The writings of Edmond Jabes pose a formidable task to their reader. Their irrecoverable strangeness, which makes their categorization difficult, is at once frightening and seductive. This is particularly true of those works associated with what one might describe as the author's "second manner", inaugurated by Le Livre des Questions. This thesis attempts to re-read the works of Jabes (in particular Le Livre des Ressemblances) from the standpoint of the fragment, presupposing that this form is not simply an effect secondary to a particular literary conception, but that it becomes the essence of Jabes' poetics, its very organizing principle. The works of Jabes then appear in a new light, as an everchanging locus of thoroughfares, telling of the impossibility of the Book, of the author, and of literature itself.

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By its structure and by the impressive quantity of literary presuppositions that it questions, Le Livre des questions sets itself in the margins of any classical understanding of literature. For Jabes, citation holds a central place in the book: it is one of the main elements which subverts the literary text. It is not an addition, an artifice or a purely stylistic process through which the text is reinforced and given credibility: it is the essence of writing, and the understanding of its importance made it possible for the writer to continue writing in spite of what he perceived as the failure of western culture after Auschwitz. This thesis examines citation in Le Livre des questions and attempts to define Jabes' conception of the book and of writing. Le Livre des Questions encourages us to redefine citation as movement, otherness and memory.

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