Jabes's ceaseless interrogation of the book is marked out against the background of the Shoah. As a problematical post-Shoah writer, Jabis, in his more recent texts, begins to employ the word Auschwitz as a metaphor for the unthought, unthinkable, unknowable, unsayable. While stressing the fact that he does not and cannot speak of Auschwitz as such, he nevertheless sees Auschwitz as having wounded the word which it is the poet's task to attempt to express. Jabes's writing bears the mark of this wound, and the traces of Auschwitz are inscribed in a poetics that would link them with an ethical discourse on the face and responsibility. Although God, the void and Auschwitz become metaphors for one another, it is Auschwitz that specifically, as a non-representational absolute, interrupts the Jabes text and disrupts the appropriative movement of dialectical thought. Auschwitz as a non-thematizable event dislocates its own position in Jabks's texts. Though Jabes can only circumscribe the wounded word, the traces of Auschwitz in his work point to the simultaneously centred and marginalized nature of the questions he poses.'On ne pense pas la mort, le vide, le neant, le Rien; mais leurs innombrables metaphores: une faCon de contourner l'impense' (PLS p. 77).' One of the innumerable metaphors in the Jabes lexicon for circumventing, or tracing out the unthought is Auschwitz. As a symbol or synecdoche of the Shoah, Auschwitz, in the Jabes text, poses the following question: what guarantees its inscription from being reduced to a meaningless (extravagant) rhetorical trope? In other words, does the metaphorical status of Auschwitz signal more than its naked significationits saying exceed its said -, or does the metaphora fail to transfer, to carry behind, beyond or with it, that which Jab& consciously silences? Is Auschwitz, in the Jabes text, a 'meaningful metaphor,'