Desire in Ashes

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.

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.

• List of contributorsIntroductionSimon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano Chapter 1Ashes to Ashes: Derrida’s HolocaustGil Anidjar Chapter 2‘There shall be no mourning’Simon Morgan Wortham Chapter 3 Transference Love in the Age of ‘Isms’ Herman Rapaport Chapter 4Kindling; or, Suicide by FireElissa Marder Chapter 5 Fort Spa: In at the Deep End with Derrida and FerencziLynn 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