Word: derrida
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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...
This is not a new topic for Derrida. He has openly confronted it in "Shibboleth: For Paul Clean," and the book Glas (about Hegel) and of Spirit (about Heidegger). In the Clean 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...
Clean 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...
...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...