In this lecture Ruin picks up a theme that was first explored in Derrida’s early work, on the connection between writing and death. The written sign could be seen as a technology of survival (of meaning), that at the same time inserts a principle of death at the center of life, this opening a new way of looking at tradition as inhabited by an irreducible strife between decay and rejuvenation. In the early work of Egyptologist Jan Assman and the group “Archeologie der literarischen Kommunikation”, which he and Anglicist Aleida Asssmann established in the late seventies in the university of Heidelberg, this topic is taken up in the context of creating a new theoretical approach to the workings and possibility of tradition as such, now understood as a subform of “Cultural memory”. While incorporating important elements of a deconstructive understanding of writing, this school at the same time signified the reestablishment of (technically mediated) cultural memory as the over-arching framework for the historical-human sciences, that in the end distances it from the original ethos of deconstructive practice. In the lecture Ruin explores the hitherto scarcely addressed issue of the relation between deconstruction and cultural memory studies, and shows how this hidden link can help us develop a more nuanced understanding of the workings of cultural memory, in particular in what concerns the culture of death.