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."

Finding both identity and difference (the human and its other) at once is what Derrida has traditionally called "the trace," but here calls "the cinder." The entire allusion is lost.

But that is not the worst of page 75. Lukacher translates two sentences "What does he do with DER? I wonder: (scin-, [pre]scin-,[re]scin-, DER)." I'm confused. The junk in the parentheses in French is "sans, sens, sang, cent DRE," or, literally "Without, meaning, blood, 100 DER."

Now, that doesn't make much sense either, but going all the way to archaisms or neologisms to keep the homophones is ridiculous. Include the French in brackets for the English reader, and be done with it. Some stuff is untranslatable--a mission impossible.

(The original French title Feu la Cendre would seem to be untranslatable as well, but Elvis Costello came close when he lamented "you're less tender and more tinder" in "Only Flame in Town.")

This is all nice, but it still doesn't convince you to buy (or steal, or purloin) this book. Here goes. One thing this book is obviously about is the Nazi Holocaust, the relationship of philosophy to such an ideology and the possibility of understanding the Holocaust at all.

This is not a new topic for Derrida. He has openly confronted it in "Shibboleth: For Paul Celan," and the book Glas (about Hegel) and of Spirit (about Heidegger). In the Celan piece, Derrida says "There is certainly today a date for this holocaust that we know, the hell of our memory; but there is a holocaust for every date, somewhere in the world at every hour."

In the same way, Cinders is about Celan as much as is it about Heidegger. His name echoes throughout it, such as the sentence "C'est la, la cendre." ("There is the cinder," but also "Celan the cinder.").

Celan spun his "Death Fugue" around the images of "black milk of morning" and the "ashen-haired Shumlamith" of Goethe's Faust, weaving the drinking in of the dead burned in the Nazi ovens with a force competing for the soul of Germany. Derrida talks of wanting the only phrase worth publishing, "an 'up to date' phrase" (recalling the dates of "Shibboleth"). He wants a phrase that "would tell of the all-burning, otherwise called holocaust, and the crematory oven, in German in all the Jewish languages of the world."

When Theodor Adorno read Celan's poem, he proclaimed that "After Auschwitz, poetry is barbaric." The problem, he felt, was that it was impossible to talk about the Holocaust without depriving it of its meaning, its force, its incomprehensibility. But he also knew it was impossible not to talk about the Holocaust and that doing so was to side with those who did nothing to stop it, with the people who claimed to have no idea of the camps just over the hill.

Derrida's Cinders is an answer to Adorno's problem, and, to may mind, a better one. Adorno himself never came to a firm conclusion about what to do, about how to speak properly for these dead, but, in effect, he did. By summarizing the Holocaust as "Auschwitz," Adorno was able to reduce the ethics of surviving to an aphorism--neat and tidy and quotable.

Derrida's answer is twofold. The first part is contained largely in the left-hand page of Cinders, and amounts to saying "Before Auschwitz, philosophy was barbaric."

The second answer is that there is no proper name for "the all-burning, otherwise called holocaust," there are only cinderwords. And those words, if they could be found, make it impossible to appropriate synecdochically the Holocaust so as to deny it to a poet who drank the black milk of his own family.

The question is not one of appropriating the cinders at all. "It is, however, a question of making a withdrawal," he writes near the end. Trying to imagine the absolute withdrawal of the world, an impossible mission--Derrida does that all the time.