Table of Contents

List of contributors Introduction Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano Chapter 1 Ashes to Ashes: Derrida’s Holocaust Gil Anidjar Chapter 2 ‘There shall be no mourning’ Simon Morgan Wortham Chapter 3 Transference Love in the Age of ‘Isms’ Herman Rapaport Chapter 4 Kindling; or, Suicide by Fire Elissa Marder Chapter 5 Fort Spa: In at the Deep End with Derrida and Ferenczi Lynn Turner Chapter 6 Neurosciences: The Obverse Side of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ Céline Surprenant Chapter 7 The Desire for Survival? Kas Saghafi Chapter 8 The King is Dead! Long Live the King! Chiara Alfano

Promotional Information

Re-evaluates the continuing importance of deconstruction and Derrida in contemporary European thought

About the Author

Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of English and co-director of the London Graduate School at Kingston University, London, UK. Chiara Alfano is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Kingston University, UK.

Reviews

Desire—which can never go out of fashion, never cease to move, never settle finally on its proper object—and “deconstruction,” a term, a movement, an intellectual style, a form of thought surely time-stamped, maybe even expired. This marvellous collection of essays shows us that deconstruction’s long, unthought concern with desire—primarily in Derrida’s work, but also in his closest readers’, American as well as European—lets us think beyond its seeming end; and how desire’s stubborn persistence, its endlessness, inasmuch as it is deconstruction in act and thought, infuses the work of religion, philosophy, ethics, and historiography. Desire in Ashes realigns thought: it is scholarship at its most consequential and urgent.
*Jacques Lezra, Professor of Spanish, English, and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA*

Readers interested in the futures of deconstruction and its intersections with contemporary thought will find the publication of Desire in Ashes a welcome event. This well-timed, thoughtful book makes the Derridean analysis of desire a source of deconstruction’s continued liveliness and taps its energies in a wide-ranging collection of essays to make the point.
*Ellen S. Burt, Professor of French and Italian, University of california, Irvine, USA*

Desire in Ashes is a rich and fascinating volume. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars, Morgan Wortham and Alfano’s book offers something not available elsewhere: an excellent, focused collection of insights and explorations concerning the ways in which psychoanalysis and deconstruction have transformed our understanding of the nature of desire.
*Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK*