Cinders

By Jacques Derrida

University of Nebraska Press

$25.00

There is one really good joke in Jacques Derrida's Cinders. It takes some setting up. When he published the French texts Feu la Cendre and "Animadversions" (one on the left side of the page, the other on the right-- this is the kind of thing Derrida is always doing), he was asked to do a tape recording of the text.

Derrida agreed, and with Carole Bouquet and Stockhausen's Stimmung behind them, they read it. The cassette was sold with a version of the text.

The joke. Derrida wonders "what is a word for consuming itself all the way to its support (the tape-recorded voice or strip of paper, self-destruction of the impossible emission once the order is given) to the point of assimilating it without apparent remainder?" Buried in that parenthesis (and several other places) is an allusion to Mission Impossible: this tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds. I thought it was funny.

For anyone who has never read anything by Jacques Derrida, Cinders is (obviously) not the place to start. That place is still Of Grammatology, which engages just about every discipline in the humanities or social sciences at one time or another.

But for someone who has at least made a start on Derrida, and who has the 25 bucks to spend on a book of less than a hundred pages, Cinders is worth it. You can read it in an afternoon and go to dinner and have an intense discussion about whatever it made you think about.

Telling you a joke and assuring you that it's worth it is not, I suppose, a very good way to convince you to buy this if you have the outrageous amount of money they want for it. (I cannot sanction your xeroxing the whole thing, which would come to about $4.00. That's illegal. And besides, the book is beautiful, and worth buying for the cover photograph alone...Hmmm...maybe a color xerox would do that...)

So what is the text about? The in-publication cataloguing data for Cinders lists it under three subjects: 1. Play on words. 2. Homonyms. 3. Ambiguity. That is like saying The Scarlet Letter is about embroidery. I mean, it is, but that's not the point.

Translator and introducer Ned Lukacher, at least, knows this going in. but he overcompensates. Instead of describing what the book talks about, he goes in for some serious "thinking of being," tying tight knots between Derrida and Heidegger, and asking a lot of questions he doesn't answer--like "Why does language bear within itself the traces of something that cannot be exhausted by pragmatics and historicity, something from which the pragmata of history themselves arise?"

There are some points of interest in the introduction, but it is worth skipping until after you have read the rest of Derrida's Prologue. The moral: if you have written some thing more confusing and complicated than something by Derrida, you have made a serious error.

While I'm complaining about Lukacher, I should note that his translation is, at times, a disaster. Fortunately the book is bilingual, so his faults show through, but still....

Page 75 is a total melt down. On that page, one of the voices of the polylogue (a technique Derrida has used before, most successfully in "Restitutions" in The Truth in Painting--he's always doing things like that) says that the initial consonant in the word cinder doesn't matter much to Derrida "every word seems to finish with () inder." But the French version says that every words seems to finish with "()endre" (the ending of cendre) "ou ()andre." In "andre," we have allusions to both "androor" "human" and "Anderer," the German "other."