The Truth in Painting

First printing. Translation by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod of "La vérité en peinture" (Flammarion, 1978). Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", shows very light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright. 77 pages.

"Jacques Derrida's "Cinders" is among the most remarkable and revealing of this distinguished author's many writings. While 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."