Entre L’Hostilité ET L’Hospitalité il n'y a qu’un Pa(s): Accueillir L’Autre Dans L’Intimité du Livre

In his farewell to words and to the world, Le Livre de l'hospitalité (1991), written in part as a response to the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the first intifada, and to the slogans by the French far right, Jabès develops a double discourse which, along with a poetic, lyrical language, sustains the ethico-political background of his last two books: on the one hand, the hospitality reserved for the stranger compared to the hostility that can be shown him/her (negation, rejection, the “not here” thrown at him/her), and on the other, the notion of hospitality in relation to responsibility. This article analyses both discourses: the first opposing the vulnerability of the eleven letters of the “territory of hospitality” to the hell, blood, and death of the “three wounds” of racism, anti-Semitism, and exclusion; the second extending Jabès’s implicit dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas’s notion of responsibility.