What is tobacco? Apparently it is the object of a pure and luxurious consumption. It appears that this consumption does not meet any natural need of the organism. It is a pure and luxurious consumption, gratuitous and therefore costly, an expenditure at a loss that produces a pleasure, a pleasure one gives oneself through the ingestive channel that is closest to auto-affection: the voice or orality. A pleasure of which nothing remains, a pleasure even the external signs of which are dissipated without leaving a trace: in smoke. ... That at least is how it appears. But this appearance remains to be analyzed.

Derrida, Given Time 107

AUGGIE (Reaching for cigars and lighter) The boys and I were just having a philosophical discussion about women and cigars. Some interesting connections there, don't you think?

PAUL (Laughs) Definitely. (Pause) I suppose it all goes back to Queen Elizabeth.

AUGGIE The Queen of England?

PAUL Not Elizabeth the Second, Elizabeth the First. (Pause) Did you ever hear of Sir Walter Raleigh?

TOMMY Sure. He's the guy who threw his cloak down over the puddle.

JERRY I used to smoke Raleigh cigarettes. They came with a free gift coupon in every pack.

PAUL That's the man. Well, Raleigh was the person who introduced tobacco in England, and since he was a favorite of the Queen's -- Queen Bess, he used to call her -- smoking caught on as a fashion at court. I'm sure Old Bess must have shared a stogie or two with Sir Walter. Once, he made a bet with her that he could measure the weight of smoke.

DENNIS You mean, weigh smoke?

PAUL Exactly. Weigh smoke.

TOMMY You can't do that. It's like weighing air.

PAUL I admit it's strange. Almost like weighing someone's soul. But Sir Walter was a clever guy. First, he took an unsmoked cigar and put it on a balance and weighed it. Then he lit up and smoked the cigar, carefully tapping the ashes into the balance pan. When he was finished, he put the butt into the pan along with the ashes and weighed what was there. Then he subtracted that number from the original weight of the unsmoked cigar. The difference was the weight of the smoke.

TOMMY Not bad. That's the kind of guy we need to take over the Mets.

PAUL Oh, he was smart, all right. But not so smart that he didn't wind up having his head chopped off twenty years later. (Pause) But that's another story.

Paul Auster, Smoke (movie script)

A philosopher was asked: "What is the weight of smoke?" He answered: "Subtract from the weight of the burnt wood the weight of the remaining ashes, and you will have the weight of the smoke." Thus he presumed it to be incontrovertible that even in fire the matter (substance) does not perish, but that only the form of it undergoes a change. In like manner was the saying: "From nothing comes nothing," only another inference from the principle of permanence, or rather of the ever-abiding existence of the true subject in phenomena.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn. London: Dent, 1934. 145

Transcendental Doctrine of Elements > First Division of the Transcendental Logic > Transcendental Doctrine of the Faculty of Judgment > Chapter II > Section III > part 3 > First Analogy > Principle of the Permanence of Substance

One may be tempted to subtract tobacco from economy, from the circulation of labour and production, income and surplus-value, from the accumulation of capital, from money in the form of currency or non-currency. From all of that one may be tempted to subtract, purely and simply, tobacco--or rather the act of smoking and inhaling, the experience, the enjoyment and the expenditure of that which, one could say, goes up in smoke. But one can also resist this temptation as one resists an appearance. This could be shown on several registers.

Derrida, Given Time 109