Living the Death of God

Living the death of God is the inescapable task of every poet in the wake of the Shoah. In writing a finite book, the task of the Jew and the poet is to approach the Infinite Book which cannot be written. While God''s Book dies with the birth of humanity''s book, the Name is forever resuscitated through language. The symbolic power of language within the chasm between the finite and the Infinite is one of many crucial contributions made by Edmond Jabès (April 6, 1912—January 2, 1991) to the history of Jewish Thought. The scope of Jabès''s reflections spans seventeen books (1943-1985). The following study is an exploration in delimiting the limitless Book of Limits, from Jabès''s tetralogy spanning 1982 to 1987. This sustained work offers linguistic testimony to the loss and rupture experienced through exile. Amidst this tissue of signs, questioning is a mode of being in the world. Jabès realizes a theology beyond the limits of post-modernism, by both questioning the foundation stone of theism and incorporating time and negation back into the deity.