ABSTRACT
This chapter considers material traces in relation to the themes of Jacques Derrida's writing, particularly relating to ethics, Marx, and memory in his later work. The chapter contributes to the book's wider discussions of materiality, memory, sensation, desire, and phantasmagoria in the representation of the past. It begins by considering briefly the act of smoking, the cigarette, and the importance of smoke in recent historical film and television, to point out the various ways it might mean, or suggest meaning. The chapter uses these somehow indistinct physical objects to pursue Marx's comment in the opening of capital that, 'to discover the various uses of things is the work of history'. It then moves on to thinking more widely about the significance of the cigarette, using some of Marx's ideas, before finishing with a discussion of the series Mad Men. The work here on this topic is in something of a vacuum, in terms of historical studies.
