Edmond Jabès et l'éthique du désert.

The desert is important in Jabès' work, because it is for him the place for poetic speech to emerge: speech (midbar in Hebrew) comes from the desert (midbar also). This is to be understood at the beginning of the first Livre des questions (1963) from the autobiographical episode of the risk of death in the Sinai Desert. This episode is rewritten at the very end of Jabès' last book, Le Livre de l'hospitalité (1991); but this time an element takes a special role: the fact that the poet has been saved from death by a nomad of the desert. This fact opens to new developments about the ethics of the desert, which is an ethics of hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]