Cinders

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University of Nebraska Press, 1991 - Humor - 77 pages
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.

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About the author (1991)

Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria on July 15, 1930. He graduated from the École Normal Supérieure in 1956. He taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure for around 30 years. His works of philosophy and linguistics form the basis of the school of criticism known as deconstruction. This theory states that language is an inadequate method to give an unambiguous definition of a work, as the meaning of text can differ depending on reader, time, and context. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 40 books on various aspects of deconstruction including Of Grammatology, Glas, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 9, 2004 at the age of 74.

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