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This thesis concerns the relationship between socio-historical context and literary criticism with respect to the work of Edmond Jab��s (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop). I argue that literary discourse is a significant site in the history of ideas and that criticism accordingly bears a latent narrative in that it is not merely reflective or reactive but co-constitutive of political discourse. Taking my cue from Edward Said, I read Jab��s���s text as an event contemporaneous with the Holocaust and the declaration of the State of Israel. The inquiry broadly follows three strands of purpose: (a) to ascertain modes and means through which dominant political ideas are sustained and preserved in a critical culture; (b) as consequence of which, to show how certain nuances, complexities and subtleties in the text are traded for essentialism; and (c) to assess the alternative possibilities created by the primary text. The secondary literature on Jab��s is analysed to trace the underlying narrative, both political and historical, in relation to these events. Simultaneously Jab��s���s text is examined as the site of an alternative imaginary against the hegemonic status quo. The first chapter focuses on exile and exilic consciousness in Jab��s. After 1948 and the declaration of the State of Israel, Jewish exile ceases to be a religious abstraction. Most of Jab��s���s interlocutors direct their attention to the theological while overlooking the socio-political context of exile in relation to statehood. These metaphysical readings, however, while refraining from explicit political pronouncement, tend to affirm and bestow legitimacy on the state���s construction of mythology as history. I determine the critical gestures that consolidate this narrative and read Jab��s���s text as a form of resistance to teleological statehood. In the second chapter I examine the textual methodology employed in the translation of figural gesture in the Bible into political literalities. I argue that the hermeneutic legacy of constituting statehood from religious scripture is significant for literary studies whose primary object and mode is text and textuality. An analysis of Jab��s���s conceptual conceits compared with the socio-political trajectory of the Bible (in relation to statehood) yields critical insights both in terms of Jab��s���s work and the relationship between religious and literary methodology. Jab��s resists the authority of religious orthodoxy and affirms poetic injunction that both opposes and transcends the sacred creed. The third chapter focuses on translation in which I consider the ethics of adopting a political subjectivity while translating works that bear witness to moments of historical rupture. Translation or the translatedness of the text is integral to the inquiry ��� the particularity of the translated condition is not ignored in favour of reading the translated text as if it were identical with the source text. I resist the invitation to draw equivalences between the source text and the translated text and read the latter as witness to the event of the former.