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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.
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.
80 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
9 people are currently reading
236 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
650 books1,792 followersJacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 3, 2016
Similar to how the blend produced in differance came to be emblematic of deconstruction, through the unpronounceable equivocation in the term’s significance, this slim volume is contingent upon il y a la cendre, wherein an equivocation on the la (diacritical vel non) produces either “there are cinders there” or “cinders there are” (3), a distinction of topos v. ousia, perhaps, the ontic v. the ontologic.
Something of a lost opportunity here. Often enough the principles by which the derridean analysis occurred were initially metaphors drawn from the text sub judice, transformed into figures of thought for deconstruction as well as emblems of the process—the trace, the supplement, the hymen, the pharmakon, the preface, the tympan, and so on. Here, the cinder is drawn from Derrida’s own writings (the ‘Animadversions’ section is simply quoted bits from Glas, Dissemination, The Postcard). I am not however getting the sense that these writings are being subjected to the protocols of reading through the figure of the cinder, which is otherwise excellently emblematic of deconstructive processes—a remainder in the form but not substance of some original, now however subject to an “all-burning” (24), i.e., an etymological “holocaust” (25). We see that the “incineration of the definite article leaves the cinder itself in cinders” (31).
Language is accordingly an “urn,” which draws us into the familiar “work of mourning” (35). What else? “Pyrotechnical writing feigns abandoning everything to what goes up in smoke, leaving there only cinder that does not remain” (43).
Lotsa stuff about debts and metonymics and Phoenixes and (FFS) “burning semen,” the “impossible emission” (53 & 55).
Some bizarre Marxist interest: the phrase “like the accumulation of surplus value, as if he speculated on some cinder capital. It is however a question of making a withdrawal, in order to let him try his luck on a gift without the least memory of itself, in the final account, through a corpus, a pile of cinders unconcerned about preserving its form” (57 & 59).
So, yeah, it’s that sort of text.
Something of a lost opportunity here. Often enough the principles by which the derridean analysis occurred were initially metaphors drawn from the text sub judice, transformed into figures of thought for deconstruction as well as emblems of the process—the trace, the supplement, the hymen, the pharmakon, the preface, the tympan, and so on. Here, the cinder is drawn from Derrida’s own writings (the ‘Animadversions’ section is simply quoted bits from Glas, Dissemination, The Postcard). I am not however getting the sense that these writings are being subjected to the protocols of reading through the figure of the cinder, which is otherwise excellently emblematic of deconstructive processes—a remainder in the form but not substance of some original, now however subject to an “all-burning” (24), i.e., an etymological “holocaust” (25). We see that the “incineration of the definite article leaves the cinder itself in cinders” (31).
Language is accordingly an “urn,” which draws us into the familiar “work of mourning” (35). What else? “Pyrotechnical writing feigns abandoning everything to what goes up in smoke, leaving there only cinder that does not remain” (43).
Lotsa stuff about debts and metonymics and Phoenixes and (FFS) “burning semen,” the “impossible emission” (53 & 55).
Some bizarre Marxist interest: the phrase “like the accumulation of surplus value, as if he speculated on some cinder capital. It is however a question of making a withdrawal, in order to let him try his luck on a gift without the least memory of itself, in the final account, through a corpus, a pile of cinders unconcerned about preserving its form” (57 & 59).
So, yeah, it’s that sort of text.
June 11, 2023
There are few philosophers that I dislike more than Jacques Derrida. I distinctly remember reading Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology in my Undergrad and thinking how painful they were to slog through. So, when I discovered Cinders, although the title and concept grabbed my attention, I entered into the text from a place of irritation and deep resentment. I think it’s important to mention that before I proceed.
Some figures loom so large in the history of philosophy that – whether you like them or not – you need to study if you’re going to take the discipline seriously. Obviously, Derrida is one of those figures, and I have promised myself to return to his work and give him another chance.
After reading the aphoristic Cinders, I have to admit that Derrida can be quite a compelling writer. The image of “the cinder” is a lovely visual representation of Derrida’s twin concepts of “trace” and “differance”. At times, Derrida’s use of imagery even ventures into the sublime. The text is shot through with themes of death, grief, loss, and futility. Take this passage, for instance: “But the urn of language is so fragile. It crumbles and immediately you blow into the dust of words that are the cinder itself.”
You get a very real sense that Derrida is an author struggling with the fundamental lack of control he has over meaning, by virtue of authorship itself. His anxiety is palpable. According to Derrida, once an idea leaps from thought to speech or page, from interiority to exteriority, it becomes something else entirely. It’s as if the idea begins to decay the second it leaves the subject and enters into the object-world of text. Meaning is endlessly deferred and the author cannot pin down any single interpretation once an idea moves from the private to the public realm. Speech is stillborn, he suggests, as “[t]he sentence is adorned with all of its dead.” We are left with the haunting trace of signifiers and signifieds, though it’s never clear what the noises and scratches of language actually suggest. Each word is marked by its presence and its absence; the word is there, on the page, and yet it refers to something outside of itself. "'There are cinders there,' 'cinders there are'", he writes. A word is there in the text, and yet it is not. This is why Derrida sometimes wrote withstrikethroughs, in an attempt to mark the presence of absence, and the absence of presence.
Cinders is unique, in that it also reveals some of Derrida’s ethno-cultural sensibilities as well. In the text, Derrida attempts a genealogical analysis of his own thought, connecting it to his Jewish heritage and his personal relationship to the Holocaust. The image of cinders, ash, and decay harken back to the Nazi extermination program. He gestures at this connection several times throughout the text. Most poignantly, he writes: “The symbol? A great holocaustic fire, a burn-everything into which we would throw finally, along with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc." Ideas become incinerated in the crematoriums of the spoken and written word. Authors and archivists commit their ideas to speech, writing, and collections in a vain attempt to entomb them for the ages. But they, too, become cinders rising up from the flames. The allusion is powerful and lends an interesting historical and temporal weight to his ideas that I haven’t seen in his other work.
That being said, the same issues I have with the rest of his work also pop up in Cinders. To me, Derrida is more properly a literary critic or a poet than a philosopher. He conjures up images and metaphors that allude to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel. As mentioned, some of those images are actually quite evocative, and they can help tease out new and creative ways to visualize difficult concepts, like the trace, differance, and deconstruction.
However, as I see it, the overarching goal of philosophy is dialogue – that is to say, the need to understand and to be understood. If that’s the case, then Derrida clearly doesn’t fit the label of ‘philosopher’. He has no interest in being understood by his audience, nor in grasping anything epistemologically substantial. I’ve always felt that Derrida’s books are solipsistic in the extreme. It’s as if he’s talking to himself out-loud when he utters unintelligible things like, “[t]he name ‘cinder’ is still a cinder of the cinder itself.” There has to be a better way to communicate about communication.
Overall, I’m glad that I gave Derrida another chance with Cinders – it is the most attractive of the three texts that I’ve read. However, my critical impressions of his body of work haven’t shifted considerably. Cinders is amusing and imaginative, yet it suffers from poor communication and a rather flimsy understanding of how language and meaning actually work. This is typical of post-structuralism, which has a pretty lousy track record when it comes to the philosophy of language. I’ll leave it there for now.
Some figures loom so large in the history of philosophy that – whether you like them or not – you need to study if you’re going to take the discipline seriously. Obviously, Derrida is one of those figures, and I have promised myself to return to his work and give him another chance.
After reading the aphoristic Cinders, I have to admit that Derrida can be quite a compelling writer. The image of “the cinder” is a lovely visual representation of Derrida’s twin concepts of “trace” and “differance”. At times, Derrida’s use of imagery even ventures into the sublime. The text is shot through with themes of death, grief, loss, and futility. Take this passage, for instance: “But the urn of language is so fragile. It crumbles and immediately you blow into the dust of words that are the cinder itself.”
You get a very real sense that Derrida is an author struggling with the fundamental lack of control he has over meaning, by virtue of authorship itself. His anxiety is palpable. According to Derrida, once an idea leaps from thought to speech or page, from interiority to exteriority, it becomes something else entirely. It’s as if the idea begins to decay the second it leaves the subject and enters into the object-world of text. Meaning is endlessly deferred and the author cannot pin down any single interpretation once an idea moves from the private to the public realm. Speech is stillborn, he suggests, as “[t]he sentence is adorned with all of its dead.” We are left with the haunting trace of signifiers and signifieds, though it’s never clear what the noises and scratches of language actually suggest. Each word is marked by its presence and its absence; the word is there, on the page, and yet it refers to something outside of itself. "'There are cinders there,' 'cinders there are'", he writes. A word is there in the text, and yet it is not. This is why Derrida sometimes wrote with
Cinders is unique, in that it also reveals some of Derrida’s ethno-cultural sensibilities as well. In the text, Derrida attempts a genealogical analysis of his own thought, connecting it to his Jewish heritage and his personal relationship to the Holocaust. The image of cinders, ash, and decay harken back to the Nazi extermination program. He gestures at this connection several times throughout the text. Most poignantly, he writes: “The symbol? A great holocaustic fire, a burn-everything into which we would throw finally, along with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc." Ideas become incinerated in the crematoriums of the spoken and written word. Authors and archivists commit their ideas to speech, writing, and collections in a vain attempt to entomb them for the ages. But they, too, become cinders rising up from the flames. The allusion is powerful and lends an interesting historical and temporal weight to his ideas that I haven’t seen in his other work.
That being said, the same issues I have with the rest of his work also pop up in Cinders. To me, Derrida is more properly a literary critic or a poet than a philosopher. He conjures up images and metaphors that allude to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel. As mentioned, some of those images are actually quite evocative, and they can help tease out new and creative ways to visualize difficult concepts, like the trace, differance, and deconstruction.
However, as I see it, the overarching goal of philosophy is dialogue – that is to say, the need to understand and to be understood. If that’s the case, then Derrida clearly doesn’t fit the label of ‘philosopher’. He has no interest in being understood by his audience, nor in grasping anything epistemologically substantial. I’ve always felt that Derrida’s books are solipsistic in the extreme. It’s as if he’s talking to himself out-loud when he utters unintelligible things like, “[t]he name ‘cinder’ is still a cinder of the cinder itself.” There has to be a better way to communicate about communication.
Overall, I’m glad that I gave Derrida another chance with Cinders – it is the most attractive of the three texts that I’ve read. However, my critical impressions of his body of work haven’t shifted considerably. Cinders is amusing and imaginative, yet it suffers from poor communication and a rather flimsy understanding of how language and meaning actually work. This is typical of post-structuralism, which has a pretty lousy track record when it comes to the philosophy of language. I’ll leave it there for now.
November 26, 2017
Reste la cendre
"Se un luogo medesimo si cinge di fuoco (e si riduce infine in cenere, è tomba come nome), quel luogo non è più. Resta (come resto) la cenere. Vi è là cenere, dovrai perciò tradurlo: la cenere non è, non è ciò che è. Essa resta di ciò che non è, al fine di richiamare al fondo friabile di sé nient'altro che non-essere o impresenza. L'essere senza presenza non è stato, e non sarà nemmeno là ove vi è la cenere e dove quest'altra memoria dovrebbe parlare. Là, cenere vuol dire la differenza tra ciò che resta e ciò che è: ce la farà a dirla?".
Il cenerino Derrida ce l'ha fatta. E non avevamo dubbi al riguardo.
"Se un luogo medesimo si cinge di fuoco (e si riduce infine in cenere, è tomba come nome), quel luogo non è più. Resta (come resto) la cenere. Vi è là cenere, dovrai perciò tradurlo: la cenere non è, non è ciò che è. Essa resta di ciò che non è, al fine di richiamare al fondo friabile di sé nient'altro che non-essere o impresenza. L'essere senza presenza non è stato, e non sarà nemmeno là ove vi è la cenere e dove quest'altra memoria dovrebbe parlare. Là, cenere vuol dire la differenza tra ciò che resta e ciò che è: ce la farà a dirla?".
Il cenerino Derrida ce l'ha fatta. E non avevamo dubbi al riguardo.
March 12, 2015
"Cinders there are." Derrida's linguistic/self-analysis and his poetic evocation of the trace as cinders are gorgeous.
Read
June 13, 2025Derrida’s abstraction here is, indeed, far more poetic than the balled-fist, hair-gripping abstraction he is so known for elsewhere. While this is likely not the place that anyone should start with Derrida, I find that this was nonetheless a good choice as one of my earlier reads in the scheme of his bibliography. Surely, there are references to his works Dissemination and The Postcard, but a general understanding of Derrida’s project will ensure that one is not lost for having not cracked the spines of those texts (like me). Of course, reading this after having tackled his major texts will provide its own reward. That aforementioned understanding of Derrida’s project is affirmed throughout Cinders: to speak of memory is to reckon with absence, loss and death. Memory is a postal economy; postcards are sent and never received due to the immediate decay of presence. Memory, having gone up in flames, is therefore the work of mourning. Yet in spite of this, and while the circle never closes and the burned postcard is never retrievable having been set in the fire, it’s ashes, it’s cinders, testify to its having been. It is the impossibility of recovering presence that inspires us to recover anything at all. Deconstruction is an opening up of the undecidable, an attempt at meaningful communication, a deliberate action which seeks not to pull apart and destroy, but to archive and give inheritance a future. The work of mourning is love itself. This book, then, is one of those burned love letters.
October 11, 2019
At first I didn't find this book very revealing re Derrida's key ideas (as is claimed in the intro); however, in the end I found this to be one of his clearest works, especially wrt his ideas of singularity and otherness, of the gift and sacrifice, and of the way non-present beings--viz. events and people in the past that are inaccessible to us--influence us and our present. Above all it's a work that tries to show that there is an infinity of worlds and beings that remain totally inaccessible to us, which is to say other from us. The key here is to show that these beings are not the idea we have of them in our minds. He shows this (implicitly) through the example of the Holocaust. It's an event that has been written and talked so much about that it has a particularly outsize presence in the public consciousness. However, the Holocaust, the infinity of little private deaths that composed it, is totally inconceivable to us. We can only interact with its cinders, or the cinders of its cinders, which is to say that we can only come across remnants of it that point us towards an abyss that we can sense but not see.
March 16, 2023
—But the urn of language is so fragile. It crumbles and immediately you blow into the dust of words that are the cinder itself. And if you entrust it to paper, it is all the better to inflame you with, my dear; you will eat yourself up immediately. No, this is not the tomb he would have dreamed of in order that there may be a place, there may be good reason [y ait lieu], as they say, for the work of mourning to take its time. In this sentence I see the tomb of a tomb, the monument of an impossible tomb—forbidden, like the memory of a cenotaph, deprived of the patience of mourning, denied also the slow decomposition that shelters, locates, lodges, hospitalizes itself in you while you eat the pieces (he did not want to eat the piece but was forced to). [35–6]
May 29, 2022
"We can only think the otherness of the other's inaudible voice, but our thinking about it is always inseparable from poetic saying, from the audible song, prayer, or hymn that would bring us as close as possible to the silence in which the voice of the Other burns. Cinders is situated in the neighborhood of this haunted crossing, in the nearness of the khorismos . . . " (Ned Lukacher from the Introduction)
July 9, 2020
Cosa resta di quel/questo fuoco nero su fuoco bianco? Cosa lasciamo se non ciò che siamo?
Da bruciare-tutto in una volta per sempre.
Da bruciare-tutto in una volta per sempre.
May 23, 2024
Ok I’m going to need to go to office hours about that one. Am I getting stupider in grad school maybe
October 26, 2014
An eternal return on voices and writing where the multiple voices/texts circulate self-referentially on Derrida's haunting by the phrase "there are cinders; cinders there are," il y a la (accent grave {how do you that here?}) cindre, and the equivocation on the la with and without an accent--the (feminine article) her and the (adverbial) there -- in which the cinder begins to figure as the unfigurable incarnation and dissolution of the famous Derridain trace, the there and not there, the there and the not-here of writing, of a life: "cinder is nothing that can be in the world". "…[Y}ou take the word into your mouth, when you breathe, whence the cinder comes to the vocable, which disappears from sight, like burning semen, like lava destined nowhere." Yikes!
And of course the gift. In what way is the gift a cinder? The book ends, doubly, on the verso --contrapuntally, quotations from other Derridian works into which the cinder phrase has penetrated shadow forth on the versos-- with "you would approach me within you with a serenity we have no idea of, absolute reconciliation," and on the recto with "a gift without the least memory of itself…a retreat, a retracing only without any relation with what, now, through love, I just did and I am just about to tell you--"
Lyric Derrida.
And of course the gift. In what way is the gift a cinder? The book ends, doubly, on the verso --contrapuntally, quotations from other Derridian works into which the cinder phrase has penetrated shadow forth on the versos-- with "you would approach me within you with a serenity we have no idea of, absolute reconciliation," and on the recto with "a gift without the least memory of itself…a retreat, a retracing only without any relation with what, now, through love, I just did and I am just about to tell you--"
Lyric Derrida.
January 21, 2015
"This (then) will not have been a book..."
Not a book, but a cinder. On cinders (aflame), this cinder burns up a nothing that is and is not in (not) being a cinder.
Derrida traces the cinder, the burning trace, to no end.
He speaks, writes, saying/writing everything and nothing. Speaking/writing cinder(s).
"Il y a là cendre."
Not a book, but a cinder. On cinders (aflame), this cinder burns up a nothing that is and is not in (not) being a cinder.
Derrida traces the cinder, the burning trace, to no end.
He speaks, writes, saying/writing everything and nothing. Speaking/writing cinder(s).
"Il y a là cendre."
January 12, 2013
My brain hurts.
February 3, 2015
Warrants a rereading... Definitely the most original book I've read (one of my first exposures to Derrida)
March 30, 2015
I had high hopes and am comfortable working with Derrida's style, yet this didn't deliver the insights into cinder, trace, remainder I thought it would.
May 9, 2016
I have very little idea of what he's going on about, but the language is beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews