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.