come down and lay us down dry. . . . . . . . . . . . . He does not come, does not lay us down dry. (196)

The incapacity of the divine to provide solace, meaning, logic— ‘‘unbewohnbar’’—is the precondition for human activity—‘‘Darum baun wir und bauen.’’ The relation between self and other only finds its shelter in the space created because of divine shortcoming. There is an explicit hope here—‘‘Er hat genug an sich selber . . . er komme und lege uns trocken.’’ Perhaps the model given by Ich and Du will conjure God again into being, remind God of his once-protective nature (Weissenberger 246). This hope is disappointed—‘‘er kommt nicht.’’ Here we see resignation, an acceptance of abandonment— ‘‘Laß ihn, er habe sich ganz.’’ As if to say—let us get on, let us put our efforts into something over which we can affect some change, and, perhaps in the process, act as a suitable model for the divine. It is to the space of the between—this ‘‘Zwischenwand’’—that Celan suggests we orient our movement. Part and parcel of the process is a stringent ethic: remain in the space between—neither heaven nor earth, speech nor silence, will suffice to the exclusion of the other. Only in the space that, like Celan’s Meridian, both divides and circumscribes a relation will productive meeting take place. If there is any chance at all of God’s being called back into a dialogue, it is only here—in this no-place—that this may occur. It is here, too, that human connection, love, is possible. ‘‘Geliebte’’ recalls the ‘‘Song of Songs,’’ the most intimate and sensual moment in the Hebrew Bible. In this space of abandonment, of disappointment, there remains the comfort and solace of love, and there remains, as well (‘‘pitiable’’ as it may be), a structure under which this love can take cover.

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Where is this space between? We can begin to approach it by determining where it is not. It is not to be found in the realm denounced in ‘‘Bei Wein und Verlorenheit’’ as ‘‘bebilderten Sprache.’’ Fixed in language, imaged in words, this ‘‘imaged language’’ precludes the necessary movement of exchange. Looking once again to ‘‘Soviel Gestirne,’’ we come a bit closer perhaps to Celan’s intention. Upholding being and becoming simultaneously, Celan depicts a constant vacillation between disclosure and understanding. In the exchange between self and world comes a sort of knowledge that remains untouched by ‘‘bebilderten Sprache.’’ It is the knowledge, precisely, of relation—‘‘ich weiß, / ich weiß und du weißt, / wir wußten, / wir wußten nicht, wir / waren ja da und nicht dort, / und zuweilen, wenn / nur das Nichts zwischen uns stand, fanden / wir ganz zueinander’’ (‘‘I know, / I know and you know, we knew, / we did not know, we / were there, after all, and not there / and at times when / only the void stood between us we got / all the way to each other’’). In a series of conjugations of the verb ‘‘to know,’’ the I grows into the Du and then the We, until finally it is the We who does not know (wir wußten nicht) that meets in encounter. The condition of not knowing, a grammatical negation, becomes the place—das Nichts—of meeting. Joachim Schulze suggests that Celan’s mystical affiliations prompt him toward a ‘‘wissenden Schweigen,’’ a silence founded on a kind of intuitive understanding, an understanding that can never be voiced in speech (Celan und die Mystiker 57). This is a condition that implies return, a willful forgetting of ‘‘knowledge’’ that exacerbates separation. ‘‘Das Nichts’’ is the vehicle for communion, the void necessary for exchange. But we witness here again Celan’s unwillingness to promote complete reunion, complete merger. Rather, it is only in the space between—the space of the void—that meeting can occur (Wolosky 232). Again, we see the tension between meeting and merger, the temptation toward merger. Again, the temptation and threat of merger is bound to the symbol of the breath—‘‘. . . nur ein Atem zwischen / Dort und Nicht-da.’’ It becomes a question of right breathing, of self-prolongation in the Du rather than annihilation. The space of the between, then, fosters movement into the world, it propels the Ich toward the Du. But knowledge as such breaks down, becomes an insufficient condition for the True, and in fact seems to be an obstacle. Rather, the True is

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founded on the void, in the place where ‘‘wir wußten nicht.’’ Language must come to reflect this willful casting-off of knowledge. A Subtle Emergence of Hebrew It is in this volume that Hebrew begins to figure into Celan’s linguistic revaluation. Having placed creation firmly in the realm of human, natural, affairs, Celan suggests that language is born in the same moment as the Ich and Du are born. Specifically, Hebrew is the language he employs to connote remembrance, return, and renewal. Hebrew has special status in Judaism—it is the divine, primordial language, the language that conjures nothingness into existence, the language of creation. Hebrew is the visible marker of continuity and survival—it has not died out despite all efforts to silence it. On the one level, Celan’s increasing use of Hebrew coincides with the growing apprehension he began to experience after the Gollaffair, when the wife of a prominent French poet, Ivan Goll, accused him of plagiarizing her husband’s work. His paranoia of antisemitism well justified, in many ways his use of Hebrew is a deliberate act of defiance against his non-Jewish, German critics. Leaving the Hebrew untranslated, he continues in the same vein as his entirely ironic Bremen Prize Speech. Now uttering the words themselves that rang throughout ‘‘. . . die Landschaft, in der ein nicht unbetra¨ctlicher Teil jener chassidischen Geschichten zu Hause war, die Martin Buber uns allen auf deutsch wiedererza¨hlt hat’’ (‘‘. . . the home of many of the Hasidic stories which Martin Buber has retold in German’’) (Collected Prose 33), Celan defies the death-sentence intended upon this language and this people. The spirit of the Yiddish folktale is carried over into Hebrew, a language that holds precedence and maintains its mystery. Celan’s language conceals itself from the German-speakers who were complicit in the degradation of the German language and the destruction of the Jews at the same time as it reveals itself as a shared, communal language, the language of Jewish belief and culture. Serving this function, Celan’s use of Hebrew imitates one of the most basic historical uses of Midrash: consoling Jews in times of persecution through a language that was unthreatening to the persecutors, because the persecutors did not have full access to the depths of this

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language (Davidowicz 17). Leaving his Hebrew untranslated, Celan both protects and defies. Ezrahi explains: For most of Celan’s German readers, only one language [of the many Celan uses] remains inscrutable: the Hebrew words scattered throughout. Like the small, empty niches on the doorposts of formerly Jewish homes all over Eastern and Central Europe, Celan’s Hebrew is a marker not only of the absent (and therefore indecipherable) Jewish culture but also of the absent reader. Recovering its status as the language of origins, the primordial language, it remains uncorrupted, untried. (269)

The triumph of Shulamith, the heroine of The Song of Songs, over ‘‘dein goldenes Haar Margarete’’ plays itself out each time Celan refuses to provide translation (Felstiner, ‘‘Translating ‘Todesfuge’ ’’ 254). However, given that Celan’s use of Hebrew is so often either explicitly imperative (‘‘Die Schleuse’’ of this volume commands the reading of the prayers of remembrance, ‘‘Jiskor,’’ ‘‘Kaddish’’; ‘‘Du sei wie du’’ implores ‘‘kumi, ori’’—arise, shine; and ‘‘Mandelnde’’ concludes with ‘‘hachnissini’’—‘‘bring me in’’) (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 162–63, 251, 261; Koelle 200–202) or implicitly revealing an existential condition, not restricted to Jews (as we will explore in ‘‘Mandorla’’), I would venture to say that Celan’s Hebrew is in many ways the vehicle toward a universal ethics (Koelle, Pneumatisches Judentum 124). Insisting, as he does to Michael Hamburger, that his poetry is ‘‘completely and entirely not hermetic’’ and, in his letter to Hans Bender, ‘‘I canot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem’’ (Collected Prose 26), Celan uses Hebrew as a means of furthering his fundamentally communicative project. Rather than divide and discriminate, Celan’s Hebrew brings the other into his primarily inclusive world. Beginning from the specific, historical example of Jewish exile, persecution, and abandonment, Celan moves outward to suggest that this particular Jewish condition is more generally indicative of the human condition. Moreso, it is the poet’s task—the poet sensitive to this universal plight, so graphically depicted in the case of the Jews—to bring this condition to light and to offer potential solace. ‘‘All poets are Jews,’’ Celan writes as his epigraph to ‘‘And with the Book from Tarusa’’ (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 197). Jabe`s, similarly, suggests that the project of writing cannot

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be dissociated from the experience of being Jewish: ‘‘for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out’’ (Book of Questions 122). Celan suggests that the poet has the responsibility to present an ethical model, a model that insists on ethics even as—because—it grows out of the deepest suffering. What promises to become universal is the ethical imperative toward the other, and it is this imperative that speaks itself again and again. With a voice that is first hushed, whispered to those most close and familiar, it rises higher and reaches further, to embrace the stranger. But communication here is qualified. Celan’s poetry reaches out only toward those who would reach back (Lyon 189). The communicative aim is founded on reciprocity and hermeneutic exchange.3 The Hebrew embedded in Celan’s poetry is uniquely suited to this communicative project. Hebrew is a language that resists fixation and incorporates the mysterious nature of the divine, the paradoxical presence of silence—it mirrors the divine that Celan hopes guides his pursuit at the same time as it indicates the loss of voice and decreasing sphere of influence that this divine has undergone. It is no coincidence, then, that Celan’s use of Hebrew proliferates as the possibility for systematic, ‘‘logical’’ language breaks down. Indeed, as each conception of the divine, once tested, is proven to be insufficient and simplistic, the language of divine creation, now directed by a human voice, takes a stronger hold. As well, the multiplicity that characterizes the Hebrew language points toward an interconnectedness of meaning, a web of symbols that somehow reflects the complexity of human existence. ‘‘Mandorla’’ depicts the richness of Celan’s theologically oriented human condition: In der Mandel—was steht in der Mandel? Das Nichts. Es steht das Nichts in der Mandel. Da steht es und steht. Im Nichts—wer steht da? Der Ko¨nig. Da steht der Ko¨nig, der Ko¨nig. Da steht er und steht. Judenlocke, wirst nicht grau. 3 This is Thomas Sparr’s guiding thesis in Celans Poetik des hermetischen Gedichts.

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Und dein Aug—wohin steht dein Auge? Dein Aug steht der Mandel entgegen. Dein Aug, dem Nichts stehts entgegen. Es steht zum Ko¨nig. So steht es und steht. Menschenlocke, wirst nicht grau. Leere Mandel, ko¨nigsblau. In the almond—what dwells in the almond? Nothing. What dwells in the almond is Nothing. There it dwells and dwells. In Nothing—what dwells there? The King. There the King dwells, the King. There he dwells and dwells. Jew’s curl, you’ll not turn grey. And your eye—on what does your eye dwell? On the almond your eye dwells. Your eye, on Nothing it dwells. Dwells on the King, to him remains loyal, true. So it dwells and dwells. Human curl, you’ll not turn grey. Empty almond, royal-blue. (192)

The Mandorla, from the Italian word for ‘‘almond,’’ is a medieval Christian symbol that indicates the interdependence of opposing worlds or forces—the ‘‘almond’’ is formed by the intersection of two circles.4 The ‘‘worlds’’ that would seem to collide and intersect here are the Catholic and the Jewish; relying on the form of catechism (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 180), Celan both parodies this form and insists that the strategy of questioning is at the very heart of Judaism. Where the Catholic catechism provides set responses, Celan’s catechism suggests the insufficiency of the answer. Indeed, here 4 See www.sandplay.org/mandorla.html for a more comprehensive discussion and a directed bibliography of sources that focus on the importance of this symbol in Christianity. I am indebted to Dawn Barclift, Program Assistant, University Consortium Programs, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, for bringing this website to my attention.

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the question-and-answer format underlines the pervasive negativity of both question and answer—‘‘Das Nichts’’ is both origin and destination. Posing questions to this Nothing asserts its existence—though answers fail to ‘‘describe’’ the contents therein. The catechism opens up into deeper questions, questions that reveal answers that are themselves questions. The title, ‘‘Mandorla,’’ immediately suggests the unifying aim of this poem, an aim that is at once supported, problematized, and undercut by the subtle word-play that is uncovered if one were to look at possible Hebrew readings of the poem. While the word-play of this poem would be entirely impenetrable to Celan’s non-Hebrew speaking readers, what is revealed by this same play is a universal, existential condition, a condition, moreover, that remains unaccounted for and unalleviated by the exclusive claims of Catholicism and Judaism. The ‘‘intersection’’ of these two systems—suggested by the common strategy of catechism—perhaps indicates the necessity to call both systems into question. This ‘‘calling into question’’ is enacted in the almost magical world of interdependence that bubbles beneath the surface and is captured in the Hebrew. For instance, in Hebrew, ‘‘eye’’, ‘‘nothingness,’’ ‘‘I,’’ and the question ‘‘where’’ are connected etymologically. The words ‘‘eye’’ (ayn) and ‘‘nothingness’’ (ayn) are homonyms, while ‘‘I’’ (ani), ‘‘nothingness’’ (ayn), and ‘‘where?’’ ([l]an) share the same letters.5 By a fortuitous (or perhaps not so fortuitous) stroke of linguistic foresight, Celan weaves together questions of identity, ontology, existential positioning, and spatial orientation. We begin with an assertion of place, a suggestion that this place is delineated and well-marked—‘‘In der Mandel—was steht in der Mandel’’ (a pointed statement of the question, perhaps, ‘‘what resides at the point of intersection?’’). To which comes the perplexing, but inevitable, answer—‘‘Das Nichts’’—that is yet followed by a reassertion of location—‘‘Es steht das Nichts in der Mandel.’’ Nothing, the Nothing personified, perhaps, is the common ground, the shared space between two opposed worlds, which we have been taking to represent Judaism and Catholicism, but just as well might represent any number of oppositions, such as heaven and earth, self and 5 Felstiner points to the connection between ‘‘eye’’ and ‘‘nothingness’’ (Poet, Survivor, Jew 181). I have extended this argument to include these various additional meanings that Celan may have wished to address.

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other, inside and outside. As we saw earlier in ‘‘Mit Wechselndem Schlu ¨ssel,’’ Celan echoes here again Heidegger’s claim that ‘‘language is the dwelling-place of being.’’ But this dwelling-place, though palpably present, is Nothing—‘‘Da steht es und steht.’’ This is the Niemand-God, whose nothingness extends now from identity to essence. The form of catechism, devoid of discernible content, suggests Celan’s insistence upon sustaining the covenant— upholding the form of command, while the command itself has no voice. This new form of catechism raises the asking of questions— because they will yield no answer—to the level of imperative. The next verse poses the question ‘‘who?’’—‘‘Im Nichts—wer steht da?’’ Dwelling in the Nothing (ayn), the individual, the ‘‘I’’ (ani), tentatively asserts itself in a way that surpasses all boundaries circumscribed by religion or culture. Jerry Glenn suggests that the reference to the ‘‘King’’ in this stanza is a statement about the failed Christ. Perhaps Celan’s intentions go further, however. Perhaps, here, Celan links Christ—‘‘King of the Jews’’—to the throne imagery at the base of Merkabah mysticism, the movement founded on Ezekiel’s ascension to the Lord in the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, second lecture). In making this connection, and in keeping with the use of Mandorla as connective symbol, Celan suggests that a similar symbolism pervades Judaism and Christianity and implicitly commits himself to Jewish– Christian reparations. At the same time, he suggests that both belief systems have to be reconceived in terms of a more inclusive, because less definable, ontological base. Each needs to be reestablished, that is, upon the void. Because traditional covenant-theology fails to account for either tradition in the wake of the Holocaust, it must be reformulated in a way that makes possible the future dialogue of Jews and Christians. It is this intention—not to overcome (in the sense of Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung) but to reevaluate the historical and theological implications of the covenant—that begins with this specific dialogue in order to make way for a universal dialogical ethic. Consequently, we see the movement from ‘‘Judenlocke’’ to ‘‘Menschenlocke,’’ each with a like destiny—‘‘wirst nicht grau.’’ But there is yet a more sinister reading, bound together with the seemingly hopeful claim to longevity (in the case of both ‘‘Jew’s curl’’ and ‘‘human-curl’’), and with the seeming call to Jewish–Christian dialogue captured in the term ‘‘king.’’ Indeed, longevity—the prom-

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ise that ‘‘you’ll not turn gray’’—is undercut by the violent threat of Aryanism, suggested eerily by ‘‘ko¨nigsblau’’ (kingly blue); Judaism and humanity alike are mowed down in their prime (‘‘wirst nicht grau’’). And King—melech, if we turn again to the Hebrew—forces a relation to molech (‘‘a heathen God to whom infants were sacrificed’’) (Plaut 883).6 Recalling the ritual of burnt sacrifice—in the particular case of the Molech, an ‘‘abhorrent act that the Lord detests’’ (Deuteronomy 12:31)—performed for a false god, Celan implicitly reinvokes the covenantal model, even as he works to overturn it. The suggestion here is horrifying because it is embedded in Scripture. Leviticus 20: 2–5 reads: Any man among the Israelites, or among the strangers residing in Israel, who gives any of his offspring to Molech, shall be put to death; the people of the land shall pelt him with stones. And I will set My face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he gave of his offspring to Molech and so defiled My sanctuary and profaned my holy name. And if the people of the land should shut their eyes to that man when he gives of his offspring to Molech, and should not put him to death, I Myself will set My face against that man and his kin, and will cut off from among their people both him and all who follow him in going astray after Molech.

The ambiguity of melech, sliding into Molech, makes possible several covenant-based interpretations: (1) these ‘‘burnt sacrifices,’’ the innocent children of parents bound to a false god, were sacrificed in vain; (2) false sacrifices are punishable by death, so sayeth the Lord. Is the genocide he obliquely refers to in ‘‘Judenlocke, wirst nicht grau’’ to be understood as an olah, a ‘‘burnt offering’’ (from which the term Holocaust is taken)? Is it to be understood as punishment for behavior that is ‘‘abhorrent’’ in the sight of God? Even as he calls for Jewish-Christian dialogue, Celan points to the tangled depths that will have to be navigated before such dialogue can take place; he points, that is, directly to the theological arguments for the Holocaust that sustain the traditional covenantal model. His prognosis for this dialogue is not good—even as he desperately searches for a new model to replace a covenant that allows victims to be blamed for their fate according to a tightly knit theological para6 I am indebted to Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, for this strain of analysis.

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digm, he, almost despite himself, falls back into this way of thinking, as though force of habit is simply too powerful to dismantle. At the same time, though Celan demonstrates a clearsighted awareness of the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of Jewish– Christian dialogue, his particular use of Hebrew, his forcing of linguistic association, nevertheless establishes the basis for the Ich–Du encounter that will pervade the remainder of his volumes: individual identity is grounded in nothingness—the point of intersection is ‘‘Das Nichts’’; this is not only the Jewish condition but the human condition as well. The ‘‘mystery’’ disclosed in the Hebrew of this poem is the paradoxical connection between the self and what Celan seems to suggest is an ontologically grounded nothingness. The equation we are bound to come to is that the ‘‘I’’ equals nothing—that is, the ‘‘I’’ both is mirrored in the palpable presence of the divine other and comes to its fullest representation only when connected with this other. At the same time, this equation effectively announces the annihilation of the individual. By accident or intention of language, this ‘‘equation’’ is revealed only by means of the question we are compelled to continue asking—‘‘where?’’—‘‘where are you?’’ or, perhaps, ‘‘where am I in relation to you?’’ The question paves the way for a relation between Ich and Du that is grounded in the void.

Atemwende This fundamental realization about the nature of the self is at the base of Atemwende. As the frequent use of Hebrew suggests, Celan is concerned more in his later volumes with finding a language suitable to his mimetic discoveries than with clarity. That is, clarity, lucidity, no longer serve his communicative aims but hinder it by offering a false sense of order. The relation takes precedence now over any description of relation, and as this occurs, as the distance between Ich and Du narrows and Celan becomes ever more aware of the interdependence between self and other, language breaks down. A pervasive sense of unity, though reflected through a filter of dizzying multiplicity, overcomes his work. Atemwende reasserts the core of unity—the crystallized core of meaning—that both drives and eludes poetic capture. At the same time, as this core becomes more solidified, the ‘‘I’’ faces more decisive destruction. The poetic voice

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is to a degree annihilated, as is the absolute poem itself. As the ‘‘I’’ breaks down, its dependence on the Du grows stronger (even though this Du has been effectively reduced to Nothing)—indeed, it is only in terms of the other that the self maintains a measure of existence. More and more in this volume, the poles of inside and outside encroach upon the self, inspiring an atmosphere at once threatening and filled with promise. The ‘‘True’’ wants an accounting, but it seems that the ‘‘True’’ resides both in transcendence and in immanence. Separation and union—rejected in the previous volume as equally ‘‘uninhabitable,’’ perhaps only when one is posited to the exclusion of the other—are now locked together as mutually dependent modes of being, both for the individual and for the divine. Equally dependent, equally indispensable, here, are the connected movements of expansion and contraction, proliferation and reduction. Taking these movements together, upholding each pole simultaneously, Celan uses this volume as a means for charting out his method—the only theological bastion left and paradoxically a method that originates in the quickly fleeting self: the Atemwende, devekuth, the turning of one’s breath. In the poems ‘‘Stehen im Schatten,’’ ‘‘Ein Dro¨hnen,’’ ‘‘Weggebeizt,’’ ‘‘Keine Sandkunst mehr,’’ ‘‘Einmal,’’and ‘‘Ich kenne dich,’’ we witness a two-pronged movement, the reduction of language and the expansion of relation-in-nothingness. Like the divine tzimtzum, language as it retreats contracts into itself, providing more room for further creation. The True is given space to grow and crystallize, becoming, in turn, ever more impenetrable by language. The Schattensprache of ‘‘Sprich auch du’’ is reformulated in ‘‘Stehen im Schatten’’ (‘‘To stand in the shadow’’).With this reformulation comes a more expansive imperative, not only to ‘‘speak’’ the shade, but to ‘‘be’’ it, to reside in the place of shadow and ambiguity: Stehen im Schatten des Wundenmals in der Luft. Fu ¨r-niemand-und-nichts-Stehn. Unerkannt, fu ¨r dich allein. Mit allem, was darin Raum hat, auch ohne

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Sprache. To stand in the shadow of the scar up in the air. To stand for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone. With all there is room for in that, even without language. (232)

This movement from speaking to standing, I suggest, follows from an assumption similar to one made by Elie Wiesel, namely, that it is not merely enough to ask questions, but to be question, to direct one’s efforts and existence to upholding a dialogue based on challenge. As well, the movement gestures to Kafka’s statement, ‘‘we cannot always see the truth, but we can be it’’ (Notebooks 31). Language, effectively, is not necessary for indeed it hinders this existential turn. And yet, language cannot be altogether dismissed because it is the visible mark of the covenant—to speak, to bear witness, is the fundamental command. As Celan revaluates the covenant, he promotes a language that will reflect this existential turn, a language cloaked in silence, a language that, like the Niemand-God, surpasses its own limitations and boundaries. As Celan returns to the second person of the earlier poems, the effect is to produce an imperative stance, the addressee of which remains uncertain, but might well be either the reader or the poet himself. The imperative is existential—literally, the poet or reader is prevailed upon to take a stand. This is a potentially comforting moment, mirroring the comfort of the stance itself (a stance within rather than against), not unlike Kafka’s ‘‘and you must not despair.’’ And yet, the stance that Celan describes is by no means inherently comforting, indeed, it is inherently empty—‘‘Fu ¨r-niemand-undnichts-Stehn.’’ Quite literally this suggests an embrace of the Niemand-God and the space of Das Nichts as the productive and creative sphere. This ‘‘stand,’’ as well, embraces transcendence, a transcendence uniquely located in the wound of suffering—‘‘des Wundenmals in der Luft.’’ Levinas maintains in his ‘‘Transcendence

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and Height’’ that transcendence is the cornerstone of ethics.7 To posit a realm external to oneself is to be reminded again and again of the insufficiency of the isolated self. And yet, there is a distinct moment of triumph for the self—‘‘fu ¨r dich allein’’ this ‘‘Niemand-und-Nichts’’ presents itself. This spectacle remains undisclosed, but the possibilities for its approach multiply in the conciliatory silence—‘‘auch ohne Sprache.’’ But perhaps we are to hear, ever-so-faintly, Lebensraum (‘‘mit allem, was darin Raum hat’’) in the potentially solipsistic assertion of self that ‘‘fu ¨r dich allein’’ might also represent? Truth with a Vengeance Even as external being is posited for the purpose of guiding ethical relations with the other—here depicted as the conflation of Du and Niemand-God—even as language retreats back into itself, the ‘‘True’’ emerges from within. Despite itself, truth ‘‘schimmert auf, schimmert auf ’’ (‘‘Das Geschriebene ho¨hlt sich’’). Truth cannot be hemmed in by language, but seems to seep through the boundaries constructed for it. It calls for an accounting, a reckoning, as ‘‘Ein Dro¨hnen’’ illustrates: Ein Dro¨hnen: es ist die Wahrheit selbst unter die Menschen getreten, mitten ins Metapherngesto¨ber. A rumbling: truth itself has appeared among humankind in the very thick of their flurrying metaphors. (270) 7 Peter Haas, in his article ‘‘Auschwitz: Re-envisioning the Role of God,’’ follows the line of argument to a disturbing conclusion. The lack of transcendence in what he terms the ‘‘Nazi ethic’’ was reinforced by the self-sufficiency and internal logic of the Nazi regime. When the guiding point originates within, rather than outside, a system, there is no possibility for a method of checks and balances. Everything ‘‘makes sense’’ from within, and justice, as well as judgment, become impossible categories.

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Somehow language, once tapped into, has opened up the floodgates of being. Though language is perhaps unnecessary, insufficient, and often deceptive—‘‘auch ohne Sprache’’—here it has displayed itself as magical, conjuring, bringing into being a ‘‘truth’’ that takes on its own life and renders language negligible. Despite itself, there lies ‘‘truth’’—die Wahrheit—in the very midst of humanity, and moreso, in the very midst of metaphor. Do we see here an evolution from ‘‘bebilderten Sprache’’ to ‘‘Metaphern’’? The language of lies, of images, has been transformed into a language that speaks at a remove from its intended object. Perhaps Celan gives voice to a hope here that humanity will yet learn how to ‘‘speak the shade.’’ The metaphor, like Kafka’s use of parable, serves an important pedagogical and ethical function in the context of Celan’s developing project. The metaphor circumscribes its object, describing boundaries without defiling content. Like Kafka’s parable, which ‘‘only shows that everything is incomprehensible, and we knew that already’’ (Basic Kafka 158), Celan’s metaphor reminds us of our condition. Like Kafka’s ‘‘art,’’ which ‘‘flies about the truth, but with the distinct intention of not getting burnt’’ (Notebooks 39), Celan’s metaphor becomes the method whereby truth comes into its paradoxically hazy focus. And, as we learn from Kafka’s Abraham, truth, once called into being, asserts itself with a vengeance. How are we to reconcile Celan’s seemingly incompatible claims that, on the one hand, this ‘‘truth’’ exists, and, on the other, that ‘‘reality is not simply there, reality must be searched and won’’? I would like to suggest that Celan intends to keep ‘‘truth’’—Die Wahrheit—separate from reality—Die Wirklichkeit. This separation is a strategic necessity for Celan; he needs to uphold both poles simultaneously for several reasons. First, ‘‘truth,’’ serving the realm of being, cannot be collapsed into the dynamic process of becoming, served by ‘‘reality.’’ This sustained separation is fundamental to the phenomenological method favored by Celan. Should the poles merge into one, the interpretative imperative would come to an end. As well, this vacillation between being and becoming, and essentially the movement of meeting-without-merger, mirrors the relation that Celan intends to foster between self and other. Self cannot be appropriated by other, just as the wish to appropriate the other into the self is, as Levinas suggets, a primarily violent and exploitative wish. At some level, then, there is a retreat back to a core of being, a core of self,

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and it is in the space between form and process, word and interpretation, that productive engagement becomes possible. This retreat back into the self—fu ¨r dich allein—is a temporary stance, however. The self will soon be eclipsed, unable to maintain its autonomy before Du. Crystallization and Reduction: The Atemkristall The dynamic tension between being and becoming is clearly represented in two poems of this volume—‘‘Weggebeizt’’ (‘‘Etched away’’) and ‘‘Keine Sandkunst mehr’’ (‘‘No more sand art’’). Taken together, they suggest both goal and method. What is sought—the truth that both is and must be continually won—is the Atemkristall. The method with which to approach this truth is the reduction of poetic speech and the emergence of das Genicht, the noem. Weggebeizt vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des Anerlebten—das hundertzu ¨ngige Meingedicht, das Genicht. Ausgewirbelt, frei der Weg durch den menschengestaltigen Schnee, des Bu ¨ßerschnee, zu den gastlichen Gletscherstuben und -tischen. Tief in der Zeitenschrunde, beim Wabeneis wartet, ein Atemkristall, dein unumsto¨ßliches Zeugnis. Etched away from the ray-shot wind of your language

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the garish talk of rubbedoff experience—the hundredtongued mypoem, the noem.8 Whirled clear, free your way through the humanshaped snow, the penitents’ snow, to the hospitable glacier rooms and tables. Deep in Time’s crevasse by the honeycombed ice waits, a crystal of breath, your irreversible witness.

The freeing of the noem, das Genicht, is contingent upon a drastic reduction of language—‘‘Weggebeizt vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache. . . .’’ As we have seen before, freedom implies here a freedom from the limitations of human speech—‘‘frei der Weg durch den menschen-gestaltigen Schnee. . . .’’ But, freedom from occurs only in the passing through these obstacles. ‘‘Durch den menschen-gestaltigen Schnee . . .’’ echoes once again the sentiment of the Bremen Prize Speech—language must go through (hindurchgehen) before coming into its own. Freedom from, then, cannot be divorced from freedom to—freedom to engage in an experience, itself limited, that serves as the basis for future movement (Weissenberger, Zwischen Stein und Stern 250). The type of poetry that will most accurately approach being relies on a language that incorporates both aspects of this freedom—it is a language that feels itself to be most ‘‘free’’ in its restriction. Intensely rich and layered in its connotations, the ‘‘I’’ at the center 8 Michael Hamburger translates the phrase ‘‘Mein-gedicht,’’ as ‘‘pseudo-poem.’’ This translation misses something of the importance of the loss of self that Celan, as poet, undergoes in the formation of Das Genicht.

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of this lyric outcry—‘‘Mein-gedicht’’—forces the poem into a seemingly lesser form of reality, one that will eventually annihilate itself— ‘‘das Genicht.’’ Yet, like Kafka’s statement concerning the centrality of faith to existence—‘‘It is precisely in this ‘cannot, after all’ that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form’’ (Notebooks 54)—‘‘das Genicht’’ signals a new type of poetic expression that has been able to incorporate silence, nothingness, the profound emptiness of the void, into itself. In the negation dwells the form. In this sense, Das Genicht is the culmination of a remark that Celan makes in his Meridian speech—‘‘Das absolute Gedicht—nein, das gibt es gewiß nicht, das kann es nicht geben!’’ (‘‘The absolute poem—no, it certainly does not, cannot exist’’). The absolute poem does not exist, but it is the claim that a poem makes toward the absolute that gives it its merit—‘‘Aber es gibt wohl, mit jedem wirklichen Gedicht, es gibt, mit dem anspruchslosesten Gedicht, diese unabweisbare Frage, diesen unerho¨rten Anspruch’’ (‘‘But in every real poem, even the least ambitious, there is this ineluctable question, this exorbitant claim’’) (Collected Prose 51). The poem and poet undergo a willful forgetting as they set out to capture the ineffable; the poem operates from the internalized sense that, despite the nonexistence of the absolute, it ought to exist. And it is this ‘‘ought’’ that reestablishes a sense of self based upon an external realm. Das Genicht does not imply the death of the poet, the death of the poem, but posits a fuller existence in its extended relation with the other. Consequently, the noem moves through the realm of human construction into a welcoming realm promising to be filled, into a world prepared for a gathering—‘‘zu den gastlichen Gletscherstuben und tischen’’ (Schultze, ‘‘Die reinsten Gletscher’’ 232).9 As language begins to embrace the relation, the Atemkristall emerges as a possibility. The noem indicates the presence of this core of being that still waits, hidden, patient for the words that will somehow bring it into focus. Negating in itself everything that is dogmatic, doctrinal, or systematic, the noem moves toward the absolute. But this is an absolute again uniquely solidified by means of its own fluid 9 Schultze suggests that this Gletscher becomes the primary symbol of Celan’s pursuit of the ‘‘absolute poem’’ which he recognizes ‘‘does not exist.’’ Schultze continues that Celan’s pursuit leads him on a path through, what he terms, a ‘‘nihilistic mysticism’’ and the necessary destruction of a personalized image of God. This is a destruction, then, which paves the way for his re-creation of the covenant.

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dynamism. That is, Celan brings together the process underlying the breath—the sustaining movement of expansion and contraction— with the fixed form of the crystal. In a landscape covered by ice and snow, recalling ‘‘Mit wechselndem Schlu ¨ssel,’’ the ‘‘key’’ has transformed from ‘‘das Wort’’ to the Atemkristall. But both remain encrusted, encased, frozen—‘‘What snowball will form round the word / depends on the wind that rebuffs you.’’// ‘‘Deep / in Time’s crevasse / by / the honeycombed ice / waits, / a crystal of breath, / your irreversible / witness.’’ There is clearly a preservative function in this ice and snow—the word, the crystal remains insulated, protected. At the same time, the condition is quite precarious—come the thaw, the word and crystal will melt away to nothing, will become the truly negated form that they had barely been able to disguise. ‘‘Wabeneis’’ recalls the ‘‘Waben der Uhr,’’ emptied of time, in ‘‘Mit Brief und Uhr.’’ ‘‘Waben’’ suggests the naturalized dwelling of the crystal, a dwelling that is at once functional, suited to, and constructed by the community that occupies it. Just as the wax of this previous poem both ‘‘seals and melts the unwritten,’’ the Atemkristall faces two potential fates, inextricably linked to each other. The Atemkristall, no longer ‘‘reisebereit,’’ no longer restless, is waiting to be conjured into being. And the imploring ‘‘kommst du schwimmendes Licht?’’ grows ever more strained, ever more convinced that it will be met with no response. In a realm of Time somehow set apart from temporality, the breath-crystal bears witness to Du and Das Genicht—both equally addressed by ‘‘dein unumsto¨ßliches Zeugnis.’’ But it has yet to be uncovered. It exists, untouched, waiting, as if to bring full expression to Celan’s claim, ‘‘all is true and a waiting for the True’’ (‘‘Dein Hinu ¨bersein heute Nacht’’). Does this represent a kind of hope, or is it the source of unbearable frustration, that Celan believes he has not yet brought the Atemkristall from its hiding? At the same time, language, as if searching for its own saving voice, breaks down, refusing to represent its own solidification, its own betrayal. ‘‘Keine Sandkunst mehr’’ presents a model of poetic possibility. As in so many other cases, Celan ventures toward this model only through negation, by first providing an example of the type of language Das Genicht is not to employ: Keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, keine Meister. Nichts erwu ¨rfelt. Wieviel

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Stumme? Siebenzehn. Deine Frage—deine Antwort. Dein Gesang, was weiß er? Tiefimschnee, Iefimnee, I-i-e. No more sand art, no sand book, no masters. Nothing won by dicing. How many dumb ones? Seventeen. Your question—your answer. Your song, what does it know? Deepinsnow Eepinnow, Ee-i-o. (240)

John Felstiner suggests that Celan conflates two paths of increasing possibility in this poem: ‘‘poetic language and Jewish existence.’’ He continues, ‘‘recalling his ‘Sand from the Urns’ (1948) with its sense of a desert life running out, this poem turns away from the ‘art’ opposed to true poetry in the Meridian speech’’ (Poet, Survivor, Jew 220). To fashion and manipulate language in such a way that it speaks only of language, in such a way that it refuses to point toward an external source of being, is to engage in a kind of meaningless word-play. A poetic act that reveals nothing outside of the self, a language that gains momentum only by the generation and proliferation of selfreferentiality, this is the ‘‘Sandkunst’’ that provides Celan with his negative example. It is Mallarme´ who exemplifies this kind of art, therefore the reference from ‘‘Un coup de de´s’’—‘‘Nichts erwu ¨rfelt’’ (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 220; Levinas, ‘‘Being and the Other,’’ 21). Celan’s struggle to disconnect his poetry from the Symbolist movement—here exemplified by Mallarme´—is central to his project, but difficult to articulate. Celan’s poetry, like that of the Symbolists, courts the void and maintains that language is insufficient before its subject. But, at a fundamental level, Celan rejects Mallarme´’s ‘‘art-

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for-art’s-sake’’ program. Rather, in its gesture toward the other, Celan’s poetry is motivated more consistently by inclusion than exclusion. The insufficiency of language, then, inspires frustration and anguish in his project, rather than playfulness; what is riding on finding ‘‘the right words’’ is immense, ‘‘the realities at stake in the poem,’’ nothing short of the rehabilitation of the covenant. Jean Firges suggests that Celan’s ‘‘vehement opposition’’ to Mallarme´ stems from the Mallarme´en conception of art that implies the abolition of the real before the writing subject. Celan reverses this movement, using art as a means of constructing the real. Firges continues that Celan, unlike Mallarme´’s master in ‘‘Un coup de de´s,’’ does not hesitate to throw the dice; he’s ready to accept danger and necessity (99–100). In the sense that Celan’s stance before reality is active (‘‘darum baun wir und bauen’’; ‘‘Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein’’), it jars against expressions of passivity, against notions, like the one so vividly and beautifully depicted in Rimbaud’s ‘‘Le baˆteau ivre,’’ that one can be passively swept away by an intoxicating reality that is, at bottom, delusion. For Celan, one must actively struggle against the loss of self—though this struggle may be futile, and though it may tend dangerously at times toward solipsistic self-assertion, it has to be upheld. From a stark and frozen world—the world that houses and protects the sought-after Atemkristall—we are transported into the desert landscape that Celan seems to reject—‘‘keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, keine Meister.’’ Curiously, this is the poetic landscape that forms the backdrop of Jabe`s’s Book of Questions. The danger of this landscape is all too apparent; the sun baking overhead will melt and dissolve the Atemkristall that was, so soon before, safely tucked away ‘‘Tiefimschnee.’’ Thus we witness the dissolution—‘‘Iefimnee . . . II–e.’’ This dissolution is preceded by the incompletion of the Eighteen prayer of Jewish tradition–‘‘Wieviel Stumme? Siebenzehn’’ (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 220; Glenn 142). Ritual is made analogous here with a game of chance, and both are found equally empty—‘‘nichts erwu ¨rfelt.’’ Once again, as he does in ‘‘Mandorla,’’ he relies on the uniqueness of the Hebrew language to describe the linguistic basis of this transformed covenant. As both Glenn and Felstiner explain, Celan reverses the Hebrew erasure of vowels, reducing language here to only vowels—‘‘Tiefimschnee / Iefimnee / I–i-–.’’ Felstiner points out,

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should this poem be translated into Hebrew, it would ‘‘verge on silence—a testimony to the literal truth that Celan sought’’ (Poet, Survivor, Jew 220). At the same time as he warns of the potential danger of Sandkunst, Celan suggests, paradoxically, that Sandkunst serves this reduction of speech to silence. And here Celan provides a model that Jabe`s will display again and again in the linguistic charts of the later volumes of The Book of Questions, namely, to break down language to its essentials, to use language as a reference to the truth of being. The sand effectively scatters, disseminates, the melted Atemkristall; in the silence of the desert, the word proliferates. This socalled ‘‘truth of being’’ has at least one discernible characteristic: it cannot be captured by a language that seeks capture. Any formal means of seeking truth—question, answer, song—reveal only, always, the prevailing lack of knowledge that governs and meets our pursuit for understanding—‘‘Deine Frage—deine Antwort. Dein Gesang, was weiß er?’’ The covenant must be written again in this void, in this place where, Felstiner explains, ‘‘question and answer, the poles of Celan’s lyric effort, themselves get swallowed up by a question’’ (Poet, Survivor, Jew 220). The question without answer, the language reduced to silence, provides the starting point for future movement. Therefore, echoing in this linguistic reduction, we see again the movement of divine creation—tzimtzum. As the divine retreats further and further into itself, it creates a space of emptiness into which it will eventually expand, to fill again with its presence. That space necessitates the destruction of the isolated self and the emergence of the Ich–Du relation. You: Completely, Completely Real In the same way as Kafka implores, ‘‘destroy yourself [in order to become what you are]’’ (Notebooks 20) Celan promotes the destruction of the individual ego as the first premise of the Ich–Du relation. It seems to be the case that, in promoting this destruction, Celan oversteps his original focus of devekuth, that is, of meeting-withoutmerger. Du gains primacy over Ich—once called into being it asserts autonomy and power. The poems ‘‘Ich kenne dich’’ (‘‘I know you’’) and ‘‘Einmal’’ (‘‘Once’’) present, respectively, a description of this condition of primacy, and a reestablishment of the divine and covenant in the space of the annihilated ego.

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Ich kenne dich, du bist die tief Gebeugte, ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan. Wo flammt ein Wort, das fu ¨r uns beide zeugte? Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn. (Breathborn 92) I know you, you are the deeply bowed I, the pierced-through, subject to you. Where flames a word, would bear witness for us both? You, completely, completely real. I—complete delusion. (my translation)

This parenthetical remark reveals, in its off-handedness, the very crux of Celan’s ontology, as well as the implications and imperatives this ontology places upon both aesthetics and ethics. The condition of familiarity, the special type of ‘‘knowledge’’ captured by the verb kennen, is the condition that sparks the search for an appropriate poetic language to capture this relation—‘‘wo flammt ein Wort, das fu ¨r uns beide zeugte?’’ What does this so-called familiarity reveal? Taken together, the poles of self and other appear at once opposed and adjoined. On one level, Du and Ich represent reality and delusion, each half of which can be described only in relation to the other. On another, Du and Ich are depicted as submitting to an external force, though to varying degrees of severity—‘‘du bist die tief Gebeugte, / ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan.’’ Before whom does Du bow? In both submission to this unknown, and subjugation of the Ich, Du gains its ‘‘ganz, ganz wirklich’’ status. By the same token, Ich, by virtue of its being wounded—‘‘der Durchbohrte’’—is pure delusion. All that remains is question, again the question ‘‘where?’’ which becomes here a question of existential condition underlined by an aesthetic concern, namely, how to bear witness to the relation? Where shall these words be found?10 Choosing the term ‘‘zeugen,’’ Celan echoes the Atemkristall— ‘‘dein unumsto¨ßliches Zeugnis’’—and captures the ambiguity at the base of the task of bearing witness. Zeugen suggests both to witness and to procreate. This ambiguity captures something of the explicitly sexual nature of the divine–human relation in Jewish mysticism (that is, the disrobing of the Torah), and again gestures to the Song of Songs. But this relation has become sado-masochistic—the beloved 10

This discussion is extracted from my article ‘‘Ich kenne dich.’’

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inflicts bodily pain on the lover, and it is its ability to do so that gives it its status of reality. We are reminded of Kafka’s officer in ‘‘In the Penal Colony.’’ This sado-masochism transforms into murderous rage (followed by tremendous remorse) in The Book of Questions. In each case, the relation can only be felt, painfully, upon the body. Zeugen has another set of connotations. Through an auspicious linguistic foresight—to witness and to procreate—past is bound to future. To bear witness to the past, to maintain a sense of continuity, is to give birth to a fuller sense of self, a self that comes into its own reality only when it, paradoxically, understands its own insufficiency. The violence of the relation between Ich and Du is the violence that propels and preserves memory—as in ‘‘Tenebrae,’’ violence is the spark that leads from a casting away of a traditional vision of God to a human relationship grounded in prayer. At the same time, following the question demanding this witness that will link past to future, we see a deliberate division between Ich and Du, as though language can only capture separation. Like the Atemkristall, the word that will bear witness to both Ich and Du has yet to be uncovered; when it is uncovered, the relation will speak much louder than the word that breaks down into silence before it. In the final poem of Atemwende, Celan provides us with, I believe, yet another reflection on the covenant. The account he gives is both continuous with biblical tradition and suggestive of the possibilities, and limitations, of the newly shattered Ich: Einmal, da ho¨rte ich ihn, da wusch er die Welt, ungesehn, nachtlang, wirklich. Eins und Unendlich, vernichtet, ichten. Licht war. Rettung. Once, I heard him, he was washing the world, unseen, nightlong,

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real. One and Infinite, annihilated, ied. Light was. Salvation. (278)

There is an implicit hope here, one that Hermann Burger believes is captured in the movement ‘‘Vernichtet . . . ichten . . . Licht.’’ Like the language that ‘‘must come through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech,’’ Burger continues, the light can only be retrieved in the aftermath of annihilation (30). It is more than fitting, then, that Celan should rely on the biblical episode that provides the first inklings of the covenant—the Flood, given testimony by the rainbow (Genesis 9: 8–17)—to point toward a possible means of redemption. However, this hope is extremely tentative, ambivalent. Significantly, this account is given in the past tense. On the one hand, this tense draws a stronger connection to biblical tradition, echoing creation—‘‘And God said, let there be light, and there was light’’ (Genesis 1: 3). As well, ‘‘einmal, da ho¨rte ich ihn’’ suggests a certainty of the divine that we have not seen so clearly before this. Indeed, the plaintive ‘‘ho¨rst du mich?’’ of ‘‘Gespra¨ch im Gebirg’’ gives way to at least a partial answer—‘‘once,’’ yes, I did hear him. But, then, ‘‘einmal’’ also echoes the conventional beginning of the German fairy tale. Is this pure fantasy, this notion of a covenant, the cornerstone and building block of the entire Jewish faith? As if to say, ‘‘once upon a time’’ we needed this illusion, now we have grown tired of it and no longer believe it to be true. It is to this same point that we seem to keep returning. It is this point that Celan refuses to reconcile. We both need the covenant, in all its traditional symbolism, as ‘‘recorded’’ historical document that governs faith and practice, and need to overcome the confines and limitations of this, so potentially painful and divisive, belief. Therefore, what provides hope here—the seeming explosion of possibilities—also indicates resignation. To attribute this cataclysmic event, this event from which the light will come, to a being which is both ‘‘Eins und Unendlich’’ is to admit to an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. There are no answers. All we are left with is the clear awareness that, as Celan writes in one of his very last poems, ‘‘Die Pole /

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sind in uns, / unu ¨bersteigbar’’ (‘‘The poles are inside us, insurmountable’’). The poles of all levels of opposition—heaven/earth, life/death, I/you, speech/silence, to name a few—remain at the core of existence, irreconcilable and insurmountable. Celan cannot bring these poles together; as hard as he tries, he cannot ‘‘raise the world to the level of the true, the pure, the immutable,’’ because the false, impure, and changing always remind him of their presence on the flipside, rendering ‘‘happiness’’ impossible. And yet, at least at this point, Celan continues to uphold the impossible aim of capturing this non-existent absolute realm. His means of doing this seems to center in his commitment to the notion that the self comes into a truer state of being through union with the Du. As his desperation mounts to find a new expression of the covenant, merger takes precedence over meeting. Eventually, the precarious balance between distance and proximity proves too fragile to sustain; the Ich collapses into Du.

The Final Volumes In his final volumes—Fadensonnen, Lichtzwang, Schneepart, Zeitgeho¨ft11—Celan vacillates constantly between viewing Du as his source of salvation and viewing it as his inescapable death. We see him struggling to maintain a sense of distance, knowing full well that it is only in distance, in separation, that survival is possible. Not only is it his own survival that informs this struggle; as the ‘‘last’’ of German-Jewish speakers, the last who bears testament to an all-but-annihilated people, Celan feels he must survive to tell the tale. It is at this point, so close to his death, that Celan makes his journey to Israel. As if to reestablish a connection with the people for whom he is, primarily, speaking, Celan’s later poetry relates, with one specific example, two significant events of Israeli history, one long past and the other in the making. ‘‘Denk dir’’ (‘‘Think of It’’) recounts the events at Masada, but is written in commemoration of the Six Day War of 1967 (Glenn 150; Koelle, Pneumatisches Judentum 235–238). Conflating past and present in the shared instance of spiritual and political struggle, Celan appears to use Israel as a sym11

All but Fadensonnen were published posthumously.

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bol of this absolute that he seeks. ‘‘Sag, daß Jerusalem i s t ,’’ he implores in a later poem, emphasizing existence here in such a way that serves only to reject its reality (and, indeed, the poem continues in the conditional—‘‘sag, als wa¨re ich dieses / dein Weiß, / als wa¨rst du / meins’’—‘‘say it, as though I were this / your whiteness, / as though you / were mine’’) (352). Israel cannot meet his expectations. This long-awaited trip, which he cuts short by three days, leaves him perhaps more lost and ambivalent (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 275–79). This realization that he felt neither completely at home with, nor entirely welcoming of, the community for whom he thought he was speaking was a devastating blow. The so-called ‘‘homecoming’’ that Celan had mused about nine years before in the ‘‘Meridian,’’ ‘‘the paths that poems take us . . . paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths . . . for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves,’’ was not to be experienced in Israel. Perhaps, in becoming familiar, Israel could no longer function as the ‘‘altogether other,’’ necessary for poetic speech? In any case, as Celan becomes more and more disillusioned, as one by one his utopic ideals are shattered, the project of sustaining the Ich–Du relation, as an abstraction, becomes urgent. His life, quite literally, depends on it. Death of the Self, Death of the Covenant I want to stress again how integral the Ich–Du relation is to Celan’s revaluation of the covenant. The respectful distance promoted in this relation is precisely the point upon which the covenant turns. Both distance and proximity are necessary for dialogue, and it is the form of dialogue—between self and God, or self and human other—that establishes the base, both ethical and ontological, for the covenant. Consequently, if the Ich–Du relation falls apart, merges into one, becomes silent, there is no space upon which to posit a covenant. Perhaps I am dwelling on a point that is, at this stage, quite evident. However, I believe this is so vital to Celan’s own sense of a failed project and to his resulting suicide that we must fully explore these connections. We are given several examples of the role of Du in these last volumes. There is a pervading sense of exhaustion here, as though Celan, struggling against his own death-wish, now sees Du as the

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source of both solace and destruction. Two poems capture this ambivalence: Du warst mein Tod: dich konnte ich halten, wa¨hrend mir alles entfiel. You were my death: you I could hold while all fell away from me. (282) Wie du dich ausstirbst in mir: noch im letzten zerschlissenen Knoten Atems steckst du mit einem Splitter Leben. How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you’re there, with a splinter of life. (304)

A puzzling conflation of death and life, the dying out of Ich in Du, and its reversal, Du in Ich provides the spark needed to continue—we are reminded of his early verse, ‘‘wir waren tot und konnten atmen’’ (‘‘we were dead and were able to breathe’’). The presence of Du is both sustaining and consuming force; it overtakes the self and perhaps achieves its own absolute status. A slight alteration from Atemkristall to ‘‘Knoten Atems’’ indicates a breathlessness that has now become fatal. Nevertheless, Du remains an external presence, something that can be raised to the level of absolute reality. When Ich begins to falter, Du looms above and beyond, and it is this separation that gives Du its saving potential—‘‘dich konnte ich halten, wa¨hrend mir alles entfiel.’’ Something of this need for absolute reality is echoed in the title ‘‘Lichtzwang’’ (light compulsion). Whether we read this ‘‘light’’ as the ‘‘false light of clarity,’’ mentioned earlier in connection with

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Zschachlitz’s ‘‘Schattensprache’’ or as ‘‘Ziw, jenes Licht,’’ the light of the Shekinah, it seems to be the case that this compulsion, though born perhaps of delusion or wish-fulfillment, is a protective measure. Celan writes, in the poem from which he takes his title, ‘‘Doch konnten wir nicht / hinu ¨berdunkeln zu dir: / es herrschte/ Lichtzwang’’ (‘‘But we could not / darken over to you: / light compulsion / reigned’’) (296). Somehow, it seems, the ‘‘Herrschaft’’ (Weissenberger 58) implied in the vertical configuration of Ich–Du, human and divine, must be kept in place as a preservative structure. The collapse into the horizontal realm, the substitution of immanence for transcendence, and, finally, the replacement of the speaking God with the silent Niemand, though absolutely crucial steps in Celan’s reconfiguration of the covenant on human ground, have paved the way for the destruction of the self. When the light no longer compels the poet’s gaze toward it, Du, as external other, only remains as quickly fading memory: Ich kann dich noch sehn: ein Echo, ertastbar mit Fu ¨hlwo¨rtern, am Abschiedsgrat. Dein Gesicht scheut leise, wenn es auf einmal lampenhaft hell wird in mir, an der Stelle, wo man am schmerzlichsten Nie sagt. I can still see you: an echo that can be groped toward with antenna words, on the ridge of parting. Your face quietly shies when suddenly there is lamplike brightness inside me, just at the point where most painfully one says, never. (306)

Du, in the first stanza, still separate, still approachable, ever so tentatively, by language, fades ever dimmer and begins to release its grasp. It disappears completely when Ich assumes autonomy from Du. The point at which Du is made negligible, no longer the source of light

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because ‘‘es auf einmal lampenhaft hell wird in mir,’’ the external world is shattered. And it appears that Ich is a far more suitable sacrifice for Celan’s ethical purposes than Du is. The point of no return, the only seemingly irreparable transgression of Celan’s project, is positing the self as the vehicle of creation to the exclusion of an external realm; that is, when one rejects the possibility—however inconceivable it may seem—that the divine exists. It is at this point that one must ‘‘painfully’’ admit that the covenant will ‘‘never’’ be an option. Once the poem has ceased to bear witness to an external absolute—however illusory this absolute may be—once the imperative ‘‘laß uns ihr Aug himmelwa¨rts wenden’’ no longer drives the poetic endeavor, there is no communicative purpose, no ethical basis. ‘‘Transfounded by Nothingness’’ When Celan reaches this point, when he renders the covenant effectively impossible, he seems to undergo a momentary surge of elation. Left freely roaming, alone and in the void, Celan is no longer bound by the constrictions he had once placed upon himself. But, in the same way as freedom implies freedom to, responsibility, as well as freedom from, this elation is short-lived once ‘‘nothingness’’ proves to be, only, nothing: Wirk nicht voraus, sende nicht aus, steh herein: durchgru ¨ndet vom Nichts, ledig allen Gebets, feinfu ¨gig, nach der Vor-Schrift, unu ¨berholbar, nehm ich dich auf, statt aller Ruhe. Do not work ahead, do not send forth,

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stand into it, enter: transfounded by nothingness, unburdened of all prayer, microstructured in heeding the pre-script, unovertakable, I make you at home, instead of all rest. (322)

The dialogical imperative is silenced here, and prayer, the formal dialogical sign of the covenant, becomes a mere burden lifted from the addressed reader. Prayer is made negligible once the future is negated. Kafka’s dictum, that ‘‘writing is a form of prayer,’’ echoed in the earlier ‘‘Nachtlich geschu ¨rzt,’’ is rejected, has become somehow an impossible effort—‘‘unu ¨berholbar.’’ As in the earlier poems, the imperative tone here is evident, but the content of this command has been radically altered. ‘‘Wirk nicht voraus / sende nicht aus, / steh herein’’—outward movement is forbidden, the future is no longer projected goal, movement is directed inward toward a seemingly passive and fixed point ‘‘herein.’’ Ich appropriates Du into itself in a final violating motion—‘‘nehm ich dich auf.’’ And the Ich–Du rests, consumed and ‘‘transfounded’’ by a Nothingness that no longer has a dialogical, and therefore ethical, component. And yet, so typical for Celan, this poem ends on an entirely ambiguous note. The multiple possibilities captured in the phrase ‘‘statt aller Ruhe’’ lead us in several conceivable directions. ‘‘Instead’’ suggests that ‘‘aller Ruhe’’ is not a viable option. The appropriation of Du into Ich, then, takes place on one plane to the exclusion of another. How are we to read ‘‘Ruhe’’? ‘‘Ruhe’’ can signify rest in the physical sense, silence or quiet in the linguistic sense, or peace and calmness in the more existential sense. If we are to follow the first and third definitions, Celan’s final words seem to be a defiance of complacency, both spiritual and actual. If we tend toward the second, the last phrase is a challenge against silence. Each level of meaning calls for action, and yet each is betrayed by the dismissal of prayer as a suitable vehicle for this action. Despite all losses, there still glim-

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mers a shred of hope that the Ich–Du relation can overcome the very devastating, very real fact that dialogue, in the form of prayer directed toward an external absolute, goes unanswered, unreciprocated. Sanctifying the Void It is this remaining shred of hope that, I believe, is both Celan’s death and his legacy. The hope that looms always so present and yet so unreachable on the periphery of his poetry—the wish that the Atemkristall both exists and is there to be witnessed—this finally proves unbearable. Sometime around April 20, 1970, Celan took his life (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 287). It may be naı¨ve to suggest that Celan chose to die rather than live in a world for which the covenant no longer holds true, in which there is no longer an external absolute, in which we have realized Dostoevsky’s prediction ‘‘in a world without God, all things are possible.’’ And yet, Celan’s final poem betrays his refusal to let go of his wish for the absolute as a living possibility for others. He continues to promote the covenant as the means of redemption. He writes: Rebleute graben die dunkelstu ¨ndige Uhr um, Tiefe um Tiefe, du liest, es fordert der Unsichtbare den Wind in die Schranken, du liest, die Offenen tragen den Stein hinterm Aug, der erkennt dich, am Sabbath. Vinegrowers dig up, the dark-houred clock, deep upon deep you read,

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the Invisible summons the wind into bounds, you read, the Open ones carry the stone behind their eye, it knows you, come the Sabbath. (trans. John Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 284)

Felstiner points out that this term Rebleute incorporates both the archaic word for vintagers and the Yiddish term Reb, used within the Hasidic community to designate a pious man (Poet, Survivor, Jew 285). Perhaps herein lies the key to understanding the legacy that Celan wished to leave. The human-centered goal of bringing the Messiah to earth, the taking on of what was previously the work of God—this is the task he promotes, and this is in many ways the backbone of Hasidic teaching. ‘‘Cultivating’’ the world so that it may become fertile for a Messianic age, based not on the fixed and passive goal of redemption, but on the dynamic and active process of redeeming, these Rebleute embody the ethical imperative of a post-Holocaust age. Despite the resignation displayed in the earlier poem that the written text has become unapproachable, and that, for this reason, prayer is no longer viable—‘‘ledig allen / Gebets, / feinfu ¨gig, nach /der Vor-Schrift, / unu ¨berholbar’’—here we see a return to the primacy of the text, underlined again and again by the consoling verse ‘‘du liest.’’ The empty nothingness has once again been filled, and continues to act, confounding presence with absence—‘‘es fordert / der Unsichtbare den Wind / in die Schranken.’’ It is precisely to this paradox that the Du must give testimony by reading— ‘‘du liest’’ (Felstiner, Poet, Survivor, Jew 285). Celan closes on a note of almost excruciating intimacy—‘‘der erkennt dich, / am Sabbath.’’ Both Du and the realm of the sacred are fully restored and brought back into relation with each other. The overarching movement in Celan’s poetry is one, finally, of hope. However tempered, hope guides the development of the relation. Throughout, Celan battles against the ‘‘natural’’ monologic condition. The plaintive ‘‘ho¨rst du mich’’ that plays like a refrain throughout

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these volumes suggests that isolation and separation are always a constant threat to the communicative gesture in Celan’s poetry. Though the threat is constant, in the brief moments when it subsides, Celan posits the existence of a listening other, an other who is bound in relation to the subject. With the emergence of the other comes an imperative: to bear witness to this source and, more precisely, to find a language that will not defile the object toward which it beckons. As we have seen, Celan’s collective injunction, ‘‘laß uns sie waschen / . . . laß uns ihr Aug / himmelwa¨rts wenden’’ (‘‘let us wash it / . . . let us turn its eye toward heaven’’) suggests that the type of language that is born in the relation simultaneously rehabilitates the divine and humanity—the ‘‘washing’’ of the word, that is, facilitates human connection. The relation between self and other, divine and human, gradually deepens and begins to outgrow language. Speech can no longer contain the relation. Nevertheless, as the relation grows stronger, the danger of proximity begins to take precedence over the threat of isolation. This ‘‘danger’’ is prevalent for several reasons. First, proximity presents an insurmountable problem for covenantal theology. God’s ‘‘nearness,’’ in other words, renders his silence far more terrifying, if indeed God is a speaking entity. Celan’s concern in the volumes Sprachgitter and Niemandsrose, therefore, is primarily one of finding an image for God that will account for both silence and proximity. As God becomes effectively depersonalized, the covenant is made secular, and, with it, the contextual thrust of the covenant is made universal. The ‘‘space between’’ enforces the separation necessary for the relation. In this space, the divine sustains its distance from the human realm, and the self retains autonomy from the other. However, as dialogue supplants monologue as the mark of human relation bearing within it the means for ethics, proximity encounters another type of danger. As Celan ‘‘comes through’’ the monologic condition—another level of the ‘‘hindurchgehen’’ that his poetry promises to affect—his dialogical relation is confronted again and again with the possibility of collapse. Atemwende represents the final challenge against the collapsed relation. In this volume, Celan posits the Atemkristall, the source of external truth calling for an accounting, a bearing witness. But this source calls for a very particular type of accounting, a means of speaking, of positioning oneself, in the realm of uncertainty. In this last stage of resistance, the self is subju-

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gated to the other; the other represents the source of truth (‘‘Du— ganz, ganz wirklich’’). The covenant is rewritten in the space of this subjugation, and the self is, finally, subsumed into the other. And yet, the self is sacrificed for the sake of ethics. Celan’s final volumes suggest how deeply he held to the hope for a covenantal structure suitable for a world coming to terms with a silent God. Celan’s last poetic word is Sabbath, the time designated to be sanctified and set apart from mundane time. His last word pleads for upholding the division between sacred and mundane and for keeping holy that space that is so crucial to the discussion of covenant in the Hebrew Bible. Though he himself may have given in to hopelessness, this final phrase continues to speak of promise and to display the fragile hope that guided so much of his poetry. If we use this last word as a filter through which to read his overarching poetic pursuit (perhaps a dangerously reductive move), we might choose to read Celan’s poetry as an instance of one of the most crucial imperatives of the Jewish faith: Kiddush haShem, sanctification of the divine name. That this imperative becomes so problematic after the Holocaust, that it becomes so intertwined with the project of redeeming humanity reflects the immensity of the task that Celan set before himself.

III `s: Edmond Jabe The Death of God and the Emerging Law of the Other ‘‘It is in questions that the Alliance is renewed,’’ wrote Reb Assim. ‘‘Interpreting the Law is our daily task. Questioning, the pledge of our truth in God. And Reb Adlan: ‘‘The wings of the word are questions.’’ (Return to the Book 364) And Yukel said: ‘‘The Law is in the word. I write: I apply the Law.’’ (Book of Yukel 222)

6

Posing the Questions In the languorous haze of a morning that might as well be dusk, a man, pushed to the brink of rage and despair, jealousy and frustration, murders his adulterous, pregnant wife. As he smothers her, as he crushes the life out of the body he so desires but senses does not belong to him, he imagines he has both freed himself from and become the other who possesses her love. Immediately stricken with remorse, but confused about his own motives and the precise cause of her death, he sees himself in her lifeless eyes, full of the repulsion she carries for him beyond death. The violent scene is frozen, and in the aftermath the man begins to comprehend the vastness of his solitude, the magnitude of the crime (of passion) he has committed: ‘‘I was alone. With silence for an accomplice. Yae¨l’s screams hung on the ceiling like game hung up by their legs. The sky had been pulled down with those poor beasts’’ (Y 70).1 At the very center of The Book of Questions, in the fourth volume entitled Yae¨l, or The Death of God, we witness this brutal and startling scene. The murder of this woman, portrayed alternately as cold and detached, then as deeply passionate, is also, we are told, the 1

The following title abbreviations are used in the Jabe`s chapters: Volume 1—Book of Questions (BQ) Volume 2—Book of Yukel (BY) Volume 3—Return to the Book (RB) Volume 4—Yae¨l (Y) Volume 5—Elya (E) Volume 6—Aely (A) Volume 7—El, or the LastBook (El)

Jabe`s’s text appears in both italicized and roman fonts. When I cite from the text, I will be maintaining the original font. In alternating his fonts in such a manner, Jabe`s is perhaps mirroring the Jewish prayerbook, which traditionally places the text to be read only by the rabbi in roman, and the passages to be recited by the entire congregation in italics. On this very basic level, then, The Book of Questions can be read as a kind of dialogue between rabbi and congregation, an extended and collective prayer service.

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murder of God. To kill Yae¨l, the narrator explains, is ‘‘to kill God in the mouth of the man struck down, in the belly of the unfaithful woman’’ (Y 61). The murder extends to the child in Yae¨l’s womb; Elya, ‘‘dead-in-order-to-be-born’’ (E 191), the vague stillborn, hints suggestively at the potential renewal—silenced but also fixed as pure potential by not-yet-having-been—that mingles with destruction. In this space of catastrophe, betrayal, transgression, and uncontrollable grief, the narrator is left to force a shred of life out of the smoldering ashes of death. The death of God, as violent act, vindication, redemption, and retribution, unravels in this central moment, forming the jagged poetic backdrop for Jabe`s’s theological project. The Book of Questions is a stunning, exhausting tribute to the power of the unanswered question. At the core of Jabe`s’s world, the question resides, a pulsing, dynamic entity that vehemently rejects conclusions, yet promises to foster a relation between the one who asks and the one of whom the question is asked. Resisting interpretation, but demanding engagement, Jabe`s’s Book of Questions accosts its readers. Frustratingly elusive, yet hauntingly familiar, Jabe`s’s text opens before us. It is a text of the starkest intimacy which remains, nevertheless, impenetrable on a number of levels. Like Celan, Jabe`s writes in the shadow of Adorno’s famous claim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. To this claim he responds, ‘‘To Adorno . . . I say that we must write. But we cannot write like before’’ (Motte 90). Taking on this imperative—‘‘we must write’’—Jabe`s enters onto a path with no suitable precedent—‘‘we cannot write like before.’’ His efforts to find a new means of writing after the Holocaust coincide with a return to the formal strategies of Jewish tradition. Employing the strategies of commentary and interpretation (strategies implicitly committed to the question), Jabe`s constructs a new method of writing that represents the breakdown of language accompanying the collapse of human values. Writing comes to signify a wholly new existential condition, bringing with it a set of wholly new choices. The movement that Jabe`s promotes is embraced by the phenomenological method and the strategy of hermeneutics suitable to this method. In much the same way as Kafka does, Jabe`s incorporates the text-based strategies of Midrash into the ontology of mystical Judaism—particularly Lurianic Kabbalah. Therefore, in his universe, the

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exile of the divine from itself (the presence of the Shekinah) comes to represent as well the exile of the word from the word—the word from its ‘‘meaning’’; likewise, the return to the word promoted by Midrash (commentary, interpretation) facilitates a ‘‘return’’ to the divine. Jabe`s’s work necessitates, paradoxically, a return to both a text and a divine that are altered, and continue to alter, in the telling. What he will ask, ultimately, of his readers is that they continue to promote a structure that they are, in fact, constructing by means of this method. Interpretation will come to take precedence over the original text, a text that will never be reached by pure return— altered as the text is, return is impossible. But, in the moment of exchange, both the text and the divine are reconstituted. The way in which reader and writer choose to engage text and divine—the specific ways they choose to reconstitute these concepts—becomes the cornerstone of Jabe`s’s ethical project. Upholding the covenant is no longer a matter of posing questions as a stance of challenge—a` la Job—but of posing the right questions. It is these questions, indeed, that will bring into being a model of both text and divine capable of providing an ethical foundation in the post-Holocaust world.

Marginalization and Exile In his Questioning Edmond Jabe`s, Warren Motte suggests that, though Jabe`s’s work escapes traditional generic categorization, it may be said to belong to a number of types. The connective link among each of the categories into which he has been placed— ‘‘Mediterranean writer, poet, metaphysician, Jew’’—is that, in each case, his is a voice from the margin (15). As central a part as ambivalence toward their own Jewish identity plays in the work of Celan and Kafka, it is Jabe`s’s marginalized position as writer and speaker for a group to which he questions his belonging that pervades his work. And, as ambivalence, challenge, and rebellion form the core of Kafka’s and Celan’s revaluation of faith and the covenant, here it is Jabe`s’s position as a Jew in exile, but a Jew who directly experienced neither the Holocaust nor, in general, the anti-Semitism pervading all aspects of life in Eastern Europe before and during the war, that informs both his choice and his treatment of his literary subject. A member of a prominent Sephardic family in Cairo, Jabe`s experi-

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enced a climate relatively free of the anti-Semitism and religious intolerance that marred Europe. The Cairo of the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the British occupation was a site of avid intellectual engagement, a space that fostered exchange between Egyptian and European culture, a veritable meeting ground of East and West.2 The Jewish community of Cairo was instrumental in this meeting of minds and cultures. In this period of liberalism, tolerance, and diversity, a type of cosmopolitan Judaism was the norm. Unlike Kafka’s and Celan’s Judaism, in which the cliche´d Jewish self-hatred is a persistent factor, Jabe`s’s Judaism is marked more deeply by its being the product of a shared culture. His Jewish identity is in many ways an assimilated identity, one nurtured in an environment of intellectual and religious inclusion. At the same time, although his Jewish identity might initially be said to be less problematic than Kafka’s or Celan’s, the shock of mounting anti-Semitism, with the establishment of the State of Israel and the subsequent deterioration of Arab–Jewish relations in Egypt, was perhaps that much greater for Jabe`s. Under the newly established regime of Nasser, and the emerging nationalist sentiment of Egypt, Jews were increasingly viewed as a threat to the homogeneity of Egypt, as well as potential collaborators with Israel. This nationalist fervor was decidedly at odds with the liberalism of the pre-Nasser era. From 1956 to 1960, the years of the most insistent expulsion and ‘‘voluntary’’ exile of Jews, approximately 36,000 Jews left Egypt. Only 8,000 to 10,000 remained. Jabe`s and his family were among those who ‘‘voluntarily’’ went into exile. In 1957, at the age of 45, Jabe`s literally became what serves as a central metaphor of The Book of Questions: the writer in exile, a member of the exiled Jewish people. Rather than make aliyah, Jabe`s chose to emigrate to Paris. He never returned to his native Egypt. While warmly received in Paris, he continued to feel a pervasive sense of homelessness and alienation from the desert landscape that so thoroughly saturates his work. Over the period of a decade, 1963–1973, Jabe`s composed his Book of Questions, seven volumes that are, literally and poetically, a testament to 2 Biographical information on Jabe`s is relatively scarce. Paul Auster provides a brief biography in his ‘‘Book of the Dead: An Interview with Edmond Jabe`s.’’ Daniel ´ gyptien provides the most extensive biography to date. See Lanc¸on’s book Jabe`s l’E Michael Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970 for a general history of the modern Jewish experience in Egypt.

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the bitterly ironic experience of exile from the narrative perspective of a Jew who had never identified himself as Jewish to the exclusion of his Egyptianness. In a sense, Jabe`s’s move from a Sephardic culture to an Ashkenazic one suggests a further level of exile. It is as an uprooted and displaced member of the Sephardim that Jabe`s poses the challenge to covenantal theology and ethics presented in The Book of Questions. He often presents himself as cut off from, shunned by his coreligionists. Whether these coreligionists are Ashkenazic or Sephardic, a detail Jabe`s never discloses, Jabe`s appears to be speaking to a group that shoulders a very different collective history from his own. Jabe`s’s recognition of this divide is constant and often motivates his imagined self-indictments, which I will describe later. In The Book of Questions, the influences of modernism, postmodernism, and Judaism come together in a way that challenges the supremacy of any individual influence. Certainly, the ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘postmodern’’ issues he addresses cannot be divorced from his uniquely Jewish perspective, and are issues that in many ways are specifically grounded in Jewish tradition and theology. The breakdown of language, the inability to capture external reality, or even to conceive of a reality apart from its linguistic representation are issues taken up extensively in Midrashic commentary and in Kabbalah. But, to the extent that Jabe`s ‘‘chooses’’ to uphold his Jewish identity in exile—not in Israel, but Paris—he demonstrates that Jewish strategies can be brought into the diaspora, into a secularized world perhaps as a means of reformulating ethics.

A Problematic Holocaust Writing The Holocaust is a central focus of The Book of Questions. Characteristic of Jabe`s’s style, this theme is approached in the most elusive and peripheral way. The first trilogy recounts the story of a relationship between Sarah, a camp survivor, and Yukel, her non-survivor lover and autobiographical representation of Jabe`s himself. This ‘‘story,’’ however, is interrupted continually by meta-narratives on the act of writing, by self-contained aphorisms, and by lessons, fables, and reflections of the fictitious rabbis who constitute Jabe`s’s Midrashim. The story of Sarah and Yukel, as an isolated strand of narration, is

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quite literally lost among these competing dialogues. The effect is both powerful and frustrating for the reader who attempts to piece together this story, but is left finally with only an impressionistic, shadowy grasp of the details. This refusal to provide graphic detail or a linear narrative more representative of the historical reality of the Holocaust has led a small contingent of critics, most notably Berel Lang, to suggest that Jabe`s has failed to provide an accurate and responsible depiction of the Holocaust. Lang suggests that Jabe`s potentially misleads readers who have not had previous exposure to the Holocaust—those who read Jabe`s with the intention of learning about historical detail will not find it in his writing. In addition, he writes, Jabe`s disregards the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust by suggesting it is an event in the larger history of Jewish persecution and exile. Indeed, the Holocaust bears an eerie inevitability in Jabe`s’s suprahistorical depiction. As ‘‘inevitable,’’ the Holocaust would appear to resist moral judgments. Also, Lang continues, by urging an analogy between the condition of the Jew and the condition of the writer, under the sign of incommensurability of both historical reality and poetic language, Jabe`s aestheticizes the actual and horrifying events of the Holocaust. The lines between fiction and reality, Lang suggests, cannot be blurred so indiscriminately (191–206). Were Jabe`s, as a non-witness, to attempt a more ‘‘accurate’’ representation of the Holocaust, and were he to proclaim that, in fact, his motives and intentions were this representation, I would have to conclude, along with Lang, that he ‘‘fails the Jew, language and the Holocaust’’ (206). I am uneasy about regarding him under the rubric of ‘‘Holocaust’’ writers for precisely this reason. Simply put: Jabe`s can employ the Holocaust only as a metaphor, and, in becoming metaphor, the Holocaust is under the distinct and perhaps inevitable danger of being trivialized, aestheticized, ‘‘prettified.’’3 It seems to me, however, that Jabe`s never intends to be, nor presents himself as, a Holocaust writer. He rejects the possibility of speaking about the Holocaust and of his being an appropriate speaker 3 Where Celan’s hermeticism led to a number of accusations along the lines of his being ‘‘non-engage´,’’ Jabe`s is seldom taken to task for this, and specifically not so on the level of his chosen form. In the criticism I have come across, only Berel Lang has challenged Jabe`s on the potential risk of etherealizing the Holocaust, and his arguments are constructed almost entirely on the level of historical criticism.

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by his very refusal to provide a detailed ‘‘story.’’ He is uncharacteristically clear about his reluctance to present himself as an authority on this subject and, indeed, on any other. In a passage that reaches tentatively, gently, cautiously toward the reader, Jabe`s suggests that his own failings, with regard to observance of and participation in ‘‘traditional,’’ and, therefore, ‘‘accepted’’ strains of Judaism, grant him a peculiar kind of authority, a peculiar kind of connection to the reader, whom he invites into this world that he views from the periphery. He writes: You who are not Jewish (which I have been so poorly, but which I am), I will introduce you to my land. You who are no writer (which I have been so poorly, but which I am), I will give you my books. You who are Jewish, and, perhaps, a writer: You will reproach me with losing the prey for the shadow. And, in order to punish me, you will deny the validity of these pages. Have you seen how a word lives? Have you seen how two words live? Then listen. (BQ 63)

His qualifiers—reluctant, perhaps ambivalent admissions that he is at the same time as he is not a member of the community for which he speaks—are separated from his address of the reader, this unnamed ‘‘you’’ whom he beckons. As though afterthoughts, perhaps, these qualifiers are yet central to the aim of inclusion. At the same time as he is clear that the invitation to the reader—probably a nonJewish reader, although it also can be argued that he is reaching out toward a newly acquired Ashkenazic community from his own Sephardic perspective—should be extended from the margin, and that community begins not with a specific ritual or doctrine but with the recognition that this ‘‘margin’’ may be overshadowing the ‘‘center,’’ Jabe`s argues that the voice from the margin is by definition, in fact has to be, a Jewish voice. It has to be a Jewish voice, he tells us, because ‘‘the difficulty of being Jewish . . . is the same as the difficulty of writing. For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out’’ (BQ 122). Waiting, hope, wearing out—three modes of positioning, three strategies of embracing a present moment that is always moving toward the future. The nonfulfillability of the Messianic wish is also the inexhaustibility of the written word. The ‘‘not-yet’’ is the condition for the now. And, in occupying this space of the ‘‘not-yet,’’ the writer is charged with a series of precarious, but related, tasks: (1) to confront the other as a

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necessary fiction that stops just short of being a saving device; (2) to internalize this ‘‘fiction’’ to the point that it serves as a constant reminder of our responsibility, as Levinas suggests, ‘‘to and for’’ this other; (3) to create an illusion conducive to ethical behavior without allowing the reader or the writer to ‘‘give in to the seductive lies of [his] pen’’ (El 366). This invitation to the reader expresses the communicative thrust of Jabe`s’s project, but it does so in a manner particular to a more fundamental ethical concern: communication is to be newly found in a space of lack, of void, of incommensurability. In the same way as Kafka constructs his commandment in the space of human weakness, Jabe`s reaches out to the reader in the space of loss. The reader is being asked directly to renounce expectations of clarity, of mastery, of certainty (on his or her own part as well as on the part of the author). Jabe`s’s caution here signals that we are collectively—Jew and non-Jew—lost in an abyss out of which we must pull ourselves and each other. Like Kafka’s and Celan’s, Jabe`s’s ambivalence toward his own Judaism is quite apparent. And like that of these authors who precede him, it is precisely this ambivalence that characterizes his sense of responsibility to speak for these same people who, he imagines, cast him out. Reproach and misunderstanding are expected from the beginning—‘‘in order to punish me, you will deny the validity of these pages.’’ What binds the reader to the writer, and by extension, Jew to nonJew, in Jabe`s’s project, is the condition of exile—exile characterizes the postwar trauma, the divisive split between the idealistic humanism of the Enlightenment and the atrocities that humanity found itself capable of committing. We have been exiled from our own source of humanity, that is. In positing this equation, Jabe`s relies on the historical situation of the Jew in exile and the mythical resonance of the wandering Jew. The Holocaust, in this sense, is an instance among many that perpetuates this exile. While perhaps more tragic, the Holocaust is not a unique event, divorced from historical precedent. In opening up the Jewish condition in this way, he does run the risk of presenting a false analogy between Auschwitz and the nomadic condition of exile—a condition become pure metaphor after the establishment of the State of Israel. No one, however, is more aware of these dangers, these insufficiencies, than Jabe`s himself. I would suggest, then, that Jabe`s is no more purely a Holocaust writer

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than Celan is purely a Holocaust writer. And, as we move toward a universal ethic grounded in Jewish tradition, this is perhaps an appropriate direction to take. Perhaps in loosening his ties to the Holocaust, Jabe`s suggests not that we diminish the importance of the Holocaust in world and Jewish history, but that we use it to broaden the scope of what can be considered Holocaust literature in a more far-reaching sense, that is, to promote literature that focuses not only on the event, but also on the ramifications and consequences of this event on the covenantal structure in particular, and on human ethics in general. A voice from the margins, Jabe`s seems to suggest, is perhaps the best—and only—voice possible to take this inquiry into the next level. And, as he will indicate, the voice of the margin is the human voice, the voice that we all share in a world so deeply betrayed by and cut off from its own sense of value.

Reading The Book of Questions As I do with Celan, I would like to suggest that Jabe`s’s work allows for and provokes contradictory and conflicting readings and that we find in Jabe`s an inclusiveness and desire for totality such that ‘‘either/ or’’ propositions are ousted by the emergence of the ‘‘both/and.’’ Immanence and transcendence, absence and presence, plenitude and emptiness coexist in The Book of Questions as mutually dependent sources of meaning and inspiration. Jabe`s describes the dual intention of writing in this way: ‘‘Writing works in two directions. It is both an expansion and a contraction. . . . You have to write in the same way that you breathe.’’ In addition, he explains, ‘‘the whole work of deconstruction seems to uncover a totality’’ (Auster 16). Both these claims reveal the play of opposites describing Jabe`s’s method. Proliferation and reduction, plenitude and absence, are equally powerful possibilities for him, and, indeed, he employs them in the service of ‘‘uncovering totality.’’ Consequently, he vacillates between these poles, exploring their implications. In the same way, I would like to suggest that Jabe`s’s project is both subversive and conservative, both deconstructive and reconstructive. Jabe`s’s subversion is conducted under more primarily restorative purposes—his subversion is the first, and necessary, step in the reconstruction and reformulation of the covenant. Perhaps this implies

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a stronger teleological bent to Jabe`s’s project, one that may not rightly be there. For the purpose of argument, however, drawing primarily from Edward Kaplan’s theses in ‘‘The Problematic Humanism of Edmond Jabe`s’’ and ‘‘The Atheistic Theology of Edmond Jabe`s,’’ I suggest that Jabe`s’s ‘‘goal’’ is a new humanism that takes the Rabbinic tradition of Midrash and the exiled God of Kabbalah as its model. A useful model that better captures the phenomenological nature of Jabe`s’s project is Susan Handelman’s suggestion that Jabe`s employs a ‘‘dialectic of heresy and faith . . . an heretic hermeneutic’’ (‘‘Torments of an Ancient World’’ 65). At no time during the subversive portion of his project does Jabe`s denounce the necessity for faith; his subversion, in other words, is undertaken in the context and service of strengthening and redefining this faith. Overturning the traditional notions of belief and practice—debunking what Kaplan names the ‘‘fascism’’ of religious institutionalization (‘‘Atheistic Theology’’ 56), Jabe`s ultimately comes closer to a picture of faith-as-positioning similar to that promoted by Ricoeur in The Conflict of Interpretations. As well, he approaches Ricoeur’s ‘‘freedom in the light of hope’’ (437), with the writer as the keeper of this hope. I will be arguing that Jabe`s’s reformulation of the covenant hinges on the relation between self and other, with God being, as Jabe`s explains, ‘‘the last Other’’ (E 152). As I move through these volumes, I will establishing a certain development of theme. I am consciously imposing a linearity and a teleology on these volumes. But I will also be moving fluidly at times through them, quoting from the earlier works to support the arguments of the later and taking insights gained in the later volumes to help to illuminate earlier points. In demonstrating this cyclical movement simultaneously with a linear strategy, I hope to incorporate Jabe`s’s conflation of these methods into my own. Jabe`s is tempted again and again by the promise of moving-toward—he is goal-oriented despite himself, and often expresses his later volumes as continuation or completion of those that came before. There is a unique tension between the linearity necessarily imposed on his ‘‘message’’ by the constraints of the novel form and the distinct resistance he displays toward all examples of closure. The book remains open even while it conforms—at least structurally speaking—to the formal demands placed upon it (Motte 61; Caws 21). This tension, between set form and continually evolving content, is reflected in

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Jabe`s’s reformulation of the covenant. As in the work of Kafka and Celan, the structure of the Law, the need to sustain a structural base, supersedes the content of the Law. And yet, the content finally outgrows its structural boundaries and remains fluid and dynamic. Therefore, deconstruction is for Jabe`s, far from nihilistic wordplay, the means by which he enters into the void with the intention of finding and creating meaning. What I propose to do here is to, first, explore some of the most basic ways in which Jabe`s employs this deconstructive method. By decentering and discrediting our fundamental notions of text, author, reader, language, Jabe`s creates a space of void. The first section is a brief sketch of Jabe`s’s deconstructive landscape. This is by no means an exhaustive discussion, but it will serve as a worthwhile introduction to some of the general paradoxes and puzzles that constitute Jabe`s’s method. This ‘‘landscape’’ is both the impetus for, and the result of, the death of the absolute God, my more immediate focus in the sections to follow. This is a space governed by the ‘‘violence’’ of the question—‘‘questioning is violent by definition because it provokes the violence of the reply and in turn violates it’’ (Jabe`s, ‘‘My Itinerary’’ 11). The ‘‘violence of the reply,’’ the resounding NO—from text and God alike—that meets the interrogation, will be the focus of the first section. I will be looking primarily at the first trilogy of The Book of Questions, consisting of The Book of Questions, The Book of Yukel, and Return to the Book, here. It is in this first trilogy that Jabe`s carves open the space of void, where he loses and pursues the loss of absolute grounding to the point of potentially consuming nihilism. I will also be looking at Yae¨l, the fourth volume of The Book of Questions. While this volume is placed together with Elya and Aely in the form of a second trilogy, thematically it represents a transitional piece, in itself more reflective of the despair and loss of value resulting from the first trilogy. In this volume, the death of God is chronicled in the violent murder of the main character. The second section, then, is concerned more with the ‘‘violation’’ of this NO, the refusal of the question to rest content with its findings. Here I will focus almost entirely on the reformulation of God in light of the death proposed in the first section. The volumes Elya, Aely, and El depict the painstaking emergence from the void and the resistance to nihilism. God is refashioned according to a newly inscribed ‘‘Law’’ of movement, alterity, and distance. With the rees-

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tablishment of an ontological base, a code of ethics, determined by this base, also emerges. It is primarily in these last three volumes that the writer is given the task of creator and upholder of the Law. In the final section, I will be turning from the somewhat linear discussion of these texts to a broader, more overarching set of conclusions that, I hope, retrieves the spirit of cyclical movement more truly constitutive of Jabe`s’s project. Much as Motte predicts, I find myself imposing an order and structure, attempting to locate Jabe`s’s lost ‘‘story,’’ and at the same time, resisting the impulse to fix Jabe`s’s project by means of this imposition. My ‘‘conclusions,’’ therefore, remain inconclusive. I will suggest that Jabe`s ultimately guides us toward a new humanism, a universal code of ethics that finds its voice in the methods and beliefs of Rabbinic and mystical Judaism—that is, in commentary and interpretation of a Law that remains binding but hazy, emanating from, while continuing to alter, an unknowable divine. Separating Jabe`s’s deconstructive method from what will constitute in the later discussion his reconstructive message, I am imposing an artificial division. In actuality, these two tendencies work together. However, this division in many ways describes the dynamic of despair and hope, nihilism and idealism, that is central to Jabe`s’s reformulation of the covenant. Jabe`s courts the void, tempts oblivion, but emerges from it with a renewed sense of hope. As tempted as he is by the abyss, he is equally pulled toward the realm of the absolute. It is this tension between what he calls the All and Nothing that I hope to highlight in enforcing this division. It is a tension that Jabe`s refuses to resolve, and it becomes in many ways the cornerstone of a faith based, alternately, in the shattering and reconstructing of illusions. The writer is burdened with a task first exemplified by the Book of Job—to question ceaselessly the arbitrary and unjust workings of the divine and, in questioning, to demand a more ethical model for human action. But the conclusions of the Book of Job determine the writer’s point of departure: the writer’s demand is voiced with the full knowledge that it will go unfulfilled, the questions are posed despite their being left unanswered. Ultimately, the writer becomes the vehicle for a new humanism, a ‘‘Judaism after God,’’ as Jabe`s describes it (‘‘My Itinerary’’ 5), a humanism, far from the positivistic Enlightenment humanism, that is described in terms of the lack of understanding and knowledge that humans can possess. Like

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Kafka and Celan, Jabe`s stakes his claim to human redemption (in the sense of rehabilitation as opposed to salvation) in the relation between self and other (Stamelman, ‘‘The Dialogue of Absence’’ 100). The suspicion that lurks in Celan’s poetry, that the other perhaps does not exist, is more firmly declared by Jabe`s; the other becomes a fiction, itself a casualty of the Book. More than either of these previous authors, Jabe`s’s ethical project entails the construction, maintenance, and partial internalization of an illusion on the part of the writer. The writer, finding himself mired in the void left open by the death of the speaking God of the covenant, reconstructs the other, and gives to this other the power of the Law. This process betrays an almost fierce hope in humanity—that we will choose self-deception because it is ethically binding, that we will choose a covenantal structure because it reflects our paradoxical freedom-in-chains. The question circumscribes the bounds of relation and binds us to a fiction. The promise that Jabe`s leaves us with, and that his Book of Questions, in its totality, hints at in riddles and glimpses, is that this fiction will acquire strength and reality as it is continually perpetuated. Placing in Question With Jabe`s, the question is exploded; it becomes the symbol of faith par excellence in a world where answers no longer apply. Questions, and the act of questioning, pervade every aspect of his text. The instability of the text reflects the instability of the object toward which his writing is directed. Bearing in mind that questioning is a strategy used both to decenter and reestablish a connection with an external reality, and, therefore, that subversion accompanies rehabilitation in Jabe`s’s project, I will address some of the most basic targets of interrogation in Jabe`s’s Book of Questions. One of the most basic levels of questioning in this text is Jabe`s’s questioning of his own ‘‘right’’ to speak (Cohen 258). In an imagined indictment, Jabe`s questions his legitimacy to bear witness to events that he had not directly experienced and to speak for a people from whom he feels himself estranged: I have been around. I have circled around myself without finding rest. My brothers turned to me and said:

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‘‘You are not Jewish. You do not go to the synagogue.’’ I turned to my brothers and answered: ‘‘I carry the synagogue within me.’’ My brothers turned to me and said: ‘‘You are not Jewish. You do not pray.’’ I turned to my brothers and answered: ‘‘Prayer is my backbone and my blood.’’ My brothers turned to me and said: ‘‘The rabbis you quote are charlatans. Did they even exist? And you feed on their ungodly words.’’ I turned to my brothers and answered: ‘‘The rabbis I quote are beacons of my memory. One can only remember oneself. And you know that the soul has words as petals.’’ The oldest of my brothers turned to me and said: ‘‘Our Purim is no longer the feast of your carnival and your joy. Passover no longer the anniversary of your halt in the desert, your passage through the sea. Yom Kippur no longer your day of fasting. These dates marked in our calendar: what do they mean to you now? Rejected by your people, robbed of your heritage: who are you? For the others, you are a Jew, but hardly for us.’’ I turned to the oldest of my brothers and answered: ‘‘I have the wound of the Jew. I was circumcised, as you were, on the eighth day after my birth. I am a Jew, as you are, in each of my wounds. But is one man not as good as another?’’ The most thoughtful of my brothers turned to me and said: ‘‘If you make no difference between a Jew and a non-Jew, are you, in fact, still a Jew?’’ (BQ 60–61)

The exchange continues here, but the narrator is not given the chance to answer this important final question. His answer, an intuitively felt ‘‘yes,’’ suggests the method by which Jabe`s’s project moves from the particular to the general, how he promotes a universal ethics by means of specifically Jewish strategies and metaphors. For him, self-identification as a Jew has very little to do with excluding the non-Jew. Jabe`s’s definition of Judaism—what it means to be Jewish—is extended here to include as its common denominator the ‘‘wound’’ of the Jew, signifying at once the sign of the covenant and pain undergone—in Jabe`s’s case, forced exile—in the name of being Jewish. Prayer, knowledge of the written commentaries, observance of the Holy Days—these are the requirements that distinguish between a Jew and a non-Jew in many traditional formulations of Juda-

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ism. In a post-Holocaust world, living in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws which rendered these distinctions irrelevant, Jabe`s is posing a crucial question: who does have the right to speak after the Holocaust? And, perhaps, more crucially, is it possible that the opposite can be true? Can anyone exercise the ‘‘right’’ to silence anymore? In his campaign against Jewish doctrine and the ‘‘institution’’ of Judaism, this exchange signals the first of many of Jabe`s’s attempts to introduce what he calls, prophetically, ‘‘Judaism after God.’’ But, even more important, this indictment—a fictitious and imagined indictment of Jabe`s by Jabe`s (Derrida, Writing and Difference 67)— points to the precarious positioning of a text whose authorial legitimacy has been thrown radically into question. In some ways, Jabe`s reconciles the problem of his own legitimacy by giving the voice and witness over to those with ‘‘authority’’—to Sarah, Yukel, and his vast arsenal of rabbis. Though fictitious creations, in the world of the text, Sarah and Yukel serve as witnesses to an experience divorced from Jabe`s’s own reality, the rabbis as the collective testament to the text as it is constructed and unwound before them. But the authority of the witness is itself subverted when Sarah, for instance, refuses to speak: ‘‘I will not write of what I have seen. I write at the foot of the moment I dodge, in tow of a question which carries other questions’’ (BY 236). In this refusal, Jabe`s is bound more closely to Sarah by the more general problem of writing about the Holocaust—his uneasiness concerning his own ‘‘legitimacy’’ is in some ways subsumed by this larger incapacity, even for the witness, to speak what is essentially unspeakable. In addition to throwing into question his own legitimacy as the author of this particular text, Jabe`s implies in his Book of Questions that authorship as such is questionable. ‘‘You dream of writing a book. The book is already written’’ (BY 207), the narrator says, as if to suggest that the creative process itself is impossible, as if creation is more truly re-creation, a tapping into and bringing into light that which is always already objectively there. In this admission of the essentially hermeneutic thrust of his writing, the lines between external and internal reality become blurred. Jabe`s explains that, ‘‘writing means having a passion for origins. It means trying to go down to the roots. The roots are always the beginning’’ (RB 325). Though asserted in a deceptive tone of finality, immediately these ‘‘origins’’ are called into question. The text, the book, creates as it is being created, and

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all the while the book is only a mere shadow of the ideal Book that inspires its writing. With Escher-like complexity, the book circles around itself, wrapping layer upon layer as if insulating the elusive Book within—‘‘What book do you mean?’’ ‘‘I mean the book within the book.’’ ‘‘Is there another book hidden in what I read?’’ ‘‘The book you are writing’’ (BY 291). Writer and reader are conflated, unified by the same task. ‘‘Revelation,’’ that is, discovery of the sought-after source, is more precisely revelation of the void created within the book as it recedes further and further from capture. The book erases itself as it inscribes itself. The book writes and is written in the void. As the reader has been bound to the writer in the service of the same impossible task—to retrieve origins that vanish as quickly as they are asserted—Jabe`s questions his audience, questions that he has an audience, taking himself one remove further into a metatextual contemplation of his writing: ‘‘I speak . . . but to whom? And why speak? For whom? How? . . . To speak—under what circumstances, after what silence or wave, or incomparable path in mid-ocean, after what question, desert, exile, or before which dawn?’’ (E 136). Just as Celan’s painful early admission—‘‘ich singe vor Fremden’’—in no way disarms him of the necessity to continue speaking (als letzter), here the given is that Jabe`s will speak, that he must speak. Thus, even as he questions the purpose and impact of his words, he accepts what appears to be the often futile task of writing, and, in at least one instance, demonstrates a measure of certainty about the legitimacy and magnitude of what it is he has to say. What remains in question is not the impact his words will have, but when they will stake their claim, and where they will find their proper audience: ‘‘I know what I shall say. I know what I shall write. What I say shall be heard, what I write, read. Tomorrow already defined. Tomorrow—but where? when?’’ (Y 75). This confidence that Jabe`s will be able to communicate seems markedly different from the sentiment displayed in Kafka’s anguished cry—‘‘This tremendous world I have in my head, but how to free it . . .’’ (Diaries 222). A cry that appears to me to capture the terrifying incommensurability before the object of writing at the heart of Kafka’s project is the similar impetus behind, I believe, Celan’s suicide. And yet, the unmistakably prophetic quality of Jabe`s’s claim here is not unlike Kafka’s assertion ‘‘I am an end or a beginning’’ (Notebooks 52). An echo, as well, of Nietzsche’s eerily prescient

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claim in Ecce Homo, ‘‘I am no man. I am dynamite’’ (326), speaks directly to Jabe`s’s sense that he is undertaking a project in a time and place not yet ripe for it. Hence, the overarching sense of mixed emotions so palpable in Jabe`s’s work: urgency, mission, foreboding, hope, despair. To a certain degree, the object of incommensurability for him might be said to have shifted—or rather, expanded—to permeate every aspect of the writing process. It is perhaps for this reason that Jabe`s so defiantly resists writing a work that will conform to traditional generic standards. Jabe`s continues to subvert the book that has already subverted itself. In a section of The Book of Questions entitled ‘‘Letter to Gabriel,’’ the narrator, here Yukel, attempts to explain what type of book this is: ‘‘I have the Book of Questions in my hands. Is it an essay?’’ ‘‘No. Perhaps.’’ ‘‘Is it a poem with deep wells?’’ ‘‘No. Perhaps.’’ ‘‘Is it a story?’’ ‘‘Perhaps.’’ ‘‘Am I supposed to infer that you would like it taken as the story of your rivers, your reefs?’’ ‘‘A stranger like the word and the Jew, unclassifiable among other books, what shall I call it?’’ ‘‘Why don’t you call it: The Book.’’ (BY 300)

We witness here Jabe`s’s resistance to naming his object (Stamelman, ‘‘The Dialogue of Absence’’ 107), almost as though, in a sense quite similar to Mallarme´’s ‘‘L’apre`s-midi d’une faune,’’ to name is to kill. Also evident here is the indistinguishability of the speaker, as though the content of one’s speech precedes the one bringing voice to it. The title ‘‘Book’’ is confounded: what we are given to expect of the formal constraints of the ‘‘Book’’ here do not apply. The limits are not defined, and therefore transgression of these limits is no longer possible. In removing limitation, the very notion of the Book is expanded, made more inclusive. The consistent refrain of ‘‘perhaps’’ opens up the possibilities of the text, like a promise and hope in stark contrast to the finalizing NO (Cahen 63). Written in the form of a letter, this exchange has communication as its central focus. What is communicated, what is exchanged? An understanding of the inability to define boundaries—it is this non-

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knowledge, this glimpse into absence, that becomes the basis here for communion. Reader and writer are brought together by the puzzle that the writer merely brings into words. By including this exchange within the context of the book itself, a conversation that most likely actually occurred on some level between Jabe`s and his friend and critic Gabriel Bounoure, Jabe`s reveals that the reader is not only implied—but directly addressed—in the writing process (Motte 20). Indeed, the reader is incorporated into the text as a speaker. The reader is both powerfully present in and absent from the text. While the reader informs the writing of the text, the ideal Reader to whom the book is directed has not yet surfaced. It is precisely this insistence on the ‘‘not-yet’’ that characterizes the ethical thrust of Jabe`s’s theological project. As mentioned above, Jabe`s’s resistance to following generic standards stems from a paradoxical dual impulse quite central to his project—unwilling to restrict the focus of his work, and unable to do so because his focus is nothing less than the totality of being, Jabe`s rejects the totalizing impulse, that is, the dogmatism and rigidity inherent in systematic thinking (Motte 103). He explains: . . . this is why I dreamed of a work which would not enter into any category, fit any genre, but contain them all; a work hard to define, but defining itself by this lack of definition; a work which would not answer to any name, but had donned them all; a work belonging to no party or persuasion; a work of earth in the sky and of sky on earth; a work which would be the rallying point of all the words scattered in space whose loneliness and discomfiture we do not suspect; the place beyond all place of an obsession with God, unquenched desire of a mad desire; a book, finally, which would only surrender by fragments, each of them the beginning of another book. (A 247)

The ellipses in this quote are Jabe`s’s own, as though he is continuing a conversation that has been previously begun, as though he is reaching back and straining toward an undisclosed future moment that is itself grounded in the past. ‘‘Defined by a lack of definition’’ ‘‘nameless,’’ ‘‘the place beyond all place an obsession with God,’’ ‘‘a book which would only surrender by fragments’’—this is the form that Jabe`s’s work will take. To his reconstruction of the covenant and, with it, the God to whom this covenant binds us, this vehemently anti-systematic approach is crucial.

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Jabe`s describes the aim and difficulty of making a book in a manner that echoes something of the receding horizon so prevalent in Kafka’s landscape. He writes: ‘‘Making a book or, rather, helping it to come into being means above all blurring its utopian tracks, wiping out footprints. Then the word takes the place still warm from the heel. And we go to the word and with it retrace our silent, forgotten way, a way taken for and without it’’ (Y 30). ‘‘Helping the book come into being’’ echoes Kafka’s comments concerning storytelling; in both cases, the book and the story appear to have their own external reality, apart from the writer or storyteller. Significantly, Jabe`s extends the self-negating motion of Kafka’s storyteller to the writer, moving from the spoken word to the written word. At the same time, ‘‘wiping out footprints’’ indicates the erasure of all that has come before—a starting anew. The continuity of the story or written word (perhaps in the sense of Midrash) is now called into question. Perhaps the erasure is only partial, negating only those ‘‘utopian tracks,’’ only those paths that sought for and passed on deceptive claims to an absolute? But the movement, in the space carved open by this partial erasure, is return—retrace—a finding a way back to the word that somehow inspires the ‘‘making of the book.’’ Erasure is thus conflated with the hope that the trace will be uncovered. Much in the same way as Celan writes, ‘‘the absolute poem—no, it certainly does not exist, cannot exist. But in every real poem, even the least ambitious, there is this ineluctable question, this exorbitant claim’’ (Collected Prose 55) the movement of subversion here desperately seeks its own undoing. ‘‘A way taken for and without it’’ speaks to the tension between the rejection of and necessary claim to the absolute. ‘‘For’’ suggests an alignment with, a belonging to, the word (already an ideal); ‘‘without’’ suggests what the word’s absence makes possible. At the same time, the book that writes itself, that comes into its own being only by means of the gentle prodding of the perceptive writer (who knows how to listen for the book that urges its writing), challenges the autonomous and creative position of the writer, and, by extension, the position of the self. The very notion of self, for Jabe`s, is possible only in the context of the writing process. His enigmatic epigraph to The Book of Questions explodes the boundaries of selfhood and places passivity and action into a continuous exchange—‘‘you are the one who writes and the one who is written.’’

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Rosmarie Waldrop points to the enigmatic phrase, ‘‘Je est le livre,’’ an obvious reworking of Rimbaud’s equally puzzling ‘‘Je est un autre,’’ as the focal point of Jabe`s’s deconstruction of self and identity (136; see also Motte 121). At the center of the Jabe`sien text is the proliferation, the infinite reflection and mirroring of an image that is itself a falsehood (Waldrop 141). The ‘‘I’’ is reconstituted in the moment of the text, but does not exist outside of it. The self, then, is ultimately dependent on the text for its existence; it is inscribed in the written word. And yet, the primacy of the self is asserted alongside this seeming erasure, but it is a conditional primacy. The self exists only in relation to the writing process that it somehow sets into motion. With the ‘‘I’’ so radically called into question, destabilized and yet boldly reasserted, the boundaries between internal and external reality are blurred. The search for origins becomes increasingly more problematic (Waldrop 136). On the one hand, the Book undermines itself, it erases itself in the very moment of its writing. And yet, the Book also continues to perpetuate its own potential for existence—in the ceaseless reflection, the irreconcilable paradox, the refusal and resistance to closure, the Book remains entirely open, entirely possible. A strategy that Jabe`s frequently uses to place identity in question is the formal statement of identity (x is y). He writes, for instance, ‘‘God is doubt’’ (BY 238), or ‘‘God is absence of God’’ (BY 272), effectively removing any discernible content from this equation. In the tradition of negative theology, and as a measure of his formal subversion, Jabe`s makes a statement of identity that identifies an empty principle with an equally empty principle. God is doubt is to suggest God is all that is not, all that we cannot conceive, all that we do not believe in. Much in the same way as Kafka’s reduction of belief to being (belief means . . . being), and Celan’s equation of I with nothingness in ‘‘Mandorla,’’ Jabe`s’s statements of identity are at once reductive and expansive. The formal grounding of these statements is the relation, but what this relation means is open for question and exploration. As the space in which the Book is inscribed continually erases itself, grounding is removed, and exile becomes the established condition of both the text and the language employed in the text. The Book becomes the metaphor for wandering and exile. Specifically, the desert becomes the poetic space. The desert, laden with historical

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and mythical significance in the Jewish tradition, is the unstable dwelling of the nomad. Equating the condition of being Jewish with the condition of writing, Jabe`s suggests that both the Jew and the writer inhabit a condition of exile—from the word, from the divine. It is precisely this homelessness that places in stark relief how crucial the maintenance of the original place of dwelling is. The title of Jabe`s’s first collection of poetry, Je baˆtis ma demeure (I build my dwelling), reveals his near-obsession with finding the space of dwelling (Motte 123). As Celan stresses, in his ‘‘Zweiha¨usig, ewiger,’’ the act of building in the reformulation of the covenant as an expression of the double-bind to heaven and earth (‘‘darum baun wir und bauen’’; that is why we build and build), Jabe`s is confounded by the possibility that this ‘‘dwelling’’ lies simultaneously in the realms of immanence and transcendence. Like Celan, he finds that each realm is equally uninhabitable—in and of itself. Rather, he vacillates continually between these realms, locating himself most frequently in the void that emerges in the space between. Two aphorisms from the first trilogy demonstrate the tension between these equally pressing imperatives: ‘‘No matter how solidly you build your house,’’ said Reb Alkem, ‘‘it will always rest on sand.’’ (BY 269) The past takes part in its own metamorphoses for the sake of a future which eternity turns away from the perishable everyday. You cannot build on ambiguity. Only granite will do. (RB 399)

The first aphorism is a warning of sorts—every claim to ‘‘solidity,’’ to certainty, is fundamentally shaky. The second aphorism answers the first—despite and because of the essential instability of all bases, we need to posit a base that surpasses the unproductive and insupportable ‘‘ambiguity.’’ God in Question In some ways, addressing first, in isolation, the formal aspects of Jabe`s’s subversive and deconstructive questioning, I have circum-

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vented one of the major aims—both metaphorical and literal—of this deconstruction. This aim, I suggest, is twofold: namely, the murder of the speaking, personal God of the covenant, and the composing of an extended rhapsody on this death. If we return to the ‘‘conclusions’’ discussed in the previous section, we see that Jabe`s’s strategies are all in the service of undermining certainty, of providing only a fragmentary grounding where once absolute truth seemed to preside, and of replacing the notion of being with that of becoming. In so doing, movement is placed over fixation, fragment over totality, ignorance over knowledge. One of the biggest casualties of this series of substitutions is not only the decentering of reality but also the loss of origins, and by this I mean a loss of understanding concerning the realm of origins—internal or external. This blurriness between realms has major repercussions on the nature of the self, the nature of the book-as-creation, and, by extension, the nature of God. Once the externality of the ‘‘real’’ is placed in question, once the possibility of subjective truth is entertained, the value of absolute morality is also challenged. With internal and external boundaries thus blurred, the source of origin—the focus of writing according to Jabe`s—is irretrievably lost. With it, God, as traditionally conceived, is lost as well. It is perhaps worthwhile to note here again that the Jewish tradition, as we have seen throughout the earlier chapters, promotes this ‘‘loss’’ inasmuch as it puts forth simultaneously two faces for God reflected in the double-bind of the covenant—the immanent and transcendent. Particularly in the case of Lurianic Kabbalah, the contradictory components of God’s nature are incorporated into a picture of the divine that is both self-enclosed and self-divided. The exilic condition that becomes a major source of questioning for Jabe`s is prefigured in this divine image, and therefore loss, in some sense abandonment, and exile are elements of a condition shared by God and humanity. When we consider Jabe`s’s ‘‘deconstruction,’’ we have to look at it in terms of a reformulation and restating of this central, irreconcilable paradox of the Jewish faith. The first trilogy might be seen as an interrogation into the nature of God. That is, God’s nature, as conceived by means of the covenant as a living, speaking, causing being, can no longer be accounted for in the wake of the Holocaust. This trilogy is an exploration of how God’s nature can be viewed in this light. God’s death is assumed long

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before it is announced in the final book of this trilogy. The question becomes twofold: what can this God represent, if not all that it traditionally signified, and how is human action affected by this change of appearance? This trilogy introduces the issues of the following trilogy, but remains on the level of questioning, refusing answers. It is useful, then, to address this trilogy as a fleshing-out of a pivotal statement made in the first volume: ‘‘God is a questioning of God’’ (BQ 138). This deceptive statement of identity provides no definitive information, but equates God, rather, with the very act of interrogation. What, then, is being called into question? Bounoure suggests that this trilogy provides three witnesses to the nature of God as ‘‘a questioning of God’’: the poet who expresses the death of God in the poem, and Sarah and Yukel, who express the death of God in the individual fate of contemporary Jews (35). This section, therefore, brings into question the impact of God’s death on the literary and existential concerns, Jabe`s contends, that arise in the wake of this death. What Constitutes Proximity ‘‘God is a questioning of God’’ implies several levels of interrogation. In this trilogy, both the nature of the divine and the means of sustaining a relationship with a source whose nature is uncertain are challenged. As he earlier questions what constitutes a believer in the context of establishing his legitimacy as a Jewish writer, Jabe`s now questions what constitutes ‘‘closeness’’ to God. ‘‘Who is closer to God?’’ he asks. ‘‘The man who invents Him as He has created man? Or the man who prays to approach Him?’’ (BY 301). In these two formulations, the locus of power shifts from man, in the first instance, to God, in the second. In the first, man is given the power to invent his God. This ‘‘power,’’ however, is already held in check; man creates only ‘‘as’’ God creates. Earlier, the creative power of both man, in the guise of the writer, and God is undermined: ‘‘When a writer bends over his work he believes, or rather, makes us believe, that his face is the one his words reflect. He is lying. He is lying as God would be lying if He claimed to have created man in His image; because which then would be His image?’’ (BY 225). As God and man are seemingly joined in their subservience to the word, so too they are joined by the potential ‘‘lie’’ of creation. As the notion of a cre-

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ative God is brought into question, the writer’s role is also challenged. What is illustrated in this early exchange is the interdependency of the notion of God and writer—each is bound to the other, and curiously so, by the essentially false belief in creation. ‘‘Invention,’’ as per the first expression of proximity to God—‘‘the man who invents Him as He has created man’’—is impossible for several reasons. First, the inventing subject has limitless ‘‘faces.’’ To create in one’s image, then, is to have given rise to what can be only an incomplete fragment of the total subject. Second, if it is not the writer’s face that is reflected in the words, what, precisely, is reflected? The writer has become, in effect, superfluous to his own work. His work, indeed, seems to be not his own, but directed by a force that resides simultaneously within and outside the work as it is written. Exposing the ‘‘lie’’ of creation, Jabe`s calls the creative God— the God of Genesis—radically into question. The conditional structure of this last statement—‘‘As God would be lying if He claimed to have created man in His image’’—performs several functions. First, it posits a relation based on conditionality, on hypothesis. This will become increasingly important as we explore, in the later volumes, the necessary acceptance of fictitious beliefs in the project of reality construction that bolsters Jabe`s’s ethics. Second, this structure seems to betray his assumption that God—the ‘‘true’’ God—is not this God. He cannot, therefore, be responsible for the lie constructed by man. In this sense, He cannot be held accountable for actions attributed to the misconduct of a false God—that is, He cannot be condemned for demonstrating silence when speech is the expectation. The silence of God is, rather, a reflection of God’s nature. Consequently, Jabe`s is left to wrestle with the temptation to indict a false construction of God for falling short of expectations—as Celan does. What Jabe`s resorts to is a series of assertions of God as a natural force—for instance, ‘‘God is in the wind, in the wind which wreaks havoc’’ (BQ 83), ‘‘God of Laws, You are the God of air and water. The Law of the air is to soar, the Law of the water to soak’’ (BY 220). Nevertheless, the language of these natural depictions is not immune to the contempt and scorn that would be due a God who chose silence in the face of the Holocaust. Thus Sarah, the only survivor of the Holocaust depicted in The Book of Questions, gives voice to an indictment that is entirely ambivalent in its naturalized form: ‘‘I see loathsome little legs, my God. I see You as a centipede. I see

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loathsome claws, my God. I see you as a scorpion. I see loathsome antennae, my God. I see You as a grasshopper. I see loathsome sabellaria worms, my God. You are my wounds’’ (BY 241–42). Can nature, though ‘‘loathsome’’ and terrifying, be held to task for violating a human standard of justice? Like Celan, Jabe`s recognizes the natural human response of rage against the God who betrayed through silence. Indictment becomes a powerful and necessary stage in the refashioning of the covenant. But it has to be a temporary stage, a bridge toward a more productive means of viewing God. Indictment is a stage that must be overcome. The death of God in this sense, then, is the death of the God who can be indicted. Let us return to Jabe`s’s questioning of what constitutes proximity to God. The second expression of faith applies to prayer—‘‘. . . or the man who prays to approach Him.’’ Prayer, like the act of creation, is undermined, rejected as a sufficient means of capturing God’s essence, and becomes a source of despair: My prayer is that of a grain of dust on the mountain, a drop of water in the sea, a breath of fire from the sun. You are the slope and the summit. You are the circumference. You are the wave taken back and the foam. You are the salt. You are dawn and dusk. Therefore my prayer is different every time. Therefore You are never You, but successive You’s engendered by You, sometimes against You. My God, I must be a contemptible creature because I do not know how to pray. (RB 330)

Prayer, here, misses its mark not because it is voiced in anything less than earnestness. Like Kafka’s messenger, the one who prays here desperately wants to connect. But the object of this prayer is ‘‘truly immense’’ (to borrow Kafka’s phrase from ‘‘The Destination’’). God is configured here in terms of transcendence, verticality (‘‘the slope and the summit’’), and immanence (though a peripheral immanence—‘‘the circumference’’), as retreating (‘‘the wave taken back’’) and the trace that remains (‘‘the foam’’), as the barely perceptible element pervading both the retreat and the trace (‘‘the salt’’) and as what sheds light and what cloaks in darkness (‘‘dawn and dusk’’). What seems to be uncovered here in this prayer that misses its mark is the essentially dynamic nature of the God who emerges from the void. Prayer, the traditional form of address, one that presupposes, if not precisely a God who speaks, certainly a God who listens to personal implorings, is negated. How, then, to reestablish a dialogue?

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What the two failed expressions of ‘‘God-closeness’’ seem to point to is that God’s nature is perhaps more suitably approached in a realm somewhere between false pride and devastating humility. Jabe`s implies that we construct God both in our own image and as the unassailable other to which we have no relation. On the one hand, we restrict God by making him subject to human limitation; on the other, we create a divide that is insurmountable. The sin of certainty, we will see later, contributes to God’s death, but just as dangerous to the divine–human encounter is the futility that emerges in the assumption that there can be no meaningful connection between God and humanity. Neither option, Jabe`s indicates, is one that will be conducive to an ethical relation as contained within the transformed covenantal structure. Death of God/Death of the Writer Nearing the close of the first trilogy, the ‘‘death of God,’’ is finally brought into the open. The ‘‘interrogation’’ of God now centers on an interrogation into the death of God. It is the writer who is held accountable for this death: ‘‘What murder are you accused of ?’’ Reb Achor asked Zillieh, the writer. ‘‘The murder of God,’’ he replied. ‘‘I will, however, add in my defense that I die along with Him.’’ (The writer alone decides his own death, pledged as he is to go through with the task he set himself: to have us read the blank universe at the price of the instant. The stakes of this pledge are pegs of a ladder. Exacting interrogation.) (Y 338)

This passage reads as a startling intrusion. The reader is asked to accept not only God’s death but also the possibility that the writer and the writing process have had an active hand in this death. Couched in terms of ‘‘murder,’’ this event—the death of God—takes on the resonance of crime and transgression, and therefore echoes of the original sin. It directly echoes Nietzsche’s madman, as well, whose ‘‘we have killed Him, you and I’’ indicates shared blame and announces a crisis. And yet, transgression is contingent upon selfsacrifice. In an earlier Midrash of sorts, Jabe`s conflates these two tendencies, binding them together under the sign of the covenant:

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‘‘ ‘What is the relation between reptile and rainbow?’ asked Reb Behar one day of his teacher Reb Ephraim Sholem. ‘A most subtle one,’ he answered: ‘the adumbration of a circle’ ’’ (RB 328). Reptile, symbol of transgression, is linked to rainbow, the restorative symbol and first instance of the covenant. The act of killing God becomes, paradoxically, a necessary step in the rehabilitation of the covenant. The ‘‘pledge’’ that the writer has made here—one that is self-imposed, like Kafka’s ‘‘commandment,’’ and one that has necessitated his own death and the death of God—is enacted, it seems, step-bystep on a vertical plane—‘‘the stakes of this pledge are pegs of a ladder.’’ This model of verticality (gesturing to various tales in Jewish mysticism that speak of a ladder leading into Paradise) serves the collapse of space and time that we must witness in the act of reading—‘‘to have us read the blank universe at the price of an instant.’’ The method by which the vertical plane will be constructed in this space of loss, in this emptied universe, is the object of ‘‘exacting interrogation.’’ A new covenant is deliberately inscribed in the place where the old was deliberately destroyed; and the new is founded, curiously, on the model of the Book of Job, ‘‘exacting interrogation,’’ the most explicit challenge to the logic of the traditional covenant. We witness the death/murder of God after the fact. The setting here appears to be a trial, with Reb Achor playing the part of judge. ‘‘What murder are you accused of ?’’ he asks. To which the writer responds, ‘‘the murder of God. I will add in my defense that I die along with him.’’ The only suitable defense for a crime of such tremendous proportion, it would seem, is the sobering recognition of the death that is inevitable in the wake of this crime; this is not a crime, an act, to be taken lightly. Nietzsche’s madman asks, ‘‘how shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?’’ The madman’s questions gain urgency in their demanding of justice, in the necessity for ‘‘atonement’’ for this egregious crime. In Jabe`s’s accounting of God’s death, the ‘‘justice’’ that prevails is human justice, but its direction is given over to those who pursue religious mystery, those who see presence lurking in the shadows of absence. The writer’s self-sacrifice links the writer to God, who, we learn later, has a hand in his own death: ‘‘The commentaries on the Law are salutary steps in the word of the Creator defeated by Himself, word

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where the spirit blows beyond recall. Thus God died for the Law which bears the mark of the spirit so that its trace could be our motive to advance, our duty and goal’’ (A 303). In both instances, the self is sacrificed to a Word that has seeming primacy, and obedience is pledged to a task that is greater than the individual. This task, in both cases, is characterized by its openness, as ‘‘exacting interrogation,’’ or ‘‘commentary.’’ This ‘‘murder,’’ which is more precisely a murder-suicide, is situated in a section entitled ‘‘Pearl and Sword’’ (RB 338) and introduced with an epigraph: ‘‘Quills are in some ways kin to sword, pupils to pearls.’’ The sword, a vehicle of both protection and destruction, is equated here with the quill, the writing apparatus. As the murder of God is announced, so too is the dual purpose of the writer: in the service of ‘‘abolishing the graven image,’’ the writer is pledged to destroy the idolatrous word, and the God depicted by the word, as well as to uphold and protect a truth that lies beyond capture. Both ‘‘pupil’’ and teacher, the writer demonstrates in this dual role a model of action that he, presumably, has been taught from his own teacher, the Word itself. The murder of God, then, is placed in this moment of dialectical exchange—a moment between past and future, between destruction and re-creation. The Word, the Book, is the source of both God and man. Paradoxically, although, as Bounoure suggests, the Word is in danger of becoming graven image (26)—a danger against which the writer has made it his obligation to do battle—it is the creative power of language that testifies to the existence of God. Therefore, ‘‘to lose the word means losing God in the scream of Creation’’ (RB 320). The depiction of language as the source of the divine can be traced back to early strains of the Kabbalah. In the detachment of God from the Word, in God’s becoming subservient to the Word (and, in his subservience, equal to humanity), man and God are linked, in their bond and compelled obedience to an external force. The first trilogy leaves us in a space of void—a space left empty by the unanswered questions posed in this interrogation into God’s nature. At the close, the external reality of both God and man are rejected, and primacy is once again given back to the Book, the vessel of the Word—‘‘man does not exist. God does not exist. The world alone exists through God and man in the open Book’’ (RB 402). The second trilogy continues to promote the death of God—that is, the

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death of the imaged, limited God is simultaneous with the emergence of the invisible and dynamic God—and in so doing, appears to focus on the modes of being in this space of void. The murder of God, it seems, has not been fully played out. The remaining four volumes constitute a reconfiguration of the Semitic names of God: Ya and El (Handelman 68). Metaphorically speaking, this implies the ongoing interrogation into the nature of God, as well as a kind of reduction, a literary tzimtzum, as it were, to the pure point of the divine. The authoritative voice of the rabbis that dominates the first trilogy is lost in the remaining volumes. Yet the rabbinic model of commentary and questioning remains even as the voice disappears. The unattributable contemplations of the nature and workings of the divine supplant the authoritative voice, and commentary takes precedence over commentator. The murder of God, depicted earlier, has rendered the ‘‘death of the author.’’ The speaker has become negligible. And yet, this movement toward anonymity reflects the gradual reemergence of a type of God who is also cut off from, and made negligible to, what was previously thought to be His creation.

7

Murdering God: YAE¨L Although it is El that stands apart from the second trilogy, I would like to argue that Yae¨l is, structurally and thematically, a transitional work that serves as a bridge to the remaining three volumes. Chronicling the death of God, and concluding at a point of spiritual and moral void, Yae¨l paves the way for the reconstruction, gradually and painfully leading through the specter of another death, the stillborn Elya, through Aely, a character with no body, to El, God reduced to a ‘‘polarized point.’’ To keep with my somewhat artificial division, then, I will be making the argument that the strategies, methods, and message of Yae¨l serve Jabe`s’s deconstructive project, but are necessary for what will follow in his reconstruction. Yae¨l explores the violent death of the speaking God, serving perhaps as a flashback to the events that led to the murder of God in the previous volumes. After reenacting this death, in the parallel murder of Yae¨l, the remaining volumes begin to carve open a space of renewal. Time doubles back on itself, and we are reminded that it is the vacillation between doubling back and reaching toward that characterizes the temporal model on which the new mode of ‘‘living the death of God’’ (Bounoure 34) takes place. Death becomes both an event, as the one-time death of God, and the continued description of this death in the retelling. Like Kafka’s original sin, which is both momentary and perpetual, the moment of the rupture-causing cataclysm is given perpetual life. The death of God becomes both inscribed and the source of commentary. In a radical reworking of Sinai, the event that produced the oral and written Torah, here a new ‘‘Torah’’ is written, chronicling the death of God and compelling further commentary.1 The death of God, seemingly the ‘‘subject’’ of Yae¨l, can be divided, then, into two parts: the event and the commentary on the event. In 1 For a more thorough discussion of the death of God as the ‘‘event’’ inspiring commentary, see my ‘‘Perpetuating the Death of God: Edmond Jabe`s’s Post-Nietzschean Midrash.’’

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a metatextual explanation of the book’s structure, Jabe`s indicates how we are to be reading this volume: This work (which could have had a more complete title: Yae¨l or the death of God) has two parts: The Time before the Story which is its portion of dark, its prophetic part, and the Time of the Story which is the journal of the death of a being in the ambiguous other, that is, in the alternating of All and Nothing which appearance tries to mask. Denouncing appearance, the bait where God waits to die, means going to the truth of the void, straight into the heart of absence. For God died of looking. The eyes record the lie of images. Mirror of a mirror, the universe lives by reflections. Trees proudly on their guard are the blossoming time of shadows, and the glass reflects the dreams of gardens. Yae¨l embodies the principle of life. In her, the world dies with man wherever the book is written. (Y 41)

Jabe`s indicates a sharp break here, a temporal divide that, curiously, speaks of past and present, while disregarding future—the time before, and the time of. Two parts constitute this book: The Story and the journals of commentary on this Story. Appearance, presumably the element by which an icon betrays itself, is the death-knell of the God who presides over the Time Before the Story. Like the ‘‘Bild’’ cast into the eyes of those who implore God to establish a connection through prayer in Celan’s ‘‘Tenebrae,’’ here the image signals the deceptive lie that effectively killed an already weakened God: ‘‘for God died of looking. The eyes record the lie of images.’’ Embodying, as Jabe`s explains, the ‘‘principle of life,’’ Yae¨l’s being paradoxically points to, and is equated with (as per the subtitle), the death of God. While the time ‘‘before’’ the story is contrasted with the time ‘‘of ’’ the story, it is also made continuous with it. Time becomes both divided and fluid. In a sense similar to that of an earlier statement, ‘‘God is before and after God’’ (Y 35), this temporal divide allows for continuity and collective experience. It is precisely this shared space of before and after, before and of, that is described by means of the ‘‘story.’’ If, indeed, this ‘‘story’’ is the account of the death of God, it is made perpetual and effectively timeless by the retelling suggested by the preposition ‘‘of ’’; the use of the genitive here implies belonging, inclusion, and relation. This ‘‘divided continuity’’ places the death of God in a framework analogous to the relation of Torah to Midrash. The event, inscribed and fixed in the time ‘‘before,’’ becomes the source of innumerable commentaries in a present being

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constantly renewed by virtue of its connection to the past. Where God dies, Midrash continues, and it continues in the service of perpetuating this death. What is this Story? In its simplest reduction, Yae¨l is the account of a love-triangle—Yae¨l, the narrator, and the other with whom the narrator competes for Yae¨l’s affection. The story ends in Yae¨l’s violent murder by the narrator. But we are provided, as well, with a subtext to this seemingly simple plot. A section entitled ‘‘The Story’’2 gives an account of the dying out of particular elements of God’s character and the substitution of these elements with absence and pain: God or the thunder that was His voice, or the lightning that was His gesture, or the delicate cloud He once was, or the sky, air, water that together are His absence, or fire which is pain, our pain, Yae¨l, our real and great pain. (Y 65)

In the same way as Jabe`s earlier extends the definition of Judaism to its lowest common denominator, the wound of the Jew, here God is reflected not in speech, gesture, or image, but in pain, loss, and absence. The results of his death are overtaken by his nature. In the same way as Kafka describes the expulsion from Paradise as a perpetual condition, here the death of God shifts from event to mode of action—becoming perpetual itself, it prescribes, more than a one-time reaction, a continued response and existential positioning. Bounoure suggests that ‘‘living the death of God’’ requires a paradoxical mode of being: ‘‘it means living without living . . . an existence where neither dialogue nor affirmation nor negation is possible, but only questions multiplied by the anguish of the solitary one’’ (34). By means of his death, God is transformed from a being, an entity, 2 Stephane Moses suggests a possible reading for Jabe`s’s use of the term ‘‘story.’’ He cites a passage from the first paragraph of Sefer Yetsira (The Book of Formation) as Jabe`s’s implied reference. ‘‘He created his world from three books: The Book, the book, and the story.’’ Moses explains, ‘‘Jabe`s interprets the metaphor of the two books as an expression of the duality of the Book of God and the Book of Man. In so doing, he takes up again one of his oldest themes, that of the world as a book written by God and given to Man so that he might decipher it. As for the story, Jabe`s understands it, so it seems . . . as the product of the union of the two books, Man’s and God’s. . . . the truth of the story merges with the very act of narration’’ (89–90).

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to a mode of action. As the representation of the God who is murdered, as a fully embodied, active character, Yae¨l both mocks and is God (Bounoure 75). Her actions reject again and again the existence of a living God, a God who would be responsible for a covenantal structure inspiring ethical behavior. She proclaims defiantly: I am Yae¨l. I take what I want. I give what rebuffs. All I care for: to live the absence of God. God went into exile and left it to man to unseal the world. I shall be all the lies of God in order to die of His death. For God died of lying. All that exists lies. To be in the truth means wanting Not-To-Be. God is Truth. Thus God is Union, God is Convergence. (Y 90–91)

Yae¨l lives for herself and her desires—in her character there is nothing of the submission or abnegation that we see so often in Kafka’s characters and Celan’s ‘‘Ich.’’ Her actions are guided by the moment, and specifically by a moment that she finds profoundly empty. She occupies the space of God’s abandonment and appears to revel in this space. At the same time, however, she envisions her defiant occupation of this space as an act of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom—‘‘I shall be all the lies of God in order to die of His death.’’ And, here, her voice shifts; she announces God’s death, and in this announcement perhaps voices judgment: ‘‘For God died of lying.’’ Our lying? In the next statement is resignation, much like Kafka’s resigned, ‘‘there is no room for justice,’’ a gesture to the inevitability of deception: ‘‘all that exists lies.’’ The death wish entangled up with ‘‘truth,’’ with the unity, perhaps of I and Thou that Celan struggled so desperately against is voiced here again: ‘‘to be in the truth means wanting Not-To-Be. God is Truth. Thus God is Union, God is Convergence.’’ To be ‘‘in the truth’’ necessitates a sort of death: consciousness of division, self and other, I and Thou, perpetuates division; to lose consciousness is to ‘‘converge,’’ to ‘‘unite.’’ Yae¨l, representing the lie of God as a living God, points toward a space that is left paradoxically full and productive in its absence. The Lie is representative of the dead God—anything this God may have represented embroiled Him in necessary death. For God to be truthful, He must cease to exist. The ‘‘truth’’ that He comes to represent is a collapse into a valueless void. Becoming one with this source (a source that, because undifferentiated, contains within itself no possibility for structure of value), converging with the void, is to find God.

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Jabe`s further explains the necessary loss of values that accompanies ‘‘death consciousness’’: ‘‘Becoming conscious of death means denying any hierarchy of values which does not account for the stages of darkness where man is initiated into the mysteries of night. Death is both the loss and promise of a hope which day wears itself out courting at every moment. To be or not to be in the absurd agony of a secret glimmer until morning’’ (Y 34). Consciousness of death requires a disavowal of ‘‘any hierarchy of values’’ that does not account for death. Obliquely, Jabe`s appears to be challenging the relevance of a belief system grounded in the comfort of dialogue and promise of redemption in a landscape governed by death and atrocity— ‘‘l’univers concentrationnaire,’’ as David Rousset has named it (Langer 121). But denying these hierarchies of value is not to suggest that all values are lost, all are denied. Rather, death here is a transitional space, both the ‘‘loss and promise of hope’’ that a different type of value system—a more clear-sighted and sobering value system, perhaps—can emerge in this space of void. Then the existential question becomes: Will you choose this sobering system, this system that hastens to greet the ‘‘absurd agony of a secret glimmer until morning’’? Will you choose to occupy this space that is never illuminated? We are reminded of Nietzsche’s eternal return and the test his demon poses. On some level, then, it would seem that the narrator, equating Yae¨l with the ‘‘true’’ God who would necessitate the loss of a certain type of value system, views the murder as a protective measure. Jabe`s writes, ‘‘For my salvation and the world’s. To kill God. Through you the world will be avenged’’ (Y 61). The murder of Yae¨l remains entirely ambiguous. On the one hand, she seems to represent the loss of value that threatens to seep in with the death of the speaking God, the living God of the covenant, and the emergence of the shadow God of Kabbalah. On the other hand, as we shall explore in a moment, in killing Yae¨l, the narrator sets free these very same characteristics from which he seems to want to protect the world; death ensures longevity just as life signifies the limitations imposed by mortality. In his subversion tactics, Jabe`s places death above life, granting it power in place of restriction. Yae¨l’s death, if indeed she is the last bastion of the living God, if her mocking tone continues to keep this God alive, conversely, ushers in the loss of value associated with

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the shadow God. Alive, she upholds a lie that is nevertheless value promoting; dead, she allows the floodgates of nihilism to open. Therefore, embodying the ‘‘principle of life,’’ Yae¨l also embodies death, as anything living is bound by its own mortality. Herself a metaphor for God, her name a representation of the divine that has been cut in two, Yae¨l’s very being attests to the existence of God as well as to the separation of God, the exile of God from God (the exile of the Shekinah) (Bounoure 75). In the person of Yae¨l, the living God of the covenant, as well as what Susan Handelman describes as the ‘‘luminous God of the philosophers’’ (56), lashes out against the mystical God, the dark force of absence, nothingess, void. In Jabe`s’s terms, the All battles the Nothing within her. With her death, it seems these two faces are torn from each other, one dies while the other lives on. She also seems to be the obstacle that obstructs the Word from being freed of its destructive properties: ‘‘Yae¨l is passage and use of God, she is the body He turned from in retreat, body which rots for Him of the merciless moment. Ah, to be the moment. To tear the skin off all words. To speed their insides on toward the void’’ (Y 16). Yae¨l, then, is God become body, God burdened with limitation. The ‘‘living principle’’ is the law of mortality and impermanence: that which lives, dies. Yae¨l, a body that houses death, is set both together with and against this ‘‘moment’’ that tears the destructive encasing— ‘‘the skin’’—from the word that persists in death. Alive, it seems, Yae¨l is this skin; she is the solidified exterior that prevents the movement of the unencumbered word toward its proper destination, the void. In death, Yae¨l, like this freed word, is given the property of life-indeath. The narrator’s motivations for committing this murder shed light on the death of God as a necessary and fundamental step in the ethical revaluation promoted by the writer. The moment of her murder is described in this way: ‘‘I had decided to kill Yae¨l. I went to her room. I sat on the edge of the bed where she had just lain down. I bent over and took her head in my hands. Frightened, she stared at me the way you look at a spreading fire. My hands strangled her. God who had trembled in her was now smothered with her. I opened my fingers. . . . Everything grew dim’’ (Y 25). Her death is deliberate, like the murder of God at the hand of the writer. Though overcome with grief and rage, the narrator describes his act as a ‘‘decision’’; this is premeditated murder. Immediately preceding the account of this

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murder is a question that suggests the depth of frustration, despair, and torment of the narrator that leads, it seems inevitably, to this death: ‘‘O Yae¨l, how can you be the joy of the world in its abundance and at the same time the scream of the waning abyss?’’ Yae¨l is depicted here as a dual response—she herself is the response to a simultaneous presence and absence that cannot be reconciled. Fullness and emptiness—to this twofold condition her being attests. The God who dies within her—and paradoxically gains eternal life in death— represents this divided condition as well. In death, Yae¨l gives birth to the irreducible God, who becomes the model for a new covenant. The narrator reveals further, ‘‘because I could no longer say your name, Yae¨l, I decided to kill’’ (Y 63). If Yae¨l’s death mirrors that of God’s in the first trilogy, she died for having both inspired and eluded naming. Yae¨l tempts and refuses capture. In the series of ‘‘flashbacks’’ provided in the narrator’s journal, we are given the means to piece together, fragment by fragment, the events that lead to Yae¨l’s murder. The commentaries on the murder bring the event itself into a realm of timelessness and continual recurrence—the murder of Yae¨l, as revealed through the journals, becomes, in a Nietzschean sense, the moment of eternal return. Piece by piece, the story takes on shape, takes on linearity within this cyclical frame. We learn of her increasing withdrawal from the narrator, her husband, of her taking a lover—the ‘‘other,’’ of whom the narrator accuses Yae¨l, ‘‘you love the other, not for himself, but against me’’ (Y 97). We witness her cruelty, her sadism, her cold indifference, always through the filter of the narrator. Meditating on the murder, he asks himself: How long have I held a grudge against you for the vagueness you cultivated with subtle calculation? It left you without alliance in the labyrinths of your hasty conclusions, as if our features no longer showed up in the light and we could be interchanged with impunity, forgetting ourselves and the world, as if the universe suddenly crumbled with the face to serve as posthumous preface to nothingness? (Y 97)

‘‘The vagueness she cultivates,’’ this strange non-power, the power to withhold knowledge of her being, becomes the motivation for murder. This ‘‘vagueness’’ leaves her featureless and solitary, but his uneasiness turns to murderous panic only when the narrator realizes that he, too, has been effectively de-faced, obliterated. She is ‘‘without alliance,’’ but her abandonment bleeds into a ‘‘we,’’ a union that

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has destroyed the power of differentiation, the power to distinguish between self and other. He, too, can be held accountable for her ‘‘hasty conclusions’’—‘‘we can be interchanged with impunity.’’ In its death throes, this union bears witness to the nothingness that consumed it. Before this decisive moment, we gradually witness the relationship between husband and wife deteriorate to the point where all familiarity has been eclipsed by doubt. And, curiously, it is the point of utter uncertainty that the narrator anticipates as the moment most appropriate for murder—‘‘I have watched you for a long time. I have long been waiting for the hour when I shall see only what you hide from me, hear only what you do not breathe a word about’’ (Y 75). As though to suggest that in killing her precisely at the moment when she has come to represent both irreconcilable paradox and impenetrable mystery, the narrator captures that essence that he wishes to inspire the innumerable commentaries to follow. Paralleling the close of the first trilogy, where the so-called ‘‘death’’ of God is attached to the lie of creation, and both God and man lose their external reality, here the storyteller is undermined in the final passage of the book. We are left with an image of a story craving its own telling, a story that perhaps chooses the writer as the vessel through whom it will finally be told: ‘‘ ‘You are a storyteller,’ a friend said to me one day. How can I be when words and images always cut in and want to be heard with their own aura, when the story is built out of bits of counter-stories, and when silence lies in wait for the world’’ (Y 115). Curiously, the undermining of the writer-as-such is directly preceded by what sounds suspiciously like a rationalization of Yae¨l’s murder: ‘‘What does it matter now if she was murdered or not? Death does not have the sense we give it in death. A violent death is tied to the healthiest and worthiest act of truth. It is a dawn which all the scattered and lost shadows come to salute with a red gesture faithful to fire.’’ In the wake of the Holocaust, this statement—‘‘a violent death is tied to the healthiest and worthiest act of truth’’—is indeed a dangerous statement to make. It smacks of the type of covenantal justifications that Celan has struggled so hard to debunk, for instance, that senseless death, that murderous rage, are enacted for a higher purpose. Quite literally, in the murder of a wife by a husband, the covenant (as marriage is a symbol of the covenant) seems to have

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been trampled beyond repair. But this is far from being the last word. Instead, Jabe`s works to rehabilitate, to repair the void that has left us, at once, with the most barbaric criteria for justification—‘‘what does it matter?’’—and, in this same utterance, with no criteria at all. We are left in a place of complete and utter moral ambiguity. The next volume, Elya, continues in this space of ambiguity, searching for ways to salvage the moral abyss that this volume leaves in its wake. In the remaining volumes, a paradox is pursued: even as the writer is undermined, his obligation to uphold a moral standard, though entirely at odds with the ‘‘reality’’ he has uncovered, increases. So we continue with the story of a violent death, not permitted to end on this note of resignation and justification.

8

Abolishing the Graven Image: Elya and Aely ‘‘Jabe`s’s work testifies that [Nietzsche’s death of God] was the death only of a certain God, a classical God—or perhaps it would be better to say a certain aspect of God, the luminous, assuring guarantor of meaning. But with the demise of the ‘‘God of the philosophers,’’ the other side of God, the shadow side, the enigmatic attacking stranger of night, has emerged to unsettle and struggle with man. Man, in turn, must now contend with both his bereavement over the death of the comforting God and the onslaughts of the ‘negative’ side of God.’’ —Susan Handelman

As I mentioned earlier, the pairing of destructive and protective or reconstructive aims finds a model in religious tradition. When we analyze this so-called ‘‘murder of God,’’ we might place it in the context of the prophetic tradition—a tradition that finds its power and momentum in one crucial aim: the smashing of idols, both literally and metaphorically, constructed to represent God.1 Beginning with Moses and his destruction of the Tables of the Law in his fury against the worship of the Golden Calf, the prophetic tradition is in many ways primarily focused on upholding and protecting the second commandment, the prohibition against constructing and bowing down to graven images: ‘‘you shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens, above, or the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them’’ (Exodus 20: 4–5). The consequences of Moses’s action— the destruction of the inscribed word of Law, the willful erasure of 1 A number of critics have emphasized this intention in Jabe`s’s writing. Among the most prevalent are Derrida, Handelman, Kaplan, Bounoure, and Motte.

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the precise means of upholding the covenant—become extremely relevant for Jabe`s’s revaluation of God and the covenant. The prophetic task, given over to the writer, is described in terms of reacquaintance with the source that has been lost through false imaging: ‘‘Prophets renew our pact with the echo. It is access to the book and abyss’’ (RB 370). In a section of Elya, the fifth volume of The Book of Questions, Jabe`s indicates how central this task of ‘‘idol smashing’’ is to his literary project and ethical revaluation. He writes: You reminded me that the book demands the disbanding of vulgar eyes. To abolish the graven image as the second commandment orders, to reject representation in order to stress the transparency of the word: seen and yet indistinguishable, heard and yet inaudible. The divine word is disquieting smoke. It has never been a blast of strange and terrifying sounds, but a harmonious coiling of a trace burning in the warm air coming down from Sinai. Trace of a trace reverberating in its infinite interdiction. The voice of day points, proclaims, denounces. It neither renounces itself nor goes beyond. The voice of the dark in forbearing to speak (it does not communicate or, rather, it communicates impossible communication) unearths the sands of the Book of Silence. This book, Yae¨l, was our book. (E 188)

In the context of ‘‘abolishing the graven image,’’ Jabe`s lays bare a series of oppositions, the conflating of which becomes increasingly more central to his revaluation. Among these oppositions is that drawn between ‘‘voice of day’’ and ‘‘voice of the dark.’’ The smashing of idols, in this sense, seems to point to a substitution of one mode of thinking for another. The ‘‘communication of impossible communication’’—silence within speech—is raised above the rigid voice of day, the voice that ‘‘points, proclaims, denounces.’’ This section will trace the movement from the clarity associated with the light of day to the darkness of night. The voice of the dark is slowly becoming the ‘‘hierarchy of value’’ that can account for ‘‘the stages of darkness where man is initiated into the mysteries of night.’’ This movement toward darkness has several implications for Jabe`s’s God-destroying project. First, destruction here is balanced by creation or, more precisely, return and re-creation. ‘‘Night’’ becomes the paradoxical space of presence-in-absence that replaces the fixed and immobile categories that constitute, as we discussed with reference to Celan, the false

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clarity of ‘‘day.’’ Second, the language that best represents this realm of darkness is silence, or, more precisely, a language that conceals as it reveals. Silence both partakes of God—speaks of the divine essence—and is the means toward God—‘‘God is the accepted challenge of the word. But the word does not lead to God. Only silence could’’ (E 169). In his ‘‘smashing of idols,’’ then, Jabe`s launches an attack on both the imaged God and the language that sustains this God. This two-pronged attack is strongly reminiscent of Celan’s poem ‘‘Bei Wein und Verlorenheit,’’ in which he stresses how crucial the overcoming of ‘‘bebilderten Sprache’’ (imaged speech) is in the task of refashioning the covenant. Jabe`s, like Celan, points to the reification of language as a major factor behind the loosening of the covenant. With reification—with the assumption that a word signifies and represents, and thus fixes, its object—comes a sense of certainty that has never been a component of traditional Judaism. ‘‘The word wants to be pro in speech and contra in writing’’ (RB 339). The word sought, then, is one that resists and rejects the finality of being written, a word that reflects a type of breath-like speech, which itself is breath and mirrors the divine breath of creation. In an enigmatic pair of aphorisms, Jabe`s introduces the connection between the death of the imaged God and the love that incites this death. ‘‘God does not aspire to be understood, but to be loved’’ (E 189); ‘‘You can only love what you can destroy or what daily destroys you. Such is the love of God’’ (E 164). In this section, I will be considering both the need for the imaged-God’s death, and how this death is inextricably connected to love in Jabe`s’s formulation. As the strange conflation of death and life in the character of Yae¨l suggests, it is impossible to separate the death-impulse from an impulse toward life-affirmation, and, in the specific arena of Jabe`s’s religious revaluation, from the love signified in the practice of Kiddush haShem, sanctification of the divine name. But, first, this name must become once again unpronounceable, unutterable. The named God, the God depicted by the voice of day, must be destroyed. The transition from the living, imaged God to the God of the void necessitates a loss of bodily limitation. Yae¨l constituted, before her death, the most visceral character of the septology. In some ways, it is precisely bodily limitation and the limited desire attached to the body that serves as the impetus for her death. Jealousy, rage, and the desire for both sexual and spiritual possession push the narrator to

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the violent act of murder. Motte explains that the characters following Yae¨l, though derivative of her (as their names suggest), ‘‘become progressively less corporeal and more ethereal’’ (43). Freed, as Yae¨l finally is, from the confines of the body, these characters represent the expansion (which is at the same time a reduction) of the boundaries of the divine. But, even as the body is destroyed, in the reemergence of the Law, the body becomes the vehicle for its reception, or, more precisely, the Law is configured in the body, in the look that has been previously denounced as the ‘‘lie’’ that killed God. Just as Jabe`s retains Midrash as the strategy to commemorate the death of God (though it is traditionally in the service of commemorating the life of God), he retains the body, provisionally, as the space upon which the Law of a disembodied God is written. His ‘‘new Judaism’’ preserves the structures and trappings of Judaism, but empties them of their prior meanings. What seems to guide the willful murder of this living God, then, is a deeper wish to protect and sustain the picture of an existent God who defies a limited image. Accompanying this loss of boundaries for the divine is the increasing power of humanity. Power is returned to humanity as God’s boundaries grow dimmer. These ‘‘dimming’’ boundaries correspond with a decreasing sphere of influence. His creative power revoked, God is no longer a causal influence, but a presence-in-absence. As God’s power declines, humanity is essentially deified. This deification, however, is promoted under a new set of criteria. Where previously, Jabe`s suggests, man worshipped his own image in bowing down to the idol-God, here humanity recognizes itself as the source and power behind human action. God is maintained in the measure that he loses power and influence in the human sphere—‘‘you deify me in the very gesture that I defy you’’ (RB 336). The ‘‘smashing of idols,’’ then, implies a turning of the tables; defiance returns power to humanity. At the same time, the rehabilitation of the covenant begins here, where the divine has been incapacitated.

Elya ‘‘Man is All. God is Nothing. Here is the riddle. To glide towards Nothing. Perennial slope.’’ (E 129)

If Yae¨l’s death somehow points to the death of the living God that opens the space for the shadow God to emerge, then Elya’s voice

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comes, as it were, from within the grave itself. The stillborn child who dies along with Yae¨l, Elya is, quite literally, death-in-life, the persistent death that urges its own hearing. Through Jabe`s’s characteristic use of metaphor, that is, to draw connections within a realm of void and absence, this stillborn child represents a consistent reminder of the violent murder out of which his death-in-life emerges, a voice of conscience that argues implicitly that the rationalization against murder rings false. Death and life are conflated in the promise of a newly developing system of value, a system that is, more precisely, thoroughly unsystematic. This antisystem is neither grounded in a set of identifiable, categorizable absolutes nor directed toward an end-as-such. It suggests, rather, a mode of being-in-theworld that upholds both past and future as equally dynamic forces, brought to bear upon a present that looks simultaneously forward and backward in establishing an ethical mode of conduct. As with Celan, the ethical space is the space between—the place where Schattensprache overcomes both the false clarity of light and the impenetrable darkness. Jabe`s asserts, ‘‘you build walls, I the space between’’ (BY 229) as if to hold in stark relief the project he is undertaking in contrast to previous literary endeavors. Perforating Oblivion Elya, the never-having-been, casts a specter over the writing process as it gradually takes shape in this world of lack and void—‘‘I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express’’ (E 126). In never having been, Elya is freed of the limitations imposed on the living and, by extension, the living God. Freed from these limitations, Elya represents the indescribable ‘‘elsewhere’’ that encloses, and inspires the hope for, the other. In this volume, we witness the emergence of self and other from the void carved open by the first trilogy and rhapsodized in Yae¨l. This dual reinstatement follows from an imposed oblivion and willful forgetting. In the section that serves as a preface for this volume, there is a collective imperative, a non-imperative of sorts, that guides the movement of this text: ‘‘Let us perforate oblivion. Because oblivion is the thick rind around our origins’’ (E 121). Like Kafka’s ‘‘breathe in the air and the silence’’ (Diaries 365) and Celan’s ‘‘proffer yourselves to the dark’’ (‘‘Ins Nebelhorn’’), this is an invitation to the

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reader: to plunge into the void. There is a restorative aim here, as there is for Kafka and Celan. This is not oblivion for oblivion’s sake, but a search for origins, a search, perhaps, like Celan’s search for the Atemkristall, the reality that needs to be ‘‘searched and won.’’ In the space opened by the murder of the God of absolute value and, thus, the value that will not account for death and suffering, a course of action, characterized by negativity and lack, emerges: to continue to press toward nothingness, to pursue unification with the truth that entails, as Yae¨l clarifies, ‘‘wanting not-to-be.’’ Oblivion emerges as both the obstacle and the vehicle to the origins that, Jabe`s explains earlier, serve as the inspiration for writing. Taken together, the imperatives to ‘‘perforate oblivion’’ and ‘‘abolish graven images’’ form the puzzling constellation governing this volume. In the service of protecting the ineffable divine that lies beyond the false image, oblivion is promoted. But oblivion in what sense? In an extended meditation, Jabe`s places oblivion squarely in the void: Oblivion takes refuge in oblivion. God emerges from the oblivion of God. . . . ‘‘A knot turned into a star?’’ ‘‘Possibly.’’ Oblivion is the bond night cannot untie, but morning cuts. Oblivion blossoms in the night of oblivion. . . . A sky full of constellations is a sky of celestial oblivion. Oblivion, one of the manifestations (the most common) of the void, can be defeated only by death. Could the void, at this stage of our evolution, be just the introduction to a beyond which would give us back not only to ourselves, but to the world which we had only half imagined? To lose, to forget, all in order to embrace the world of a glance or gesture without ebb. We owe death a memory which overflows the frame of our lives. We remember what we were before being born as well as what we will have been after ourselves. Because what is at stake but prolonging a reality whose medium we are and which knows that, lit up, it is a match for the day and that, put out, it counts its tracks in the neutral dark? (E 189)

Oblivion is characterized here as both a space—for ‘‘refuge,’’ ‘‘the bond the night cannot untie,’’ ‘‘the night of oblivion’’—and a result,

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a positioning in regard to this space—‘‘one of the manifestations of the void.’’ Reflective of loss, lack, this so-called space is really a nonplace, much like Kafka’s ‘‘Weg-von-Hier.’’ And yet, this space is productive, reconstitutive of both oblivion-as-response and God—‘‘God emerges from the oblivion of God.’’ Insofar as this space is productive, it is not in and of itself the goal, the destination. Rather, we are witness here to a process of ‘‘evolution,’’ the seeming culmination of which is the realm of a saving ‘‘beyond,’’ which is at the same time a return ‘‘back to ourselves.’’ Oblivion is posited here as a necessary transitional step in the process of reality construction. Consequently, Jabe`s implores, ‘‘let oblivion then be only one more step.’’ However, there is also a danger in oblivion—‘‘Because what is at stake but prolonging a reality whose medium we are. . . .’’ Once again, Jabe`s draws heavily on the distinction between night and day, darkness and light, to expose this prolongation of reality, seemingly at odds with the ‘‘truth.’’ Oblivion, it seems, is the proper space of the ‘‘neutral’’ darkness, the space preceding value judgments. The light that rebels against this oblivion, that coaxes remembrance rather than forgetfulness, is a violation of the truth of the void. The reality that we prolong is overburdened with the habitual reinforcement in a world governed by a linear vision of space and time. And yet, the reality that finds its space in this light is an expedient reality, one that refuses neutrality because of its ineffectiveness in the realm of ethics. This light, it would seem, has undergone a transformation from the false light of certainty to what Elya describes as, ‘‘the light of what is not revealed in what I express.’’ It is this commitment to the notrevealed, the shadow side of light, that is overtaken in the positioning of oblivion. Oblivion becomes, then, paradoxically contained within the boundaries of rebellion, challenge, resistance—as an active stance it nevertheless resists the moral ambiguity that, Yae¨l demonstrates, has come to be associated with losing the criteria necessary for judgment. In a continuation of this description of oblivion, Jabe`s provides a stronger link between this acceptance of positioning and the prophetic task of ‘‘abolishing the graven image’’: Starting from oblivion, I carved a path which death was in favor of. I took the lesson of the second commandment literally. I abolished the world in the word to come. You were dead, Yae¨l. With you gone, I

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could advance where you had led and then left me. It was my chance to force the book to close and, reconciling word and step, glimpse my dead name, your name, Yae¨l, with its innumerable dry branches. . . . Killing you, I identified with each of its pages, I appropriated Elya. (E 190)

Taking ‘‘the lesson of the second commandment literally,’’ writing-inoblivion would seem to entail a forced forgetfulness of the associations between word and thing, solidified and worn out over time. But the narrator has been misled; seeking closure in oblivion, he attempts to complete the book. Oblivion is met here as an escape, a retreat, a space, not positioning. However, in ‘‘appropriating Elya,’’ the narrator embraces, metaphorically, the principle of non-closure, of beingtoward, that arises, paradoxically, in the stillborn—‘‘We turned around in the abyss, Yae¨l. The abyss was your child. Hence a stillborn child. Stillborn that is to say: dead in order to be born. Life refused even at its birth and stiff at this moment whose breath and inertia were ours’’ (E 191). Elya as stillborn child, ‘‘dead in order to be born,’’ comes to represent the God of the abyss and is taken to be, at the same time, the impetus and object of writing. The narrator writes, as if to provide instructions and inspiration for others who would choose to write in the abyss: ‘‘You can speak only on this side of death, in this tormented eternity which is the last but one existence of eternity. Silence envelops life. Hail, most kind most dear, most gentle refuge where God is without birth’’ (E 195). Oblivion, like the loss of values accompanying the death of the speaking God, is a necessary step in the mourning process for this God. A willful forgetting helps to dissociate past from present in a moment when the pain, the wound, of remembrance is simply too great. Oblivion is a defense mechanism, a protective measure, a strengthening bolster against the void left open by God’s death. But, by the same token, it is oblivion withheld, forgetfulness ungranted, that looms as a source of hope over the writing process: Oblivion, fearful flower plucked at the hour of heaviest sleep. The bonded screams of the earth mingle with ours when dawn quickens its colors, when the corolla rivals the solar disk in short-lived beauty. Any flower has the worth of oblivion. Equivalence of rites. Any flower has the warmth of oblivion. No matter which ritual, death will never be

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solemnized. This way we completed the voyage around death, O word to which I have given the hope of being, someday, forgotten. (E 191)

The word, then, given shape and direction by the writer who uses it in the service of speaking God’s death, aspires to be forgotten. That it cannot, ultimately, be forgotten reveals how pervasive the word is. Despite itself, the word continues to provoke the desire for oblivion in its refusal to succumb to it. The word provides, despite itself, what Gould masterfully names, ‘‘the instigation to hope’’ (‘‘Godtalk,’’ 167). This hope is met with the danger of forgetting, the fear that the natural movement of the sun across the sky, the intoxicating beauty of the flower that tempts oblivion, will render death—excruciating, unnatural death—perfectly natural: ‘‘no matter which ritual, death will never be solemnized.’’ Indeed, death has been conquered—‘‘we completed the voyage around death.’’ Perhaps we witness here another justification: if death is natural, it cannot find blame. But a residue of terror lurks just under the surface of this intoxicating scene: ‘‘the bonded screams of the earth mingle with ours.’’ Does ‘‘mingle’’ here imply dissolved, silenced? Or does it imply an imperative, namely, that ‘‘our’’ own voices bear witness to these screams? The tempered hope provided by the word manifests itself in the reemergence of both self and other. The close of the first trilogy and Yae¨l reflect a loss of absolute grounding and a dismissal of the self and other as ‘‘real’’ outside the realm of the text. The Word held primacy, it guided its own speaking, and self and other were mere constructs of the Book. Fully aware of the ramifications of this condition, Jabe`s begins, cautiously, to reestablish an external realm that allows for self and other. He writes, ‘‘Yae¨l was not a finished book. Elya completes it in the original completeness where man and the world awaken’’ (E 152). Though Elya is also not ‘‘complete,’’ in ‘‘awakening the world and man’’ it provides the basis for the reinscription of the Law that will occur in Aely. Birth of Self and Other It would seem to be the case that the other precedes the self, that the self comes into being only by means of, and continuing correspondence with, the other. In a section entitled ‘‘Birth of Self,’’ the other is granted precedence: ‘‘The other has a head start of more

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than one night. To catch up with him we would have to jump over the abyss’’ (E 156). Yet following shortly after this admission is a description of what this ‘‘birth’’ suggests: ‘‘I was born from a laborious reading of the night which my word has ever since suggested to you. . . . Through the reinstated sign I rejoin man in his priority’’ (E 156). This birth is neither arbitrary nor accidental, but the result of a ‘‘laborious reading’’ of that sphere without absolute values come to be recognized as ‘‘night.’’ The construct of selfhood is absolutely deliberate, then; it is put into place in order to reestablish the ‘‘priority’’ of humanity. Gaining power, becoming deified, man takes back the responsibility, the influence, before given to the imaged God. But this return of power and priority is bestowed only on the condition that power also is returned to the Word—‘‘the reinstated sign.’’ Power is provisional, then, and existence is qualified by its relation to a prior source that continues to reign. Similarly, the existence of God is shown here to be fully dependent on the perpetual reinstatement of his presence: ‘‘The center is the moment. If God is the center, He cannot exist except momentarily. Therefore God passes in whatever, by virtue of renewing itself, does not pass. Eternity is constant renewal. So that entering eternity means becoming conscious of all that begins all the time, means becoming yourself a beginning. We find God at the outset of the book. God again tied to God’’ (E 159). Again the conditional structure implies a hypothetical situation—‘‘If God is the center. . . .’’ Yet here a leap of faith seems to be encouraged. That is, this hypothesis brings with it an implied imperative: continue this moment of renewal. This hypothesis carries on the spirit of the second commandment, privileging the openness of the moment over the rigidity of fixed icons. If God is this type of being, which is more accurately a becoming, then we are prevailed upon to act in accordance with this being. ‘‘Becoming yourself a beginning’’ is an imperative that aims toward the paradoxical union of God and self in the perpetual embrace and creation of God in the moment. This union entails a ‘‘consciousness’’ not unlike the oblivion-as-positioning that we discussed earlier. Consciousness now presupposes nothingness, absence, uncertainty. It is this unique positioning of consciousness-within-oblivion that in many ways becomes the basis for Jabe`s’s new humanism, which I will describe later. Tying God to God implies tying man to a conception of God that, nevertheless, resists this tie. Jabe`s writes earlier, ‘‘God ties

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Himself where He denies Himself ’’ (RB 348)—it is precisely in the denial, the resistance to capture, that the tie gathers strength. The birth of the self, then, corresponds to the reconstituting of the divine in the moment—to perpetuate God is to perpetuate the self. This is a telling reformulation of the close of the first trilogy. Where God and man were once denied existence, here they are given provisional existence, an existence grounded in the relation. As Stamelman suggests, it is the renouncing of the individual sense of self, of the narcissism attached to the ego, that provides the necessary framework for Jabe`s’s ethical leap (‘‘The Dialogue of Absence’’ 110). As the self is reconstituted in the perpetual re-creation and continual reassertion of the divine presence, it becomes an ethical construct, a self no longer for-itself (as Yae¨l was) but for-others. Because the space of the divine–human encounter is the space of the book—‘‘we find God at the outset of the book’’—it becomes the writer’s task to bring God and the self into existence and relation in the moment of the book. The writer’s task, like the object of the book, is itself perpetual. Writing in the perpetual moment, consequently, is both a rebellion against imaging God and an upholding of the God who cannot be imaged. We are made aware of the reasons for the imaged God’s death. The death is attached to becoming visible, becoming apparent—‘‘God dies with us wherever He shows Himself ’’ (E 160). In a reversal of Exodus 33: 18–23, where Moses would be in danger of death were God to show himself, here God kills himself in this selfrevelation. The later volumes continue the process of making invisible at the same time as the gesture of looking is taken up in the reinscription of the Law. For Jabe`s the accountability associated with and necessitated by the look of the other is not connected to this self-revelation of God. Rather, God’s ‘‘showing Himself ’’ somehow negates the possibility for human action, effectively stunning humanity into paralysis. To ‘‘be shown’’ something is not to have actively sought it out. In a statement that conflates Jabe`s’s aims as a writer with a further reflection on the death of the living God, we witness the destructive quality of this certainty, and the rift between the God of the void and the imaged God grows wider: My books testify to the impossible approach of His Name. I have lived at an immense distance from the Kingdom I often thought I had

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reached. If He did not exist I would have howled to His glory. I despise those who see Him, because they only look on themselves. He is the invisible seer of an invisible world. . . . To make ourselves seeing is to become His equals in nothingness. You did not die, Lord, of having been, but of having thought You were. (E 167)

Sight presupposes ignorance here, a metaphorical blindness. Those who claim to ‘‘see’’ insist on gazing upon an image that they themselves have constructed. The living God is a casualty of thought, of the will to know the unknowable. As it did in the preceding volume, existence here assumes death and, as well, enforces a type of silence. In a radical subversion of traditional worship, praise is due here only to a God who does not exist. Giving priority back to man, then, necessitates a return of both praise and blame to its proper place—to the human realm (Kaplan, ‘‘Atheistic Theology’’ 50). The God of the void is in no sense to be regarded as the deus ex machina that Kafka also renounces. A resistance to this saving God, this God who ‘‘shows Himself,’’ entails a stringency on the part of the writer: to bear witness, to ‘‘testify’’ to the God who lies perpetually outside the realm of capture. As if to counter the collapsed hierarchy of values that accompanies the death of the living God, Elya puts forth a ‘‘pledge of the abyss.’’ Two components of this pledge suggest that, though we inhabit a world absent from the God we had once created, rather than be consumed and silenced by this world—a world standing in the shadow of a silent God—we continue to direct our gaze outward. In spite of the apparent fact that God has failed to meet our imagined expectations, indeed, by the virtue of this failure and lack, we should continue to act ‘‘as if ’’ there is a force to whom to pose questions. ‘‘To write as if addressing God. But what to expect from nothingness where any word is disarmed?’’ (E 152). And, in this address to God, existence is reconceived on the basis of posing questions, and posing them precisely because one recognizes they will remain unanswered—‘‘Being means questioning. Means interrogating yourself in the labyrinths of the Question put to others and to God, and which does not expect any answer’’ (E 153). In this ‘‘pledge,’’ a new system of values is hesitantly emerging in the space of the conditional. Positioning oneself against a purely hypothetical condition—as if to a God who somehow hears this ad-

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dress—the writer is nevertheless required to renounce his expectations. The shadowy presence of the other who precedes the collective reemergence of self and God, under the sign of absence, is beginning to assert itself as a source of tentative hope. But this is a hope again marked by its unattainability. The other begins to resurface, not as a threat but as a source of promise, a ‘‘beyond which would give us back not only to ourselves, but to the world which we had only half imagined.’’ The murder of Yae¨l signified an annihilation of the other, a victory over the external realm. Here, conflated with the space of the elsewhere, the ‘‘beyond,’’ the other suggests an external realm, transcendent in its apparent separation from the void, and yet immanent, deriving from its necessary prior immersion in the void. A Hazy ‘‘Elsewhere’’ It is to this perplexing space that the writer begins to direct his efforts: ‘‘For the One, the other is a personified beyond. You say ‘elsewhere’ as one might beg ‘to finally be’ ’’ (E 136). This ‘‘pledge of the abyss’’ protects against the temptation of closure—‘‘to finally be’’— that the elsewhere might induce. That is, this is a pledge to use the abyss as a productive source, just as one should use oblivion rather than become consumed by it. The elsewhere is conducive to valueconstruction only insofar as it inspires movement. The elsewhere, if one positions oneself toward it in a manner that places responsibility back on the self, is a universalizing force: ‘‘The elsewhere is still our strength, our theme, our law. Ecumenical, while we possess our corner where we stretch out side by side’’ (E 182). A force that reflects back on the shared isolation of the human condition, and offers the possibility for solidarity, the elsewhere retains its strength only in its never being reached, and, in a sense, in its, like Elya, never having been. Jabe`s admits in an interview, ‘‘the other is always somehow a fiction, but a fiction that is so necessary that it becomes for me the very reality of what I can feel and the very possibility of speaking about this thing that I seek’’ (Stamelman, ‘‘On Dialogue and the Other’’ 36). If, indeed, a fiction, the other can be constructed with deliberate intentions. Jabe`s continues: the other, like the God of the void, inspires a relation precisely in its not-being: (This other . . . this otherworldly being who was our painful obsession, who by not being attracted us like the void, and whom time could not

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destroy because he was the indifferent becoming of time. This same other, this same otherworldly being at the edge of our death . . . : what name could we choose for him, what face suggest? God is always in search of God.) (E 159)

Therefore, it is crucial that the writer choose a face and name for this other that will inspire the proper ethical model, a model that promotes the self-for-others, but will continue to uphold the pledge by refusing capture. Tellingly, the equation put forth in the first trilogy—‘‘God is a questioning of God’’—is transformed here into ‘‘God is always in search of God.’’ The question has, quite literally, become quest. Interrogation is connected to the search, and a teleology, however undetermined, overtakes the questioning process. The question now seeks, rather than perpetuation of the abyss, a celebration of ‘‘oblivion’’ as a manifestation of the void, a way out that remains ethically stringent. Elya ends with a vague promise. The final section, directed toward ‘‘The disciple,’’ suggests continuity of a story that has no means for closure. The section begins, ‘‘The book is the vague consciousness of going beyond yourself, the need for which will show only later. To wait, in the shade of time, for the time to come, the time which, tomorrow, will be ours and where, again, the consoled word will nestle against the word’’ (E 197). In going beyond, reaching toward the other and a time that rejoins word with word, the external realm is reestablished. Echoes of the Messianic wish are quite prominent here, but with a distinct departure from the traditional expression of this wish. Salvation and redemption, now, are attributed to the word returned to the word. The rift carved open between existence and ways of speaking about—bearing witness to—the existence of this God allows for a new mode of faith. God’s existence is now a given, after coming through on the other side of death. It is this existence that begins to make its presence felt, more and more palpably in Aely, and in the final volume of the septology, El. But with this new existence comes the new function of the writer, to bear witness to the new God, and to warn against the trappings of the old God. Reinscription of the Law We have discussed, in passing, the loss of values that necessarily accompanies the emergence of the God of the void. Absolute mean-

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ing, attached to the living God, is lost in this transformation. In Jabe`s’s ensuing ethical project, the loss of justice and the attending loss, by extension, of the ability to judge (because the standard of measure has been destroyed) inform the next crucial step: the reinscription of the Law. We explored how prominent a role this loss played particularly in the context of Kafka’s work. Like Kafka and Celan, Jabe`s remains fully aware that his ontological findings are presenting a danger to his ethical project. Earlier, Jabe`s makes an enigmatic prophecy: ‘‘You will be a God without man and I a man for God’’ (RB 336). This prophecy suggests that the law of man cannot be traced back to the divine, that there is a double standard with regard to the divine–human relation. This prophecy, on the one hand, implies separation and division, a space that cannot be crossed. On the other, ‘‘a man for God’’ insists on relation with this source. The law that man is expected to operate within, a law of justice, is not attributable to God but somehow must be constructed in the void that separates man and God. Jabe`s posits a distinction between justice and truth, saying ‘‘do not confuse justice and truth. Justice is to be done in the name of truth. And truth remains to be found. You have often been wrong. You are just’’ (BQ 110). Justice is divided from, but still in the service of, a truth that cannot be reached. Alluding to the metaphorical destruction of the Law Tables by Moses, Jabe`s describes the separation from the source of truth that inspires but is not itself justice. In addition, the condition of justice, of being just, hinges on being wrong, on accepting one’s fallibility. Part and parcel of upholding the God of the covenant, the God of justice, is giving oneself over to a lie, a willful lie, fabricated in the name of a greater truth. Perhaps this greater truth is that the divine supersedes the notion of justice altogether, that justice itself is a human construct, but a necessary and vital construct nonetheless in the maintenance of ethics. The conflation of justice with being ‘‘in error’’ has important ramifications for the system of ethics promoted by Jabe`s’s ‘‘Judaism after God.’’ Accepting guilt is the precondition for freedom—‘‘You play innocent, you will never be free’’(BY 258); transgression, we discussed earlier, is woven into the very fabric of the new covenant, the brutal murder of Yae¨l, of a wife by her husband, provides the dramatic backdrop against which the Law is rewritten. The pursuit of a viable system of ethics begins with the restoration

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of the notion of justice and judgment. The basic project of Aely is to reestablish the Law that has been destroyed as a result of the death of the imaged God. But this new Law must take into account the death of God as both irrevocable and perpetual. And in so doing, the limitations—previously lifted from both the Book and the divine— are now lifted from the Law. The Law is reinscribed on the basis of the stillborn God—the never-having-been God. It is this deep concern for reestablishing and asserting at all times a Law that remains simultaneously binding and open, because illegible, that connects Jabe`s’s project intimately with Kafka’s (Strauss, ‘‘La question du livre’’ 297). The spirit of the paradoxical imperative guiding much of Kafka’s ethics—‘‘or obey, even when one hears no command’’ (Diaries 257)—guides Jabe`s’s reformulation of the Law as well. The final two volumes, Aely and El, pursue the above-mentioned prophecy, and, in effect, turn it into an imperative. In the new focus on the Law, God is made both more remote, more unknowable, and, yet, more sufficiently binding. A double movement is enforced—one of proximity and distance. God is left untouched by human constructs while humanity continues to tie itself more thoroughly to a fiction preserved for the sake of the ethical encounter between self and other—‘‘a God without man and a man for God.’’

Aely I have always felt a strange, vague presence near me: shadowy at night, a paler whiteness in the day, and changing shapes to the point of having none of the moments when I feared it most. (A 251)

Retreating farther away from the body as the determining factor of identity, Aely is no character at all. Rather, Aely is less defined, less visible than even the stillborn Elya. Aely is identifiable only by his unnameability, by what he is not: ‘‘I am not called Aely. Nobody has given me this name. It is the name of a book. Am I this book? I can only be so in so far as it is the deciphered silence of a name’’ (A 249). The name is made possible only in the book. And because the name is the object of sanctification, gaining access to this name is crucial. The movement of this volume is twofold: there is both a return to the

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book—and with this return, an immersion in the void—and a reaching outward, a pursuit of the transcendence implied by the increasing influence of the other, palpable yet invisible, upon the writing process. Aely continues the work of Elya, bolstering the external realm, the elsewhere, as the space of promise. Here, the ‘‘elsewhere’’ is conjoined with the look and law of the other. This ‘‘look’’ is a paradoxical one. It is inspired by invisibility, and because it is never met by an image, it reflects infinitely between self and other. Part of the focus of this volume is to transform the debilitating look of the self toward the other—the killing gaze—into the look of the other reflected back on the self. For an ethical system to be binding, one must imagine that one’s actions are being watched, yet, not being able to see precisely who it is that watches, one acts always in the space of hypothesis and possibility. The power of judgment is given over to the other, a fiction at the outset, but whose reality nevertheless begins to assert itself as it assumes the seat of authority. This socalled ‘‘authority’’ is authoritative only formally and structurally—we have returned to the ‘‘command without content’’ so prevalent in Kafka’s world. In Aely, the full ramifications of upholding the second commandment are played out. With it, iconoclasm becomes the promoted stance, and the challenge of this stance is to rebel against all forms of closure, all limited visions of a divine, all forms that allow an iconic figure to deflect responsibility and action away from the self. This iconoclasm is subsumed under the Law, become now a commanded stance. Though it is not until the final volume that Jabe`s provides us with an account of Moses’s destruction of the Law Tables, it begins to become clearer in this volume how the loss of the inscribed word of Law necessitates a new means—a paradoxically written but nondefiling means—of formulating the Law and, therefore, the components of the covenant. Because God has come to represent absence, emptiness, void, death, but also movement, promise, and beingtoward, the covenant attached to this God is reformulated in this context. The Law is reattached to the figure of God, an external other is reasserted, and the writer becomes charged with the task of both promoting the lie of God and warning at all times against this lie’s being taken as anything other than a construct forged in the service of ethics.

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Joining God and Law The preface to this volume introduces several of the prevailing themes and strategies Jabe`s will be exploring: ‘‘Do you know that the final period of the book is an eye,’’ he said, ‘‘and without lid?’’ Dieu, ‘‘God,’’ he spelled D’ yeux, ‘‘of eyes.’’ ‘‘The ‘D’ stands for desire,’’ he added. ‘‘Desire to see. Desire to be seen.’’ God resembles His Name to the letter, and His Name is the Law. (A 203)

In the first instance of the word play that is so central to this particular volume, and that is carried powerfully into the final volume, El, Jabe`s begins to reveal the web of connections that informs his ontology. It becomes clearer that there is no chance or arbitrariness in his writings—words are compelled to come together by virtue of the relation that already exists among them (Shillony 18). Words that are related by sound are also related by meaning; just as Celan’s use of Hebrew demonstrates, it is this interconnectedness of meaning that emerges in the space where the imaged God has died. Significantly, Jabe`s’s word play is enacted in French and it is overt, in deep contrast to Celan’s intensely subtle use of Hebrew. If we are to read Jabe`s’s project as a continuation of Celan’s linguistic tikkun (mending of the world), the movement from Hebrew to French is crucial. French, the language of exile, a language of the diaspora, reveals an interconnectedness that is every bit as ‘‘magical’’ as Hebrew. We might read Jabe`s’s intentional employment of the Kabbalistic method—the insistence, that is, that each letter has power—in French as a means of sanctifying the ‘‘secular’’ realm, as a means, moreover, of highlighting that those who occupy the ‘‘diaspora,’’ and who speak its languages, have access to the sacred, to the unfathomable depths of ‘‘truth.’’ Jabe`s’s word play takes up Celan’s injunction ‘‘let us wash the word, let us turn its eye toward heaven’’ at the same time as it takes a polemical stance against the exclusionary model that Hebrew, and perhaps by extension Israel, represents. Celan’s imploring ‘‘sag, daß Jerusalem i s t’’ is countered by (what looks almost like) Jabe`s’s delight at times when his linguistic discoveries provide grounding for

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his theological project, as if he is consoling Celan with his conviction that the existence of Jerusalem is not the determining factor of the revaluation in which they are both engaged. Thus, he ventures tentatively: ‘‘More than a land, we need a language in common, our language, that of our ancestors, for our sons to propagate. It will return to them the loaded dice of their destiny’’ (BQ 171). An intense ambivalence comes through here; ‘‘a language in common’’ is qualified by ‘‘our language.’’ Does ‘‘in common’’ refer only to Jews? Or does it refer to a language that crosses religious, cultural, ethnic boundaries? As the increasing use of word play seems to suggest, the condition ‘‘uncovered’’ by this play is by no means limited to Judaism—it is a condition grounded in loss and absence, a condition bound to our being human. However, and this is problematic particularly because of the thinly veiled will-to-power in the statement above—‘‘. . . for our sons to propagate,’’ ‘‘. . . the loaded dice of their destiny’’—the transformed Kabbalistic method that Jabe`s uses suggests that a specifically Jewish paradigm will serve as the vehicle for a ‘‘common language’’; a method that challenges Judaism from the ‘‘inside’’ (challenging the primacy of Hebrew) also imposes itself on the ‘‘outside.’’ And, indeed, the result of this imposition is the creation of a new Law that relocates God and binds us—all of us, it seems—to this Law. In the example cited above—‘‘Dieu’’ ‘‘D’yeux’’/ ‘‘God resembles His Name to the letter, and His Name is the Law’’—God is reattached to the Law, and we become subject to this Law by means of our desire to become subject. Where the hierarchy attached to the realm of light—the extinguished light of Yae¨l and Elya—is continually threatened by the ‘‘neutrality’’ of the darkness, here there is a budding sense of hope that there can be a system of value that emerges out of the breakdown of value. But what is this Law? What is this system of value? In Jabe`s’s characteristic use of the identity statement that confounds more than it describes, the Name and the Law, equally undefinable, unattainable, indescribable, are now linked by their very negativity and located in the reconstituted divine. Perhaps this very non-normativity, this vehement refusal to provide a definitive mode of praxis even as he insists upon the highly normative structure of the Law, is Jabe`s’s answer, his antidote, to the will-to-power that he acknowledges is present (indeed, has to be present, because his is a project, fundamentally, of reinstating

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a devastated voice, an all-but-annihilated people) in his theological project? Nevertheless, in the continued refrain ‘‘he said,’’ authority is situated in an invisible, anonymous voice. No longer identified as the fictional rabbi, the anonymous character nevertheless speaks truths that reflect a Midrashic understanding and disposition. As if taking up the challenge of interpretation presented in the previous volume, this mysterious authority is beginning to bridge the gap from Jewish consciousness to universal ethical consciousness, and it is a consciousness that emerges, paradoxically, in freeing God from man, in enforcing a divide between God and man. In Elya, Jabe`s writes: Interpretation is bound to act on the fate of individuals and of the world. It gives their destiny a new course, taking full responsibility for it, being ready to suffer the consequences and pay the price. Also, interpreting the book means first of all rising up against God to take voice and pen out of His power. We have to get rid of the divine within us in order to give God back to Himself and fully enjoy our freedom as men. (E 146)

‘‘Giving God back to Himself,’’ it seems, carries with it the imperative to engage in what appears to be a counterintuitive move: giving back to humanity the responsibility to establish a law-promoting face of God, which is alternately revealed and hidden in the persistent act of interpretation. It means destroying the image of God that is connected to concretized absolutes while holding to, and continually promoting, the desire to connect the divine with the source of the Law as a worthwhile desire. Yae¨l died as a result of the thwarted desire to name and be named; the God who is emerging in the place of this death, El, is reborn of deferred fulfillment of desire.

The Look of All and Nothing In the transformation of the look, desire, too, is reconceived. Desire no longer suggests a passion for ownership or possession, but, rather, for reciprocation—‘‘desire to see, desire to be seen.’’ In reestablishing the look as a potential source of relation, communion, the look is stripped of the violent tendencies it displayed before. The former look is associated with a false sense of certainty and the pride that

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accompanies holding too strongly to constructed truths. Yae¨l’s explanation of the death of the imaged God—‘‘for God died of looking’’—is connected to Elya’s explanation: ‘‘you did not die, Lord, for having been, but for having thought you were.’’ As the imaged God is transformed into the God of the void, the look capable of depicting this God is transformed as well—the debilitating look of the self upon the other is transformed into the look of the other. In the other, this look becomes dynamic rather than static, inspires becoming rather than being. In continuation of the first passage of this volume, which connects the act of seeing with the very existence of God, there is a statement that depicts how this look is to be transformed: ‘‘Within the word oeil, ‘eye,’ is the word loi, ‘law.’ Every look contains the law’’ (A 215). By intention of language, the law is situated in the gaze of the other. Mary Ann Caws suggests that Jabe`s points out this linguistic connection at this particular moment in order to stress the responsibility inherent in this changing value system (29). Substituting human responsibility for the passive resignation that comes from fixing God in the image of man, this newly conceived look makes demands, enforces action. This look is further described in an account of a creation that again links the writer’s project with that of God. This account echoes tzimtzum—the divine act of reduction that becomes a literary act in the final volume, El: God alone knows His image. Before the Creation, God could expect everything of God, just as the writer can expect everything of his pen before the book, and the book everything of the book before it is written. . . . this expectation, however, is due to the creator not knowing himself, nor the book knowing the book. We build on ignorance and build our ruin. Before the Creation, God is All. Afterwards, ah, is He Nothing afterwards? The All is invisible. Visibility lies between All and Nothing, in each little bit taken from the All. In order to create, God went outside Himself so that he could penetrate and destroy Himself. When he had created the world, God was All without heaven and earth. . . . When he had created man, God was without face. Nobody has seen God, but the stages of His death are visible to all of us. (The word will start from Nothing in order to dissolve in the All. Likewise any law). (A 224–25)

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Creation, disclosed in the first trilogy as a lie, here is reformulated. The Creator God of Genesis is substituted for the mystical God of Kabbalah, the God who created precisely by means of the dual movement of expansion and contraction, who carved open a space for presence in the retreat into absence. And, in a radical subversion of realms, the God who previously represented the void, the Nothing, is posited here as the All—‘‘before the Creation, God is All. . . . The All is invisible.’’ The Law, like the word, begins from the space of absence in order to return to the All. The Law and the word become goal-directed, but in a peculiar sense, they seek a return to a perpetual moment. Creation, then, is made provisional—creation is re-creation—and hinges on a paradoxical knowledge-in-ignorance (Bavca`r 218). The blindness that formerly betrayed false certainty here is promoted in the form of ‘‘invisibility.’’ The false expectation of creation—to ‘‘expect everything’’—is formulated on ignorance concerning the nature of the self—‘‘this expectation is due to the creator not knowing himself. . . . We build on ignorance and we build on our ruin.’’ In a powerful conflation of the Socratic maxims ‘‘know thyself ’’ and ‘‘I know that I know nothing,’’ here to know oneself is in essence to embrace one’s ignorance—one’s truly productive ignorance, that is. Ignorance acknowledged—that is, the embrace of invisibility and the incapacity to see—combats the ignorance that results from the false belief that one can know, that one can see. Ignorance and false expectation are attributed to the book as well—‘‘. . . due to the creator not knowing himself, nor the book knowing the book.’’ This accusation implies an imperative: that the book opt for productive ignorance, and in so doing, mirror the invisibility that is the divine. In this restating of the ‘‘pledge of the abyss,’’ we see the book taking on shape, conforming to a prescriptive standard; in order to affect this a-mimesis of sorts, the book is bound by its own illegible Law, bound to an ineffable source. In the commitment to upholding this source in the space of the book, restriction supplants loss of limitation. Tellingly, the transformation of the look and the notion of creation coincide with Jabe`s’s admission that we are heading toward ‘‘the final period of the book.’’ The culmination of the book will be the arrival at El—the irreducible point. Here, this final point is attached to the ever-watchful eye of God—‘‘the eye without lid.’’ The convergence of the book with the enforced law and unwavering presence of the other provides a crucial instruction for

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the writer: the book must provide the arena for the ethical encounter. And indeed it does. Writing as Submission Writing is increasingly viewed as a submission to a Law and a truth that is couched in death and emptiness. The curious intrusion of the golem myth2 into this volume begs for consideration in regard to this emerging Law and the connection it holds to truth in Jabe`s’s formulation (Motte 35). The epigraph to the section ‘‘The Fore-Book III’’ reads, ‘‘one letter dropped from your name, and already you are no more’’ (A 245). In an obvious allusion to the golem, truth is precariously linked to death. It is said that the golem has inscribed upon his forehead the word ‘‘emet’’ (truth). Should a letter be erased, death (‘‘met’’) is the result (Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 159). As with the death of the imaged God, which we read after the fact, this passage describes an event that has both conclusive and perpetual repercussions. Truth has already slipped into the realm of death, and, it would seem, continues to ‘‘slip’’ each time it is prevailed upon to represent absolute grounding. The golem, as well, is said to be a protective figure; in the wake of this event, however, he can no longer serve his protective function. Or can he? Perhaps ‘‘protection’’ here entails coaxing truth from death? That is, to protect, in the spirit of abolishing graven images, is to continue to uphold a truth that finds its birthplace in death and a corresponding loss of absolutes? Jabe`s challenges the writer not to reconcile the paradox emerging from this peculiar ‘‘protective’’ measure. He places a seemingly conflicting set of imperatives upon both reader and writer, confronting us with the conditions of belief that emerge once truth is aligned with emptiness. In one case he writes, ‘‘the word remains objective where subjectivity afflicts us. Truth is objective. The law is objective. Death is objective. We must think of God as an objective Totality’’ (A 223). But we are given an equally pressing imperative, an equally 2 The golem is a figure in Jewish mysticism. According to legend, he was created out of clay as a servant to man. He became so powerful and placed the community in danger of being trampled by him. On his forehead the word emet (truth) was inscribed. To destroy him, the Rabbi erased the first letter of the word, leaving met, or death, in its place.

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necessary means of viewing God—‘‘if you believe in emptiness, you must believe in infinite emptiness and infinite emptiness is God, the dizzying place of the Book’’ (A 253). We must, Jabe`s insists, believe in God as both objective Totality and emptiness. The ideal and real combat each other, coming together by virtue of the word in the unattainable Book. Why must we uphold both conditions of belief simultaneously? Perhaps because infinite emptiness, as a reflection of the ‘‘true’’ ground of being, does not promote the values of a realm of objective Totality. Truth and justice are divided from each other, and yet justice acts in the service of truth. In the same way, this objective Totality has no basis in the ‘‘real,’’ but, nevertheless, points back to the emptiness, the ‘‘truth,’’ whose (unpronounceable) name it sanctifies. The writer, then, is burdened by an enormous task—upholding at once both reality (emptiness) and the imagined realm of the other, the realm necessary for a reconstruction of values. Jabe`s asks: Is the writer different by his wish to perpetuate the saintly task of recognizing the voice of God, though long dead, in his own—as if he had died with God in order to hear His voice and then to disappear in his own time? Because it is definitely against the silence of God and man, against the residual magnetism of this silence, that the word revolts. Towards this silence, subsoil of all interrupted silence, the writer is gradually driven. (A 292)

The writer’s task is explained here in terms of defiance, revolt, challenge against the silence of God and man. It is this rebellious stance taken regardless of the fact that the ‘‘true’’ God, the ‘‘long dead’’ God, is invulnerable to attack that reveals the writer’s task as a ‘‘saintly’’ one. The ‘‘saintly work’’ attributed to the writer is the continued remembrance of the dead God. Why? Because the writer is charged with the task of defying the silence of God. Though this silence may be more accurately a component of the divine nature, it cannot be vindicated by the Word, the only source for creating an objective standard of truth consumed by subjectivity and the corresponding belief that the self lives in isolation from the other. From the outset of this volume, the responsibility of the writer to give voice to an ethical standard—because it objectively, that is, ontologically, does not exist—is made clear: ‘‘Both Good and Evil ripen in the shadow of the Law. But Justice only sides with Good. God is not Good. He

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is good writing’’ (A 205). The writer is obliged both to expose truth as constructed fiction—that is, to perpetuate God’s death in the book—and to continue to uphold a standard that will allow for value judgments—that is, inspire the wish for a God who is good. The book, the space where the real and ideal come together, is urgent. It is only here that this unique dialectic plays itself out. The stakes are indeed high: without the book, silence would be taken, not only as the condition of reality, but as the ideal condition as well. Therefore, Jabe`s insists, ‘‘what am I committed to?—The necessity of the book’’ (A 248). Promoting both ideal-construction and reality maintenance as the proper work of the book and the writing process, the writer reasserts the extent to which he is ‘‘bound’’ by the other who comes to represent at once both poles of existence. The other, brought back into being, but not yet guiding presence or seat of authority, in Elya, is now the directive source of the book. Jabe`s describes the scope of the writer’s submission to this source as threefold: ‘‘in writing, we give proof of submission to the Law, submission to God, submission to emptiness’’ (A 213). In a subtle reworking of the prescriptive basis of the previous volume, the pledge of the abyss becomes, metaphorically, the pledge to the abyss. Dwelling (of implies inclusion) is substituted by an assertion of ties, and the abyss is overcome, even as it continues to inform further movement. To combat the subjectivity that presents itself as the threat against which the word protects, Jabe`s continues to promote the other as the source that provides the self with existence: ‘‘it is always in relation to others that we assert ourselves. To be yourself, methodically, in facing others, to know yourself, try to be known, while facing the unknown in others. I speak as a stranger to strangers, convinced that my brother is among them’’ (A 320). Identity is forged through the other; in sensing the presence and strength of the other, writing becomes a representation of the bonds and ties the writer is called on to represent. The other is no longer determined by the self ’s desire to appropriate or violate it; it is no longer regarded naı¨vely as a scapegoat or ‘‘elsewhere’’ given to protect the ‘‘here.’’ Rather, the other is permitted and encouraged to retain its otherness, its strangeness. The hope for communion with this other—the wish that there is a shared space between self and other—becomes the impetus for dialogue. Jabe`s admits he is speaking to, never for, the other. Again, belonging is supplanted by the

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outwardly directed act of encounter. Reaching across to the other, the stranger, Jabe`s insists that the boundaries not be collapsed, while he provokes the wish that they might, someday, be collapsed. The Space Between The space of the book, the space of the self–other relation is the space between. Both unsurpassable and continuous, this space provides for movement and retains the boundaries of otherness necessary for the encounter. This space both perpetuates and is the divine presence, according to Jabe`s—‘‘God is always between, superbly oblivious of time’’ (A 295). The writer becomes the bridge crossing over this timeless space—‘‘I am the interval. The interval is the hyphen’’ (A 256). The connective link, both in time—‘‘interval’’—and space (the literary space, that is)—‘‘hyphen’’—the writer cultivates the space between, even as he overcomes it. But mastery over this space is impossible. The writer continues to be governed by the Book, and the space between consumes the progress of the insufficient, incomplete book. The volume closes with a reassertion of the endless dynamic process of the book: ‘‘The book is destroyed by the book. We shall never have owned anything’’ (A 337). Disavowing ownership, the ability to possess, the book erases itself, suggesting that the hoped-for oblivion of the word is on some levels possible. With strong echoes of Kafka’s maxim ‘‘there is no having, only a being,’’ this closing statement is spoken in the service of Jabe`s’s ethical project: writing must continue to acknowledge its own incommensurability, yet incite rebellion against this source which exposes the writer as incommensurate.

9

The God of the Void: El, or the Last Book ‘‘My desire to write you is a need as vital, as urgent as breathing. But with what new gesture, in the wake of which inoffensive look can I reach you? (El 441) God’s eye is everywhere. The void is a voyeur. (A 266)

El begins with an epigraph taken from Kabbalah—‘‘When God wanted to reveal Himself, He appeared as a point.’’ As this quote illustrates, this last volume is a literary manifestation of tzimtzum (Stamelman, ‘‘Nomadic Writing’’ 104, 108). This act of withdrawal, or cosmic reduction, carves open a space for further expansion. The dynamic movement between retreat and return, absence that gives way to presence, is central to this volume. The full title of the volume, El ou le dernier livre (El, or the last book), suggests that it is the culmination of the Book of Questions. With Jabe`s’s characteristic refusal of closure, however, ‘‘last’’ is more likely to be read as both end and beginning. Because this ‘‘point,’’ this means of divine revelation, is grounded in paradox, reduction, collapse, and contraction to a single entity are countered by expansion. Absence is joined with presence in a, finally, irreducible point. The point, then, is reflective of both multiplicity and unity. God reveals, finally, nothing of his (its?) nature, or perhaps more precisely, reveals that he is both All and Nothing. On one level, this volume derives from an assumption that produces the tension in the earlier volumes—that is, without a model for God, without an ontological substructure upon which to build, an ethical system is impossible. In guiding his volumes toward a culmination in El, the mystical God, this volume represents Jabe`s’s last attempt to describe the indescribable, to put forth a hypothetical face

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for God because, for the sake of his ethical project, he has to. This ‘‘face,’’ which both reflects and resists capture, is the ‘‘point.’’ But this ‘‘face,’’ defined by its irreducibility, its negativity, does not pose a threat to the divine. The point, though a visible representation, manages to uphold the prohibition against graven images. Circumventing this prohibition, Jabe`s literally places the point on the cover and virtually each page of this volume. The ‘‘point’’ presides over the unraveling book; we cannot help but see the literal manifestation of our constructed Law.

Making the Invisible Visible ‘‘Visibility, invisibility, presence, absence. Words of one blood.’’ (El 396)

As Aely brings the Law back into being, El, as it were, brings this Law into focus, makes it ‘‘visible.’’ The paradox is, of course, that this ‘‘focus’’ remains blurry. The dichotomy between seeing and being seen, set up in Aely as the desire for reciprocation that both emanates from the divine and is the basis for the external source of authority, takes on a new intensity in this volume. The eye, the look, and the Law continue to be interdependent and central metaphors of this text as they were in Aely (Shillony 10). Keeping watch over every page, the point bears witness as it is being borne witness to by the text. Continuing the word play that constitutes much of the reformulation of the Law in Aely, Jabe`s describes here a linguistic connection, the implications of which permeate this volume. This vital connection is that between knowing and seeing, knowledge and sight. He writes: To discover the deep relations between one point and another no matter how distant and how limited our ability to perceive them, ah, this is true, living knowledge. ‘‘Out of the fog of the word savoir, ‘to know,’ looms the word voir, ‘to see,’ ’’ he said. ‘‘Knowing is essentially seeing.’’ We shall carve in the space between. ‘‘The word voir,’’ he added, ‘‘is placed under the authority of the word roi, ‘king,’ which we cannot read here, but which reigns nevertheless. There is royalty in seeing.’’

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‘‘But is the word roi not also contained in many other words?’’ he was asked. ‘‘It is,’’ he replied. And after a pause, he added, perhaps to cut short such questions or to throw his audience off the track: ‘‘God is there, even when the letter is not.’’ (El 359)

Written in the form of a re´cit, a ‘‘tale’’ (which Jabe`s links etymologically to ´ecrit, ‘‘the written’’—‘‘all writing offers its share of the telling’’ [El 345]), this passage is highly reminiscent of Midrash. The source of authority, the reigning presence—‘‘roi’’—remains invisible. That is, the letter is finally insufficient for its representation. Sight is mysteriously linked with illegibility—‘‘which we cannot read.’’ The sense of the illegible is extended here, it seems, to include not only that which cannot be read, but that which cannot be written. ‘‘Knowing is essentially seeing,’’ this anonymous narrator tells us, but seeing what? To know is essentially to see all that resists being seen. The space of the unseen, both unreadable and unwritable (therefore uniting the reader and writer in the frustration before this gap), is nevertheless the authoritative space. To ‘‘see’’ this space for what it is is to have acquired a peculiar kind of non-knowledge. And with this puzzling non-knowledge comes an equally puzzling wish, bordering on an imperative: ‘‘we shall carve in the space between.’’ This ‘‘between’’ is described in an earlier statement that is blatantly imperative: ‘‘Enter the center: between seeing and seen’’ (El 359). The space is uncovered by the look of reciprocation. Pursuing further this connection between knowledge and sight, Jabe`s explores a related set of (seeming) dichotomies: transparency and opacity. He writes: ‘‘words suffer from a certain opaqueness which they only lose when disembodied. As if in order to be heard they needed to take off their appearance. . . . In the beginning, there is transparency. Precocious point’’ (El 355). The sight that comes with knowledge is the capacity, quite literally, to see through, to penetrate the body that is responsible for separation and, therefore, limitation. ‘‘Appearance’’ here emerges as an obstacle to true sight. Directly translating Bereshit, ‘‘in the beginning,’’ the first phrase and Hebrew title of Genesis, Jabe`s equates transparency with creatio ex nihilo. Perhaps a subtle and more subversive connection that Jabe`s pursues in this phrase is the connection to John 1: 1. If this connection is indeed to be made, transparency is likened to the Word, before being

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made flesh. Using this highly charged phrase in such an ambiguous manner, Jabe`s gestures to the Jewish–Christian dialogue that is a necessary first step in his ‘‘new’’ humanism. Regardless, transparency is determined to be the goal and destination of the writing process. In a particularly vivid description, Jabe`s clarifies this ‘‘goal’’ by drawing out the interdependence of artistic and destructive elements on the writing process: Writing: a graphic representation, an obsessive fresco on the walls of a book which has been protected so long that, no sooner opened than it is corroded and destroyed by the air rushing in. The place of the book is a walled-in void. Every page a precarious shelter which has its four walls, its margins. To expose them to light and to eyes means to topple the walls and ceiling. All writing returns the word to its initial transparency. (El 361)

Writing, depicted here as ‘‘graphic representation,’’ veers perilously close to a transgression of the second commandment. Curiously, these visual representations become Jabe`s’s new gesture to approach the totality that he wishes to capture in writing. Fully conscious that he is entering the dangerous territory that constitutes mistaking the graven image for the object itself, Jabe`s supplants representation with metaphor; the object of pursuit continues to remain at a remove from one-to-one correspondence. Writing, ‘‘returning the word to its original transparency,’’ is a restorative and preservative act, likened to ‘‘an obsessive fresco . . . which has been protected so long.’’ Reading, on the contrary, is the destructive act—the ‘‘eyes’’ here threaten to topple the very structure of the written word. But iconoclasm, the smashing of idols, is by nature destructive, just as it is guided by a fundamentally restorative purpose. Our reading, Jabe`s urges us, must become iconoclastic—we must not allow the fear that ‘‘the air rushing in’’ will ‘‘corrode and destroy’’ to hinder the necessary process of exposing the long-protected system of values to light.

Representing the Invisible In addition to word play, Jabe`s employs a series of charts and diagrams, relying mainly on the strategies of reduction and substitution, as a means of coming closer to this peculiar kind of graphic represen-

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tation: a representation that makes visible without fixing. Jabe`s uses these charts as if to lay bare the connections between words, to force us to see the connections. He depends here on a basic assumption: language is by no means accidental, the links that manifest themselves are neither fortuitous nor arbitrary (Shillony 18). Words are, as if by some underlying design, linked together by sound, meaning, and intention. This assumption places Jabe`s within the ranks of both the mystics and the Midrashim, who believe that words are endowed with creative potential, that words have at once the power to conjure into being and to reflect the ground of being. Jabe`s’s diagrams both reflect an underlying condition and hint, ever elusively, to what this condition urges. They are descriptive, but urge a prescriptive response; they urge us, that is, to see the underlying unity that language taps into and to act in accordance with it. They urge us, as well, to assume a stance of persistent questioning, a refusal of complacency, a resistance to closure. For instance, precisely at the center of this final volume Jabe`s places a page that consists entirely of an anagram—an anagram that is both graphic and linguistic. The page is divided horizontally in two. In the top portion, written in black points upon a white background, is the word ‘‘NUL’’—or none. The bottom portion, written in white points upon a black background, is the word ‘‘L’UN’’—(the) one. The one contains the nothing. Totality, unity, partakes of absence. In a series of diagrams and commentary that follows this striking moment, he presents us with further ‘‘evidence’’ of the power of the book: in French, only one letter (the means of distinguishing this letter in Hebrew, incidentally, is only a vowel marker) separates the book from freedom. Indeed, this tenuous separation establishes a link between the two (livre/libre); the freeing absence of the letter that tends toward silence coaxes the act of reading, an act that can be read, perhaps, as an imperative (lire—to read) that contains the presence of the hidden divine (El). In the freed moment, reversal is paradoxically the strategy by which this presence is revealed. Similarly, God is tied to, embodied by mourning (Dieu/Deuil). The commentary that accompanies, and therefore helps to illuminate this diagram presents us with a mysterious, but crucial, equation: Dieu⳱Vide⳱Vie d’yeux, God⳱the void⳱the life of eyes. The gaze, the desire to see and be seen, the creative moment of the look that passes between self and other—which must by definition pass through the void—this is God.

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The equation here refers us back to the opening page of Aely—the volume in which the Law is rewritten in the space of the causal God’s death: ‘‘Do you know that the final period of the book is an eye, and without lid?’’ an anonymous voice asks us. In another reversal—this time of Berkeley’s injunction ‘‘to be is to be perceived [by God]’’— God is fashioned as the desire for reciprocal perception. And it is, finally, this desire that becomes Law. Each of these charts, it seems to me, is included with the purpose of offering a visual representation of an underlying condition. This condition is one of unity, intimacy, connection; but it is a connection grounded in absence, loss, and death, all of which are God. The unifying element is the void. Through these charts, we come to see that the distinction that Jabe`s appears to be making between poles such as visibility and invisibility, transparency and opaqueness, are part and parcel of the same source.

Recovering the Body Curiously, the injunction connected to employing writing as ‘‘graphic representation’’—to ‘‘return the word to its original transparency’’— coincides with a return to the body. The body, regarded throughout as a source of limitation, is slowly taking back its power. But this recovery is conditional and points to a paradox: the body, ‘‘encasing’’ of both word and self, is the mark of separation. It is the obstacle to transparency. The body can become a vehicle for the approach of the divine only when it casts aside its divisive tendencies. In the reemergence of corporeal power, we see a conflation of the senses. Specifically, sight and hearing are made interdependent—to ‘‘see,’’ that is to possess the sight that brings knowledge, is to hear, to listen: ‘‘(You will be able to contemplate God once you have learned to listen to words, to look at them carefully, that is, once you have learned to read. . . . His voice is inaudible, but it is the supporting silence which allows our sounds to be discrete. . . . A look without object in the spreading sound. Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things)’’ (El 400–401). The eye, vehicle of potential destruction, is superseded by the ear; the act of listening, an act that implies dialogue, supplants the act of looking, fixing, upon an object that refuses to look back. The unrecip-

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rocated look threatens monologue. In essence, the Shema is invoked here, but the command to listen, to hear, is joined by the look that is fulfilled by reading, by a return to the written text. The senses are redirected toward the relation between self and other, and, in this redirection, they bring both vulnerability and sensitivity to the body: ‘‘Body responds to body with a multitude of points which are miraculous mirrors or the misery of illness. Worlds communicate in our skin. The body is master over our attachments’’ (El 362). In keeping with the necessary, and temporary, retreat into oblivion, the body is both potential danger and means for connection. It can either isolate or bring together. It can serve its own ends, as in the case of Yae¨l’s adultery and the narrator’s jealous rage that results in her murder, or become means to an end, the vehicle for connection. The ‘‘or’’ in the statement above—‘‘miraculous mirrors or the misery of illness’’— suggests that we have a choice to make. Will we choose isolation or connection (however painful, however difficult this connection might be)? Will we choose Kierkegaard’s Abraham or Kafka’s Abraham? The recovery of the body here implies a complete reversal from Yae¨l, where the body signified isolated ego, solipsistic wish-fulfillment, a condition that infected the divine as well. In this reversal, the body comes to signify the newly emerging relation that uses human potential (however limited) as its starting point because God has been disembodied. In this reversal, the body can ‘‘communicate,’’ it can ‘‘respond’’—it need not violate, subjugate, torture, or destroy. At the same time, as ‘‘master of all attachments,’’ the body is recovered alongside the construction of an external Law, and therefore the body also comes to signal submission. But this submission is of a peculiar type: the Jabe`sien subject engages in a willful deception, creating the source to which it then submits, a source so powerful, Jabe`s suggests, that the writing process reflects a threefold submission to this source—‘‘in writing, we give proof of submission to the Law, submission to God, submission to emptiness’’ (A 213).1 For Jabe`s, the recovery of the body, in a way that is reminiscent of Celan’s invocation of the beloved in ‘‘Zweiha¨usig, ewiger,’’ provides a source of human comfort in the space where God no longer speaks, no longer acts. As vehicle, the recovery of the body becomes the means to approach the divine in the space of silence. To recover the body is, essentially, to 1

The above discussion is excerpted from ‘‘Perpetuating the Death of God.’’

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embrace human limitation, to embrace mortality, to embrace the fragile beauty that is the relation. And, in this embrace, the divine is finally cast off as a saving figure—‘‘we can only be saved by ourselves. Such is our luck’’ (BQ 125).

Finding the Center Even as the body and bodily limitations are provisionally recovered, the act of ‘‘making visible’’ accompanies what seems to be an increasing desire to reinstitute a lost center for the void. The imperative mentioned earlier—‘‘enter the center: between seeing and seen’’— requires, naturally, that this center be located. As human responsibility increases, so does the corresponding desire to uncover the source that urges this tie (between seeing and being seen). This source, Jabe`s’s explorations have suggested, does not urge this tie, in and of itself. How then, to justify the strongly felt connection—the sense of duty to uphold a Law that governs without being seen? Motte writes, ‘‘Jabe`s suggests that it may be the final task to locate the center. . . . it is as if Jabe`s had deliberately erected a hierarchy of obstacles in the text, arranged in increasing order of difficulty. The movement described in such a model of reading is that of straining towards the center, precisely, and the center itself is the last barrier between reader and book’’ (142). What is this center? Like the fictitious other, necessary for the ethical leap of the writing process, the center is a fiction that seems to take on its reality as it becomes the pivotal space and destination of the book. Jabe`s admits in Yae¨l, ‘‘This nonexistent center became the favorite place for my pen’’ (Y 83). And he asks, ‘‘Becoming conscious of the unity of the universe: does this not mean retracing God’s involucrate existence, inventing a center for the void?’’ (Y 62). The work of making visible is done in the service of exposing and compelling us, as readers, to ‘‘become conscious of this unity.’’ As if to follow his own challenge, as if to invent a center, Jabe`s places, as mentioned earlier, an anagram at the very center of this final volume—a visual, linguistic, symbol and marker of all that his interrogating, fractured, and fragmenting Book of Questions represents. In this ‘‘center,’’ he marries the One to Nothingness, the infinite to emptiness, supreme presence to devastating absence. It is

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precisely here that Jabe`s tempts us to look for a center where all possibilities for a center have been shattered. Shillony suggests that the structure of this anagram reveals the ‘‘law of the text’’ that the poet intuitively follows (34). The law residing in the text speaks to the profound unity that joins nothingness to the totality that Jabe`s has previously implored us to consider as the divine presence (‘‘we must think of God as a totality’’). As a graphic representation, the white spaces between and around the dark imprint of the word are intimately connected (Stamelman, ‘‘Nomadic Writing’’ 108)—one does not become visible without the presence of the other. This is the law at the center of the poetic endeavor. And yet Jabe`s is quite clear that this is fabrication, that this center emerges only from an act of willful intention. Why this center? What does it represent? It is worthwhile to address two different readings of this center. Warren Motte and Joseph Guglielmi alike recognize Jabe`s’s need to construct this center. Both agree that, while it is a fabrication and essentially a deception on the part of the writer, the deception is no arbitrary choice, but rather a vital element in Jabe`s’s ensuing ethics. Motte suggests that the center is a resistance to the nothingness, the emptiness that lies just outside its borders (122). Guglielmi, in contrast, views the center as a rebellion against the transcendent order that threatens to encroach upon it. Guglielmi reads the center as a void, an abyss, silent, but, in its silence and refusal of dogmatism, providing no answers and preserving the asking of questions (182– 83). Motte, however, implies that, still choosing an arena that protects the question as the privileged form of discourse, Jabe`s constructs a realm of plenitude that remains insulated from the threat of the encroaching outside. While Guglielmi places the void at the center of Jabe`s’s project, Motte suggests that the center remains the last bastion against the external void. I believe that Jabe`s’s center, and his impulse to create a center, reflect both these possibilities simultaneously. The centrifying impulse is a protection against, and an imperative to combat, meaninglessness. At the same time, it reflects Jabe`s’s ontological findings, the result of his interrogation of God—God is nothing, God is doubt, God is the negative principle. The center is contained in the point, announced in the withdrawal of the divine for the purposes of revelation. The point is itself the center. This center-point is at once place and destination, location and imperative. It embodies movement

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while promising (but never delivering) closure. Jabe`s writes: ‘‘(The sign Ⳮ is twice the sign -, vertically and horizontally on the page. The point of intersection of the two lines is the heart of the book which is also, where symbol is abolished by symbol, the hypothetical center of the universe whose every word measures the space consumed. Center both on this and the far side of any center, at the crossing of the thought and the unthinkable)’’ (El 393). More puzzlingly, this center point remains ‘‘hypothetical.’’ ‘‘Center both on this and the far side of any center’’—as mere hypothetical construct, the center makes demands as it guides the writer toward it. Reaching both across and upward, the center, like Celan’s ‘‘Mandorla,’’ is the ‘‘point of intersection’’ between opposing forces. So, too, this point of intersection is located in absence, negation, the space of deliberate undoing—‘‘where symbol is abolished by symbol.’’ The center is both lost origin and the wish bound to the return to this origin. It is a point that at once promises and refuses plenitude (Guglielmi 185). Jabe`s reminds us of the purpose of writing—the search for origins: ‘‘As the object of our avid questioning, origins, whether in the time of the book or outside time, appear to be the pretext—the pre-text—for again and again affirming our origins. But if the place I left remains the place I came from, how can I really know which was my place? An empty space must constantly be filled. Space is all we have had to fight against’’ (El 372). Filling this space, creating a realm of presence where a center can take hold, is now part and parcel of this ‘‘discovery’’ of origins. This center point, even as a fiction, an ‘‘hallucination,’’ betokens a kind of death as the writer closes in upon it: ‘‘Questioning the point meant unflagging questioning of the question that had come up with it. Unassailable point, favorable and fatal to all thought—fighting with its own excess—for which it is crest and base. This hallucinatory point— point of contact, of convergence, of incidence—is a noose of knowledge, rope of the sublime hanged man whom the four horizons claim and whose body every new day sets on fire. Around my neck, a tighter and tighter ring, it will have been my bond with the book. O premeditated death’’ (El 440). Imminent death and a feeling of dread accompany the nearing center. Paradoxically, the word cannot contain the relation. In a statement that is profoundly close in spirit to Celan’s own contentions,

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Jabe`s explains, ‘‘there can be no language for unity. There is no language but for separation’’ (El 371); what is, by extension, unreadable, speaks of union, relation. Incommensurability before this object of pursuit appears to be, perhaps more than the given condition of the writer, a defense mechanism, a survival instinct that engages when a glimpse into totality veers perilously close. To keep the center readable, the writer must sustain it in its irreducibility. The writer, for the sake of the writing process, courts division. A puzzling statement near the close of the book implies the necessity of this strategy: ‘‘all writing is an effort at polarization of the point’’ (El 412). Like Celan’s Atemkristall, this polarized point is the destination of the writing process. It is the closest the writer can come to the object of pursuit—the conflation of the divine and the unbroken word—without defiling or debilitating it. It is the point just short of capture, the point where language remains possible in sustaining the unsurpassable rift between subject and object. Containing all opposites, upholding polar distinction, this point is dynamic and unstable. This point is God. Jabe`s describes the movement embedded in the very name El, the point, in this equation: ‘‘EL . E sub L. Energy of linkage opposed to ES, energy of separation. Adding energy means splitting an entity into its constituents. Withdrawing energy means regaining the entity, the point’’ (El 375). In the same way as Jabe`s’s aphorisms and maxims make use of a known form to debunk the ‘‘known,’’ this strange equation, objective, rational, scientific in tone, uncovers the workings of the void (Mendelson 238). The realm of ‘‘science’’ is giving itself over to, as Jabe`s’s unique humanism will, a distinctly non-positivistic stance. Taken together with Jabe`s’s previous statement that ‘‘writing is an effort at polarization of the point,’’ this equation appears to be both descriptive and prescriptive. That is, there is an implied ‘‘ought’’ in this statement and equation, such that all writing ought to be directed toward this polarized point, toward sustaining the energy of separation. Just as Celan implores, ‘‘no, no this place [of the encounter] does not exist, but it ought to’’ (Collected Prose 54) Jabe`s promotes an altering of the literary object, a prescription for action that does not correspond to ‘‘reality.’’ At the same time, the condition of polarization, that is, of fragmentation and difference, is the condition of the writer. Merely setting pen to paper, the writer gives voice to this condition. The center, refusing reconciliation, is made visible in the

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point that marks each page of this volume. The irreducible point: the space where ethics, ontology, and aesthetics coincide. The insistence on this center, on describing a point that is finally irreducible, suggests the extent to which the writer is not free to employ his writing for purposes other than searching for and attempting to depict this very center. In the first volume, Jabe`s writes, ‘‘you try to be free through writing. How wrong. Every word unveils another tie’’ (BQ 37). The force of the other remains palpable in the writing process. Compulsion to sustain ties is not entirely self-imposed: ‘‘like a child in its first questions or a lover intoxicated with sharing, the writer grappling with the book does not ask who he is but whose’’ (El 371). But, more and more, the writer is the impetus for the self–other relation. The writer asks the question concerning belonging, submission—‘‘whose?’’ And, finally, it is the writer, Jabe`s, who positions the ever-watchful point upon each page. In doing so, he reminds the would-be writer of his conditional positioning before the object of writing—he must write ‘‘as if addressing God.’’ But he also cautions the writer not to believe too strongly in the truth of this imagined connection—‘‘do not give in to the seductive lies of your pen’’ (El 366). The other is a necessary construct to sustain the relation, but faith in this other must stop short of its becoming a saving device.

Commentary and the Mark of Human Freedom Freedom, in the form of escape, has proven to be an impossibility in the writing process. The ties that bind the writer to an imagined, yet unshakable force paradoxically become the precondition for the kind of freedom that is possible in the writing process and, by extension, in the humanistic ethic (a new humanistic ethic, that is) that writing ultimately promotes. For Jabe`s, like Kafka, freedom is most accurately depicted in the sense of ‘‘freedom to.’’ Where Kafka focuses on the original sin as the literary event most directly connected to human freedom, Jabe`s turns to the shattering of the Tables of the Law. Both authors stress the transgressive nature of these events, and suggest that these are the decisive events that lead to and increase the divide between humanity and the divine. Guilt at once

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becomes the mark of separation and provides the basis for human dignity. The first volume includes a shadowy reference to this event in an extended meditation on freedom: And Reb Lima [said]: ‘‘In the beginning, freedom was ten times engraved on the tables of the Law. But we so little deserved it that the Prophet broke them in his anger.’’ ‘‘Any coercion is a ferment of freedom,’’ Reb Idrash taught further. ‘‘How can you hope to be free if you are not bound with all your blood to your God and to man? And Reb Lima: ‘‘Freedom awakens gradually as we become conscious of our ties, like the sleeper of his senses. Then, finally, our actions have a name.’’ A teaching which Reb Zale´ translated into this image: ‘‘You think it is the bird which is free. Wrong: it is the flower.’’ And Reb Elat into this motto: ‘‘Love your ties to their last splendor, and you will be free.’’ (BQ 115)

In an exchange reminiscent of the one between the priest and Josef K., the rabbis’ startling teaching here is that freedom is the result of being ‘‘bound.’’ ‘‘Love your ties to their last splendor, and you will be free,’’ echoes precisely Kafka’s fragment, ‘‘free command of the world at the expense of its laws. Imposition of the law. Happiness in obeying the law’’ (Diaries 396). This freedom reflects an existential condition that carries with it an imperative—strengthen and cultivate the ties that bind. At the same time, this freedom is not the original freedom, described here as given condition, before Moses destroyed it. This original freedom bore the mark of inscription, it was written. It has nothing to do with the freedom-in-chains that results from the loss of the written word, the freedom that ‘‘awakens gradually as we become aware of our ties.’’ Paradoxically, the freedom borne by inscription is a freedom characterized by union; the freedom resulting from the unreadable text, rather, is characterized by a union-in-separation. Commentary is the sign of this type of freedom. For both Kafka and Jabe`s, commentary, interpretation, possesses the potential for rehabilitation. Bound to the text, commentary reflects the freedom to uphold a lost Law. The link that Jabe`s establishes earlier between sight and illegibility is crucial to an understanding of the importance of the destruction of the Tablets of Law in the context of his project. The Law can be

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neither seen nor read, but it holds a powerful presence in its very fragmentation. In an account of this event, Jabe`s attributes Moses’s destructive act to basic human error. In addition, he pinpoints this event as the moment when Judaism becomes defined by its commitment to the Book: (‘‘We read the word in the sunburst of its limits, as we read the Law through Moses’ angry gesture, through the breaking of the divine Tables.’’ . . . In the exploded word, God collides with the hostility of the letters. Even outside the Name, God is a prisoner of the Name. . . . God’s rape is from the Prophet’s innate conviction that the Book can be read without mediation. Basic error. By turning their back on the Tables, the chosen people gave Moses a master-lesson in reading. From instinct—for is the Book not prior to man?—they raised the rape of God to the level of original death. And, rising up against the letter, their independence consecrated the fracture in which God writes Himself against God. The destroyed book allows us to read the book. ‘‘People of the Book,’’ the Jews have been called. This would imply that God is the only writer, and every book a privileged moment in the reading of the Book. ‘‘O my brothers with your red and tired eyes, when writing and reading are part of the same act, which of you can accept without bristling that his reading has been prompted?’’ (El 377–78)

In this Midrash of sorts, Jabe`s places the transgressors, the worshipers of the Golden Calf, in the position of authority over Moses. Paradoxically, the transgression manifested in the fragmentation of the Tables becomes the precondition for reading, interpreting, independently engaging with the text that emerges in the space of separation from the Book. As the earlier conflation of serpent and rainbow illustrates, transgression and restoration are the two poles of the covenant—one is contained within the other. Therefore, continuing fragmentation coincides with a reconciliatory effort. While this reconciliation is ultimately impossible, it is the gesture toward unity that bolsters the covenant (Kaplan, ‘‘Problematic Humanism’’ 125). Jabe`s explains: Since Moses, the Jew has claimed the privilege of facing God directly, without intermediary, not even Moses, between him and his Lord. . . . What does Moses announce on coming down from Sinai? That God is invisible and that His word is our only possible connection with Him. The covenant with God goes therefore necessarily through this Word.

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Answering to—and for—this Word is henceforward the mark of Jewish identity. True, Moses is mediator, but only that. The Jew remains alone with the divine text. He always faces this text. (‘‘My Itinerary’’ 10)

The importance of commentary, the ‘‘work’’ of the covenant, is formulated not on the condition of unity, but on fragmentation. Therefore, the work of reader and writer, conflated in their roles as they confront this dissimulation, is to continue to uphold, not the original Tables, but the broken Tables (Derrida, Writing and Difference 67). Moses acted from the false belief that the Law can be rendered as an unbroken Totality—it is, ironically, this false belief that becomes, unwittingly, the model for the prophets who follow. Faced with this text, which itself has become invisible, reader and writer are joined in an insurmountable task—‘‘our lot is to interpret an unreadable world’’—and therefore, to pledge to openness, continuity, and debate. The writer must step down from his post of authority and admit that, while he has an obligation to spread certain ‘‘truths,’’ he also has an obligation to continually reveal the shadow of these truths, the underside of darkness, the negativity and emptiness that constitute the fleeting glimmer of presence. Commentary, Jabe`s explains by means of another play of words, is tied intimately to this negativity, to this silence. In addition, it contains within it the means to continue asking questions, questions specifically searching for a course of action, a prescription for living: ‘‘In the night of ‘commentary’ or commentaire, there shines—utter daring or fierce irony—-the proud verb taire, ‘to be silent,’ ’’ he said. ‘‘Any commentary must take off from what is silent in the text, what has knowingly or inadvertently been left unsaid.’’ ‘‘Comment? ‘How?’ O insistent question of all beginnings. How can we be? How can we follow? How can we die?’’ (El 347)

Interpretation, commentary, is transformed into the asking of questions and the deliberate refusal of answers that suggest closure or finality. Commentary uncovers the bond between reader and writer, a bond grounded in the secrecy of the text, in the text’s shared secrecy from both reader and writer. In a section from the first volume, tellingly taking its epigraph from the fictional Reb Midrash, Jabe`s proclaims, ‘‘I will evoke the book and provoke the questions’’ (BQ

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31). The work of Midrash, given over here to the asking of questions, is extended to both reader and writer. What distinguishes the writer from reader, perhaps, is not the act of questioning, then, but the question itself. A passage from the third volume describes an exchange between rabbi and student, an exchange that is emblematic of the writer’s new task in light of the reformulated covenant: ‘‘If no answer allays the interrogation, how do people know, rabbi, that you are the teacher and I the student?’’ ‘‘By the order of the questions.’’ (RB 373)

The assumption directing this exchange is that there is a hierarchy in the asking of questions, that there are right questions. The writer, taking on the mantel of the rabbi in a world quickly becoming secular, is charged with posing the right questions—questions that will continually provoke echoes of a finally unreachable answer, but questions, nevertheless, that embody the ‘‘how’’ of commentaire, questions committed to action. Like the rabbi, he reveals his authority only by his asking the first question. The writer stands before the text with an uncertainty equal to the reader’s, but also with the willingness to create a provisional meaning from this uncertainty. El concludes with a nod to the past, in the form of an assessment of the previous volumes, and a promise for the future, in the embrace of ceaseless questioning: ‘‘A saber stroke in the void, this is the image of my life and writing I would like to leave behind,’’ he said. ‘‘And if drops of my blood have more than once soiled the ground, you must understand that each of them is an unknown book.’’ . . . The question of the universe is a question delivered of the book. The essential: in the throes of our crisis, to preserve the question. (El 442)

Hesitant Conclusions ‘‘I believe in the writer’s mission. He receives it from the word, which carries its suffering and its hope within it. He questions the words, which question him. He accompanies the words, which accompany him. The initiative is shared, as if spontaneous. Being useful to them (in using them) he

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gives a deep sense to his life and to theirs, from which his own has sprung.’’ (BQ 59)

Leaving us abruptly without a conclusion, Jabe`s ends his Book of Questions as he begins—with an affirmation of the question that he never pretended to answer. But he teases his readers with the promise that the question provides an answer: ‘‘In my dialogues there are no answers. But sometimes a question is the flash of an answer. My route riddled with crystals . . .’’ (RB 344). In this last section, I will attempt, hesitantly, to make my own ‘‘saber stroke in the void’’ by outlining Jabe`s’s prescription for ethics in light of the massive and extensive transformation of God undertaken in the Book of Questions. We have already looked in detail at the major components of this ethical project. This section is more a reflection on where Jabe`s leaves us at the close of his septology, an attempt to put together the pieces of his vast project in order to highlight the most crucial points. Where do we go from here? I offer some tentative directions. Jabe`s’s importance as a Jewish writer derives largely from his promotion of what he names ‘‘Judaism after God.’’ He explains: ‘‘Whether God exists or not, is, in fact, not the essential question. It is first of all to himself—and our tradition has always insisted on the importance of free will—that the Jew must answer for the fate of the values he has pledged to spread. Approaching it on this level, we find what I would call Judaism after God’’ (‘‘My Itinerary’’ 5). Although Jabe`s thoroughly and painstakingly explores the possible natures of God in his Book of Questions, it appears that, in the final analysis, God is made negligible to ethics. Or rather, more precisely, God’s existence is superfluous to the question of ethics, while belief in a God who commands these values is crucial. In making this distinction, Jabe`s suggests that this new Judaism has given over any expectations to truth, any expectations that belief will correspond to existence. The ‘‘values’’ that the Jew ‘‘has pledged to spread’’ supersede the God-figure to whom these values may have once been attributed. The stance required of this ‘‘new’’ Judaism is a precarious one. At once, it requires positioning oneself before the hypothetical condition of God’s existence (Starobinski 41) and acting despite its probable non-existence (that is, the probability that God’s nature is not that

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of the speaking God of the covenant) (Kaplan, ‘‘Atheistic Theology’’ 61; Cahen 60). This dual positioning provides the basis for a stringent faith grounded simultaneously in hope and in rebellion. As a mode of faith, there is nothing ‘‘new’’ about this paradoxical positioning—it is precisely the paradox that occupies both mystics and rabbis. What is new is that, in the wake of the Holocaust, continuing this difficult faith is absolutely vital. It requires, among other things, an unabashed awareness that the rift between existence and belief has widened beyond repair. The silence of God is a spiritual atrocity compounding a moral atrocity; Jabe`s, however, refuses to provide even the barest modicum of solace that would result from holding God accountable for this silence and instead places the blame and responsibility on humanity, first, for creating a God who might have been the saving force of a passive and morally undeserving people and, second, for failing to uphold this created God’s standards. This Judaism after God is a code of belief that takes away, even (and perhaps especially) in theory, all possible means for escaping responsibility for one’s actions. There is no saving God. Indeed, it goes one further: not only is the God of the covenant destroyed as a possibility, but this faith requires that, in spite of its having been destroyed, all that it stands for continues to be upheld. The covenant is a crucial structure in the context of ethics construction. As an ontologically situated source of comfort, of alleviation of either pain or duty, however, it is to be vehemently rejected. Judaism after God, then, is by nature unreasonable, illogical, and a-rational. Traditional Judaism, like all the other religious systems based on doctrine, maintains an internally consistent logic. This new stance challenges the very logical propositions that justify faith. There can be no ontological justification, finally, for ethical behavior. All the linguistic acrobatics that Jabe`s engages in throughout The Book of Questions to find this justification ultimately fall short. Jabe`s writes, ‘‘unreason is the Jew’s vocation. It means believing in his mission’’ (BQ 125). The ‘‘mission,’’ it would seem, is to continue to seek justification and, at the same time, to disregard the possibility of ever finding it. The stringent sense of individual responsibility that derives from this Judaism after God (Handelman, ‘‘Torments of an Ancient World’’ 78), coupled with the loss of certainty and grounding that were formerly tied up in the concept of a living, personal God, become the cornerstone for the humanistic impulse at the center of Jabe`s’s proj-

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ect. The death of the God of the covenant is a loss with universal ramifications. While Jabe`s applies a specifically Jewish model of interpretation, debate, challenge in the face of an unknown, uncertain force, he is ultimately more concerned with a universal ethic. For Jabe`s, as for Celan, the Jewish condition is, in microcosm, the human condition. Edward Kaplan argues that the atheistic tendencies of Jabe`s’s ‘‘Judaism after God’’ point to a more fundamentally humanistic impulse. He calls this a ‘‘problematic’’ humanism. He suggests that, while Jabe`s deconstructs and subverts the rigid categories of doctrinal religion, he still holds to a belief in an absolute and in a morality grounded in this absolute. As the specific God of the covenant is supplanted by the non-specific God of the void, the categories of belief become necessarily less specific. Faith becomes a positioning, a disposition, a way of being-in-the-world that has no discernible content save for the elusive imperative to uphold a connection with a God who may or may not exist. In describing a means of faith that reveres uncertainty as the impetus for further interpretation, Judaism after God provides a paradoxical model suitable for a post-Holocaust age (‘‘Atheistic Theology’’ 50). This faith refuses to make of God a deus ex machina and continues to hold humans accountable for their actions. Such accountability emerges in an intuitively felt sense of connection, in the gesture toward the other that may very well be a gesture motivated by wish-fulfillment. But wish-fulfillment or not, Jabe`s argues, it is all we have. As Judaism after God is in some way a resistance to the ‘‘fascism’’ of traditional, doctrinal Judaism (Kaplan, ‘‘Atheistic Theology’’ 56), so the new humanism offered by Jabe`s is a rejection of the positivistic tendencies of Enlightenment humanism. Judaism after God is based on the premise of uncertainty concerning the nature and existence of God. In light of this uncertainty, duty and responsibility are placed squarely on the shoulders of humanity. In the same way, this new humanism calls for ruling out the possibility of a saving force outside humanity. Jabe`s writes, ‘‘we can only be saved by ourselves. Such is our luck’’ (BQ 125). Perhaps it is a leap of faith on my part that the ‘‘we’’ in this statement refers to a community, a collective whole, rather than serves as an expedient description for a group of isolated individuals. In this case, this spirit of this statement might be: ‘‘we can only save each other (we cannot expect a saving God to do our

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work), such is our luck.’’ At the same time, there is certainly a degree of anxiety behind this statement, an increasing sense that we are isolated individuals, that, as Celan suspected and dreaded, there is no ‘‘other’’ with whom we might engage in a meaningful relationship. In this case, it is indeed a drastic leap of faith to adhere to Kafka’s imperative, ‘‘in struggles between yourself and the world, second the world’’ (Notebooks 29). But we have to take this leap, Jabe`s implores us, no matter how drastic. The importance of the self–other relationship in bringing to bear this ‘‘salvation’’ cannot be undermined. And just as Judaism after God requires a hypothetical positioning, that is, positioning oneself ‘‘as if ’’ addressing God regardless of the fact that a listening, reciprocating God probably does not exist, the self-other relation, in regard to human relationships, requires a similarly conditional positioning. A leap of faith is required that this other, this ‘‘necessary fiction’’ as Jabe`s claims it to be, is nevertheless a source with which communication is possible: ‘‘I speak as a stranger to strangers, convinced that my brother is among them’’ (A 320). The hope remains that this other is a possibility and that it must continually be brought into being. At some point, Jabe`s hopes, we will become ‘‘deserving’’ of the truths we construct. We will never merit a saving God, but we may become worthy of true solidarity. The basic tenet of this humanism seems to be: truth is that which cannot be mastered. This unmasterable truth regards not only the nature of the other, but also the fragility of the self. Truth construction is a collective endeavor, between two entities hoping against hope to come into mutual being. Giving oneself over to this type of truth, always in the making, is to embrace a fundamental paradox: there is no support but in relation, and this relation is always tenuous and precarious. To recall the spatial metaphor that Celan, in particular, frequently uses, Jabe`s’s humanism is, in essence, a collapse of the vertical self–other relation—a relation based on hierarchy—to a horizontal relation based on mutuality or, perhaps better, on the wish for mutuality. At the same time, it is the intentionally constructed formal hierarchy of the Law that enforces the wish for mutuality. Jabe`s writes: ‘‘Keeping the faith with God means keeping it with man in his quest for truth. . . . Respect for the law is, first of all, respect for man in his diverse ways of facing his individuality, which is made more difficult by the gesture placing it opposite his responsibilities’’

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(A 297). Faith, as a dynamic positioning—an active stance, requiring continuous renewal in every moment—is an expression of the most unrelenting individuality, but an individuality that is tempered and shaped always by the other; the ‘‘gesture’’ toward the other (exploded in all its inassimilable ‘‘diversity’’) is a movement, as Levinas argues, that is marked by submission and ‘‘responsibility.’’ And, as Buber suggests, the exchange between ‘‘man and man’’ is, in essence, the exchange between human and divine—faith in God is faith in man. What is truly ‘‘inspirational,’’ to borrow Kaplan’s term (‘‘Problematic Humanism’’129), about Jabe`s’s project is that he remains hopeful that humans are capable of embracing a belief system (or, rather, anti-system) that provides neither a solid grounding nor a promise of salvation in the form of an ‘‘elsewhere’’ or a Messiah. He writes, ‘‘the freedom of the spirit, O tense emptiness, depends on ruling out any point of support’’ (El 358). Freedom emerges in being cast at once into the abyss and in feeling oneself tied to the very same source that has been eradicated. Jabe`s presents us with this option—unremitting in its demands, unconsoling in its indifference—and believes that we will meet its challenge. After graphic evidence of the complete moral collapse that was the Holocaust, he still believes that we are capable of being ethical for the sake of being ethical. And that is nothing short of remarkable. Arming us only, and abundantly, with the question, he insists that we make good use of it. The writer is charged with the task of promoting both this new humanism and the Jewish model upon which it is founded. The writer finds himself at the crossroads of this movement from particular to general, from the specifics of the Jewish faith to a universal mode of ethics in light of a shattered absolute. The writer shares the condition of the Jew. In this oft-quoted passage, Jabe`s equates the writer with the Jew by means of insurmountable difficulty tempered by hope: ‘‘I brought you my words. I talked to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which is the same as the difficulty of writing. For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out’’ (BQ 122). And he draws the connection further, explaining, ‘‘faced with the impossibility of writing, which paralyzes every writer, and the impossibility of being Jewish, which has for two thousand years racked the people of that name, the writer chooses to write and the Jew to survive’’ (BY 223). Writer and Jew are linked by

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means of being bound to tasks characterized by the same incommensurability, the same basic impossibility. As the Jewish model of interpretation, debate, questioning, provides the basis for a universal covenant—a covenant between man and man that remains reflective of the divine–human relation—the writer is, by extension, charged with the task of employing and promoting these same methods. The writer becomes, quite literally, the keeper of the covenant. Jabe`s writes: ‘‘The writer has been chosen to formulate the Law’’ (A 208). This loaded term, chosen (e´lu), suggests that the transition from Jew to writer as protector, seeker, challenger, of the divine word is complete. Two assumptions continue to guide the ceaseless questioning that the writer uses as his strategy. First, ‘‘there is no truth, there is a practice of the truth as there is the practice of writing which is the writer’s truth’’ (El 417). Second, ‘‘divinity is a duty of man’s, sharpened by dialogue’’ (Y 62). Truth, the object of hermeneutic pursuit, is both continually deferred and steadily unwound in the asking of questions. Truth is a practice, as well as an unattainable goal. It is an existential positioning, as Kafka suggests, ‘‘not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it’’ (‘‘Nicht jeder kann die Wahrheit sehn, aber sein’’). It is the writer’s task to help us to be in the truth, to cast off false appearances that only serve to limit our perception. Truth-construction, the practice of being-in-the-truth, is an ethical pursuit. It becomes ethical when connected to an external realm. Where God has become the void, where the void is left empty and valueless, divinity, like truth, becomes an act, a practice. Divinity— that is, the act and practice of making divine—is a continuous process bound to interpretation. It is the writer’s task to promote this divinity, this notion of a divine that is never fixed or final, and to promote it through strategies that aim for perpetuation, not closure. The writer is charged with finding a language suitable to this task. In the same way as Celan implores, ‘‘let us wash [the word] . . . let us turn its eye towards heaven,’’ Jabe`s calls for a rehabilitation, a cleansing, of language, in order to return it to a God-oriented medium. The writer, whose grasp of metaphor and a peripheral language that ‘‘reveals only in fragments,’’ facilitates this cleansing. Nearing the close of El, Jabe`s writes, ‘‘God did not say: ‘The world I created, but the world I am creating.’ As if any act of creation were only the initial focus of its permanent challenge’’ (El 440). Creation

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is perpetual, is the perpetual placing in question. In harnessing the act of continuous creation, the writer is joined with the God he brings again and again into being. In his ability to use the word in the service of the emptiness that is God, the writer becomes a kind of saving figure. The incapacity of the writer to offer ‘‘truth’’ as it were, wrapped up in a palatable whole, becomes the mark of his new power. Insufficiency, lack, incommensurability before the enormous task of capturing totality, is the writer’s power. By hiding the way, by speaking from the periphery, paradoxically, the writer makes the path toward the dynamic, elusive, invisible, empty divine more accessible to the reader. And, in so doing, the writer provides an arena for human accountability, poses a difficult task, makes the reader search actively for a source of (non)knowledge rather than allowing him or her to be a passive recipient of a kind of knowledge that negates responsibility. In freeing God from his limited image, in taking back interpretation and questioning as a source of human power, the writer displays an astonishing faith in the human capacity for ethics. And with this faith, the pact, the bond, the covenant is reestablished.

AFTERWORD Nearing the end of the research for these chapters, I discovered two books that have challenged me to rethink and resituate my project and the relevance of the questions I have been asking. Both Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age (New York University Press, 1996) and Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Westview Press, 1998) are collections of essays looking to describe and give shape to a burgeoning academic discipline known as postmodern Jewish philosophy. Both have introduced and addressed the concerns that are central to a philosophical community looking to find a footing in an increasingly interdisciplinary, crosscultural, and trans-religious space. The voices raised in these essays are various, multi-layered, and often opposed to one another, but they all attempt to resituate the power and productivity of a distinctively Jewish—that is to say, rabbinic—set of strategies within the framework of postmodern philosophy. Or perhaps it is better to say, these voices look to reorient the strategies of exegesis and questioning to a vision of a world that is increasingly suspicious of the ‘‘absolute’’ and any claims this fleeting specter might make upon us. Steven Kepnes describes postmodern thinking as ‘‘thinking relationally, thinking with an and . . . non-totalizing; it seeks no universal, all-encompassing system or story. It is content with particular stories; it celebrates the multiplicity of local stories of truth without trying to reduce them all to the one, the universal’’ (‘‘Initial Conversation’’ 11). Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (PJP), an outgrowth of often more secular strains of postmodernism, promotes relation over subordination, the multiple over the singular. At the same time, however, within the general rubric of postmodernism, PJP facilitates a return to the specificity of Jewish strategies as a viable means of approaching the generality of human experience. Robert Gibbs explains, ‘‘a logic that can open to generality without dissolving particularity will be the hallmark of PJP’’ (‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 23).

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The dual aims of inclusivity and the resumption of particularity form the ‘‘center’’ of PJP—a center characterized by a tension and sense of urgency not often evident in many of the more secular strains of postmodernism. On one level, the inclusivity, the communicative gesture of PJP is foundational. Elliot Wolfson suggests, for example, ‘‘postmodernism fosters an inclusive dialogue that excludes none but those who would exclude the other’’(‘‘Listening to Speak’’ 95). On another level, the necessity for return is perhaps motivated by an anxiety spurred on by a sense of loss regarding Jewish identity and a necessity for the preservation of Jewish practice in this space of loss. If the urgency of finding a means of ‘‘living the death of God’’ (what appears to be the driving sense of urgency in the projects of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s) is starting to subside—and in fact, God seems to be enjoying a resurgence and rejuvenation in much of the work of PJP—then it has been replaced by an identity crisis of sorts. Kepnes writes: Not only did we [the philosophers of PJP] come after the big events of modern Jewish history but also after the philosophies and ideologies that were created out of these massive events. We live in a time when Zionism, the Holocaust, the Emancipation fail to provide us with a singular basis for our Jewish lives. This is what I would describe as the predicament of Jewish postmodernity. The philosophies of modern Judaism that were developed in response to certain historical events no longer respond to our current situation. These philosophies have exhausted themselves, and we need to find new ways and new forms of philosophical and theological expression. (‘‘Initial Conversation’’ 15)

This identity crisis, ironic in its having been brought on by a distinct lack of obstacles to the practice of Judaism, is answered by a return to the Jewish texts and scriptures. While writing in a climate that was informed by the so-called ‘‘philosophies of modern Judaism,’’ Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s anticipated this return. They write from a point that is similarly marked by a tension between specificity and universality; they look to sustain the particularity of their own cultural, ethnic, and religious experience at the same time as they explore how this particularity sheds light on a general condition of homelessness, exile, and rupture. Theo Buck’s epithet regarding Celan—conditio judaica als conditio humana— applies to each of these authors, with increasing intensity as we reach

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Jabe`s. Kepnes suggests that Jabe`s and Levinas are the most exemplary figures of postmodern Jewish philosophy, that they are in many ways the ‘‘fathers’’ of this newly emerging field. This is certainly a true statement. But it seems to me that we can go farther back to include Kafka and Celan within the ‘‘canon’’ (a dangerous term to apply in this context, perhaps) of those who are spiritually and philosophically affiliated with this movement. Speaking from the margins of an already problematized modern landscape,1 Kafka and Celan push the questions of fragmentation, loss, and displacement to their breaking point. They sense that this ‘‘breaking point’’ carries within it the possibility of a complete disintegration of values. They sense, as it seems many of this new generation of postmoderns do, that to lose the center, even if this center is impenetrable, unknowable, unconfinable, is to lose all legitimate justification for ethics. And, therefore, they direct their efforts to reconstituting this space of absence, to hypothesizing (while never expecting ‘‘proof ’’ for these hypotheses) about the nature (or, better, natures) of this space. In promoting a return to the scriptural text and the strategy of exegesis, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s have also anticipated the specific type of teshuva (return) conducted in PJP (‘‘Kepnes, ‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 25; Kepnes, Ochs, and Gibbs, ‘‘Dialogic Practices’’ 35–40; Wolfson, ‘‘Listening to Speak’’ 96). ‘‘Return,’’ in this sense, coincides with a wariness regarding doctrine. This wariness is alltoo-well founded. In a certain measure, doctrine and dogma ease into being the kind of totalitarian horrors that Kafka somehow foresaw and Celan and Jabe`s witnessed. In looking to construct an ontological base that would necessitate ethical behavior, these three authors methodically debunked the Absolute, the icon, the speaking and directive voice that would mirror, in the theological realm, a totalitarian dictator. PJP is similarly cautious of the precipitous link between metaphysics and ethics. Peter Ochs explains: ‘‘We do not dismiss the search for unity, only the presumption of its finality. You might say 1 Peter Ochs stresses that PJP is a departure from the modern notions of the autonomous subject and ‘‘dichotomizing logic’’ (‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 19). The work of Kafka and Celan, often classified as ‘‘modern’’ certainly challenges these notions. The boundaries between modernism and postmodernism tend to blur in the works of these authors, suggesting a continuity between the two movements. This continuity, many of the philosophers of PJP contend, is an important component of the kind of hermeneutics employed in PJP.

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that we have lost faith in this presumption, since we have seen it lead to so many futile attempts to build Babels, or ‘final’ systems. We are perhaps also afraid of the presumption, since we have learned, as a horrible lesson of this century, that final systems tend to engender final solutions’’ (‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 18). Intrinsic to this description of PJP is that there is a decisive link between politics and philosophy, practice and theory, that metaphysical systems are invoked or created as a means of enforcing and/or legitimating a political agenda. In many ways, however, this statement points to a paradox that deeply permeates the work of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, and this is a paradox that is also not fully reconciled with the enterprise of PJP. While Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s may have predicted and witnessed the terror of a totalitarian regime, they nevertheless do privilege the external realm over the internal in terms of value construction. In addition, they characterize the relation of self to other as one of submission and subjugation, suggesting that the self is free only in its being bound to the other. Conscious of how slippery the slope is from this self–other relation (which relies on a basic wish, perhaps, that human nature either will be overcome or will adapt to this relation) to a self–other relation that is violent, exploitative, perhaps even murderous, they continue to invoke a transcendental realm because they have concluded—perhaps resignedly—that without this remove of distance and height, concepts such as justice and judgment do not logically follow. The anxiety brought on by losing the grounding for these concepts does seem to be driving much of PJP’s desire to dissociate itself from the reigning ‘‘skepsis’’ of modernism and the early voicings of postmodernism. Ochs distinguishes the work of PJP in this way: Unlike the more well-known schools of postmodern philosophy, our critique of modern system building is not just a more thoroughgoing skepticism, as if we had achieved our postmodernism by overstretching our modern suspiciousness. . . . To relax Cartesian anxiety, we believe, is to have found again something in which to trust, other than ourselves. Unlike Heideggerian postmodernists, we do not identify this something with the very fact of existence, or with any of its general attributes. Our trust concerns a relationship with the Absolute, but we do not recognize a wholly generic way of reasoning about and describing that relationship (‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 19).

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In PJP, the Absolute is reintroduced in such a way as to allow for multiplicity, difference, opposition, inconclusiveness, and, especially, iconoclasm. Skepticism is replaced by a positioning before an undisclosed, and undisclosable, source of meaning. A center, dynamic and nebulous though it may be, begins to assert itself as a viable topic for interpretation. Meaning coaxes its retrieval from the abyss. While PJP vehemently rejects the notion of the autonomous modern subject, it follows the lead of cultural studies by analyzing the effects of race, class, gender, and religion upon the writing (and written) subject.2 In this analysis, the subject, the author, is reconstituted with a strength and vitality that makes possible, however tentatively, a kind of autonomy that is grounded in the self–other relation. The ‘‘death of the author,’’ the assumed condition and focal point of a number of early postmodern claims, is no longer the predominating issue. Rather, the work of PJP demonstrates a convergence of the phenomenological method—the attempt to locate the ‘‘voice’’ of the author— and the deconstructive notions of fragmentation and multivocality. Kepnes identifies postmodernity as a ‘‘transitional period,’’ as a way of positioning oneself against the certainties of modernism more than as an historically locatable moment. Those ‘‘rendered silent or ‘minor’ by modern culture,’’ Kepnes suggests, are now being invited to speak. The movement away from modern culture is largely a function of epistemic change; postmodernity marks a transition from modern rationalism to a variety of responses ranging from ‘‘antimodern fundamentalism to continuing skepticism and nihilistic doubt’’ (‘‘Postmodern Interpretations of Judaism’’ 2). PJP’s tentative embrace of the Absolute coupled with its reconstitution of the subject signals, perhaps, that the pendulum has swung too far toward the pole of deconstruction. PJP argues, more generally, for a reconstructive approach beginning from a common base of loss, absence, and suffering. If the present trend toward local truths and particularities of meaning in cultural studies, philosophy, and literary criticism is any indication, PJP’s assertion of unity-within-multiplicity is part of a general shift in the landscape of postmodern thought. In fact, it does seem to be the case that this trend suggests that the skepticism, the potential nihilism harboring at the heart of early postmodernisms, 2 For examples of PJP that focus primarily on questions of gender and culture, see Boyarin, Silberstein, Levitt, and Shapiro.

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follows a pattern predicted by Nietzsche and reiterated by Ricoeur. Nietzsche contends that nihilism is a necessary, but temporary, step on the path from rigid and sterile absolutes to value-construction; similarly, Ricoeur envisions atheism as the bridge between the dogmatic confines of religion and the freeing condition of faith. If the concerns of PJP represent a new type of reconstructive postmodernism, then it would seem we are beginning to emerge from a long night of cynicism. Questions of faith and belief are once again open for debate and discussion. The ways in which to address these questions, however, must take into account the loss of absolute grounding that PJP acknowledges has been legitimately uncovered by modernism and early postmodernism. PJP’s contribution to postmodern thinking is its unique pairing of an interrogative method with an affirmation of the search for meaning. It seems to me that the methods and strategies used by Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s anticipate many of the claims of PJP and, in turn, model a response to these claims. Ultimately prescribing a difficult faith—a faith in an Absolute despite and because it eludes human logic, despite and because the Absolute does not exist—these methods and strategies are founded on an understanding of human nature that appears to be shared, at least in part, by PJP. The understanding is this: human dignity is bound to the search for meaning. The model of a viable faith that these three authors put forth is a model of constant struggle, constant striving, against all forms of closure, but in search of truth(s); this is a model that takes into account the devastating blow of Godsilence. Standing in the abyss, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s (and, one might argue, PJP) are yet tied to an Absolute that remains faceless, voiceless, absent. All three of these authors have launched a consistent challenge against the logic of the excluded middle, against the so-called modern rationalism that PJP is looking to overthrow. With increasing strength, as we near Jabe`s, formal and traditional categories of logic—the ‘‘either/or’’—are replaced by the ‘‘both/and,’’ the coexistence of opposing forces. What emerges from within these texts is an inclusiveness, a dialogical relation between self and other that champions difference at the same time as it imposes hierarchy. While Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s provide no clearly discernible content for their prescriptive messages, they plead again and again that we consider this message merely deferred, not nonexistent. In stressing this

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deferral, they imply that faith is a process, not a possession. Faith, they suggest, is the impetus and continued result of dialogue; it is grounded in the relation that remains at once mutual and binding, that allows the other to sustain its alterity, and provides for the encounter, the call, and the response. Similarly, Gibbs cites Rosenzweig’s notion of parataxis—‘‘the logic of ‘and,’ allowing independent entities to stand in relation to one another without combining to form a third’’ (‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 23)—as an important influence on PJP. This and, I would argue, is the most crucial ethical task of PJP, as it is also the driving ethical basis of the work of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s. When Wolfson makes this claim regarding the nature of postmodernism—‘‘postmodernism fosters an inclusive dialogue that excludes none but those who would exclude the other’’—he does so in the context of an ‘‘ought.’’ In other words, postmodernism ought to follow its credo of inclusivity to its natural conclusion. It does not always do this, he fears, and he warns against PJP’s becoming the mouthpiece for a kind of cultural elitism favoring Judaism over all other worldviews (‘‘Listening to Speak’’ 102–104). Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s, by means of an unflinching selfawareness and self-critique, have provided a model that may be helpful in heeding Wolfson’s warning. While they use methods and strategies specific to Jewish tradition and practice, their projects are largely communicative and outward reaching. In these projects, the wound of suffering is identified as the common human bond. At the same time, these projects refuse to alleviate human responsibility or accountability for suffering by positing the existence of a directive and causal God. If we follow the implications of this argument to its natural consequence, it would seem that religious boundaries have no ultimate divisive power. We are all similarly positioned, that is, before the possibility of an impersonal, nonspeaking, perhaps absent, perhaps nonexistent, divine. Claims of ‘‘chosenness’’ must, therefore, be rethought under these circumstances. The work of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s illustrates a critical juncture in this rethinking. Each of these authors begins with the assumption that there is a morality intrinsic to Jewish thinking that provides a point of departure for an overarching revaluation of values—the ethical basis of Judaism, in other words, is instructive for approaching a global ethics because of the foundational claims it makes to difference, alterity, and inconclusiveness. These claims hold true within the rubric of postmodern

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thinking, regardless of the ‘‘demise’’ of the speaking God of the covenant that Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s are at pains to chronicle. In pointing to the relation as the ontological grounding for an ethics of movement, change, and transformation, Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s consistently display the hope for a solidarity that can grow out of this relation. It is this solidarity, across lines of religion, gender, and culture and punctuated by suffering, that is in many ways the focus of PJP. While heavily debated, the question of the degree to which the particularity of Jewish experience can and should speak to the generality of the human condition remains at the center of PJP. Two postmodern Jewish philosophers, Robert Gibbs and Elliot Wolfson, are exemplary in their adherence to, what I perceive to be, the basic ethical principle driving the work of Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s. I conclude, therefore, with their own statements concerning the task of PJP. These statements suggest that the questions that Kafka, Celan, and Jabe`s were posing remain pressing and unanswerable in contemporary discussions of ethics. The real testament to the strength and longevity of these works is to be found here: the question, rather than the answer, remains the vehicle for extending dialogue. Whether in face-to-face conversations or in the process of interpreting texts or social institutions, the task of PJP is to make ethics more responsive to the other’s suffering and to the other’s freedom. Other people, as readers, actors, victims, and thinkers, have their freedom protected by the thinking of PJP (Gibbs, ‘‘Monologic Definitions’’ 21). The challenge for postmodern Jewish philosophy is to facilitate the growth of a culture based on the textual specificity of the past without losing sight of the place that Judaism must occupy in the human community at large. We must get beyond the dichotomy of the universal and the particular, but not by reducing the one to the other. On the contrary, the particularity of the Jewish tradition is meaningful only to the extent that it improves on the moral condition of humanity. To achieve that goal, it is necessary to examine the traditional sources with a critical sensibility and a willingness to modify aspects of the tradition that augment the suffering in the world (Wolfson, ‘‘Listening to Speak’’ 104).

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INDEX Abraham, xiii, xx, xxxiii, 4–10, 11, 13, 23, 24, 37, 39, 42, 46, 47, 50, 54, 55, 60, 63, 91, 101, 131 Abulafia, Abraham, 104, 105 Adorno, Theodor, 57, 156 Aesthetics, xxix, xxx, 57–60, 139, 160 Agnosticism, xxvii Anti-Semitism, xx, 17, 120, 125, 157, 158 Ambivalence, xx, 19, 20, 25, 33, 36, 70, 72, 141, 143, 157, 161, 162, 178, 211 Ashkenazim, xxiv, 159, 161 Assimilation, xx, 4, 70, 158 Atheism, xii, 22, 164, 237, 248

182, 184, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 215, 220, 222, 232 Conditionality, xxviii, 7, 38, 102, 103, 143, 178, 202, 204, 230, 238 Covenant, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xx, xxvi, 10, 12, 21, 35, 37, 43, 44, 46, 50, 65, 69, 73, 74, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 125, 126, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 157, 159, 163, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 172, 175, 176, 180, 181, 187, 188, 190, 191, 194, 195, 207, 209, 232, 234, 236, 237, 240, 241, 250

Benjamin, Walter, 11, 18, 37, 74 Blood libel, xx Body, xvi–xix, xxvii, 12, 60, 88, 84, 89, 100, 101, 139, 140, 189, 195, 196, 208, 224–226 Buber, Martin, xi, xxvi, xxvii, xvi, 12, 49, 102, 104, 120, 239 Bukovina, 70

Death of God, xi, xii, xxviii, xxxi, xxxiii, 22, 45, 156, 165, 167, 180– 183, 184–192, 193, 196, 200, 204, 216, 217, 250; Murder of God, xxxi, xxxiv, 88, 156, 166, 176, 180– 183, 233, 184–192, 193, 196, 197, 198, 237 Deconstruction, 70, 138, 163, 165, 175, 176, 184, 209, 233, 237, 247 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 10, 91, 169, 233 Despair, xxxii, xxxiv, 28, 33, 63, 74, 165, 166, 171 Deus ex machina, xxvii, 39–40, 204, 237 Devekuth, 94, 104, 105, 128, 138 Dialogue, xxxii, xiv, xvi, xxxiv, 12, 13, 14, 20, 36, 39, 42, 46, 48, 52, 54, 72, 73, 75, 80, 81, 102, 108,

Cairo, xx, 157, 158 Camus, Albert, 27, 28 Christ, xxi, 32, 40, 100, 125 Circumcision, 91 Commandment, 25, 35, 42, 43–45, 47, 48, 59, 63, 64, 69, 107, 125, 162, 181, 200, 202, 209; Second Commandment (abolishing the Second Commandment), 101,

264

INDEX

118, 125, 126, 143, 147, 150, 155, 179, 188, 217, 224, 244, 248, 249, 250 Enlightenment, xiii, 17, 92, 162, 166, 237 Exile, xxi, 28, 31, 41, 53, 76, 111, 121, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 168, 170, 174, 175, 176, 187, 189, 210, 244 Existentialism, 19, 25, 28, 36, 52, 54, 55, 70, 121, 124, 129, 139, 147, 156, 177, 186, 240 Faust, 43 Freedom, 25, 33, 36–39, 64, 133, 146, 164, 230–234, 239, 246, 248, 250 Freud, Sigmund, xi Futility, 28, 35, 39, 40, 56, 79, 180 Goethe, J. W., 17, 19, 43 Golem, 215 Halakhah, xxiv Hasidism, 41, 70, 78, 116, 120 Hebrew, 17, 70, 71, 78, 85, 91, 97, 120–127, 137, 149, 210, 211, 221, 223 Heidegger, Martin, 28, 84, 124, 246 Hermeneutics, xix, xvi, 38, 56, 173, 85, 88, 112, 122, 156, 164, 169, 240, 245 Heschel, Abraham, xxxi Hoffmannsthal, Hugo von, 16 Holocaust, xxiv, xii, xxxi, xxxiii, 3, 43, 47, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74, 78, 82, 100, 104, 107, 125, 126, 149, 151, 156, 159–163, 169, 176, 178, 188, 191, 236, 237, 239, 244 Hypothetical Space, xxvii–xxix, 61, 63, 202, 204, 209, 219, 228, 235, 238, 245

Immanence, xxvi, 37, 38, 55, 93, 98, 128, 145, 163, 175, 176, 179, 205 Indictment (of God), 50, 71, 98, 106, 111, 112, 113, 167, 178, 179 Israel, xxiv, 108, 142, 143, 158, 162, 210 Jewish-Christian relations, xx, xxi, 108, 123–127, 222 Jewish self-hatred, 20, 44, 158 Job, xxii–xxiv, 11, 47, 81, 104, 166, 181 Judgment, 9, 20, 47, 49, 50, 54, 56, 63, 93, 130, 187, 199, 207, 208, 209, 246 Justice, xxvi, 13, 32, 41, 49, 50, 51, 62, 64, 93, 100, 101, 104, 130, 179, 181, 187, 207, 208, 216, 246 Kabbalah, xviii, xvi, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26, 32, 33, 45, 46, 56, 73, 78, 92, 94, 104, 111, 115, 156, 159, 164, 176, 182, 188, 210, 211, 214, 215, 216, 219 Kaddish, 91, 121 Kiddush HaSham (sanctification of the divine name), 13, 81, 151, 195, 216 Kierkegaard, Søren, xxx, 7–8, 19, 24, 37, 44, 53, 57, 62, 225 Law, xxvi, xxviii, xxxiv, 4, 9, 24, 30, 38–39, 49, 50, 51, 56, 165, 166, 167, 181, 193, 196, 200, 203, 206– 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 220, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 231, 238, 240 Levinas, Emmanuel, xi, xxv, xxvi, 49, 72, 74, 129, 131, 136, 162, 239, 244 Luther, Martin, xxi

INDEX

Maimonides, 45 Mallarme´, 19, 136, 137, 171, 239 Meeting-without-merger, 60, 72, 94, 119, 131, 138 Meister Eckhart, 45 Messiah, 29, 33, 41–43, 52, 57, 62, 116, 149, 161, 206 Metaphysics, xi, 157, 245, 246 Midrash, xiv–xvi, xxii, 20, 120, 156, 157, 159, 164, 173, 180, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191, 196, 212, 221, 223, 233, 234 Modernism, 16–21, 73, 74, 159, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248 Moses, xiii, 11, 80, 184, 193, 194, 203, 207, 209, 230, 231, 232 Mythology, 15, 16 Negative Theology, xxxiii, 45, 85, 106, 108, 109, 119, 125, 127, 129, 134, 145, 174, 216, 224, 227, 249 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, xiv, xxix, xxxiii, xxxiv, 12, 15, 20, 21, 22, 31, 42, 44, 53, 69, 71, 102, 111, 170, 180, 181, 188, 190, 193, 248 Nihilism, 11, 12, 31, 134, 165, 166, 247, 248 Noah, xiii,xix, xx, 141, 181 Optimism, xxxii Paris, xxiv, 158, 159 Pascal, Blaise, 39, 40, 61, 62 Paul, xxi Plato, 19, 71 Postmodern Jewish philosophy, xxi, 159, 243–250 Prague, 3, 17, 18, 44 Prayer, 52, 100, 102, 101, 140, 147, 155, 168, 179

265

Punishment, 13, 24, 37, 42, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 162 Redemption, xxxi, 27, 32, 41, 43, 64, 71, 77, 78, 88, 89, 92, 141, 148, 149, 151, 156, 167, 188, 206 Revaluation, xiv, 20, 43, 44, 50, 55, 69, 71, 74, 93, 107, 116, 125, 143, 157, 189, 194, 195, 211 Ricoeur, Paul, xii, xi, 22, 164, 248 Rubenstein, Richard, xii, 107, 108 Sachs, Nelly, xviii, 97 Scholem, Gershom, xvi, 11, 18, 25, 26, 56, 97, 104, 125, 215 Sephardim, xxiv, 157, 159, 161 Shekinah, 85, 92, 97, 98, 111, 144, 157, 164, 206 Shvirat hakelim (the breaking of the vessels), 106, 111, 114, 117 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 45 Teleology, xxxi, xxxiii, 8, 21, 28, 32, 62, 164, 206 Teshuva (return), 157, 194, 208, 214, 244, 245 Tikkun olam (mending of the world), 71 Tikkun, linguistic, 77, 88, 89, 116, 120, 210 Transcendence, xxvi, xxvii, xxxii, 33, 35, 37, 55, 98, 128, 129, 130, 145, 163, 175, 176, 179, 205, 209 Transgression, 24, 28, 46, 48, 50, 51, 101, 146, 156, 171, 180, 181, 207, 222, 230, 232 Tzimtzum, xxv, 59, 92, 94, 128, 138, 183, 213, 219 Wandering, xxi, 162 Wiesel, Elie, 69, 70, 77, 78, 129 Zionism, 17, 18, 44, 45, 211, 244