Cinders

Jacques Derrida's Cinders is among the most remarkable and revealing of this distinguished author's many writings. White Derrida customarily devotes his powers of analysis to exacting readings of texts from Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Heidegger, readers of Cinders will soon discover that here Derrida is engaged in a poetic self-analysis. Ranging across his numerous writings over the past twenty years, Derrida discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. First published in 1982, revised in 1987, and printed here in a bilingual edition, Cinders enables readers to follow the development of Derrida's thinking from 1968 to the present as it defines itself as a persistent questioning of origins that invariably leads to the thought of ash and cinder.

Written in a highly condensed poetic style, Cinders reveals some of Derrida's most probing etymological and philosophical reflections on the relation of language to the human. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary poetry and philosophy.

Uniquely accessible to readers who have only recently begun to read Derrida and essential for all those familiar with Derrida's work, Cinders is an evocative and thoughtful contribution to our understanding of deconstruction.

Jacques Derrida whose works published by the University of Nebraska Press are listed below, is directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and holds visiting appointments at the University of California Irvine, and the City University of New York.

Ned Lukacher discusses Derrida's concerns in his introduction, "Mourning Becomes Telepathy." The author of Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy Psychoanalysis (1986), he teaches the history of literary criticism in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Other works by Jacques Derrida published by the University of Nebraska Press include Glas (1986), The Archeology of the Frivolous (1987), The Ear of the Other (1988), and Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry (1989).