"...That Dangerous Supplement..."

In his chapter from Of Grammatology entitled “…That Dangerous Supplement…”, Derrida derives this quasi-concept through his reading of Rousseau’s work, especially his “Essay on the Origin of Language.” In Derrida’s reading, he locates Rousseau as representative of a poignant articulation of the Western metaphysical obsession with the self-presence of the subject and investigates why, if speech is considered the fullest expression of presence, then Rousseau’s text continually condemns the written word while simultaneously relying on that same medium to elevate his speech. Derrida finds Rousseau’s relationship to the written word vexed, because while the latter is “straining toward the reconstruction of presence, he valorizes and disqualifies writing at the same time,” because language inherently “dislocates the subject that it constructs” (141,142). This continuing relationship between the oppositional states of presence and absence cannot be severed within Rousseau’s text, and it is this difference itself that Derrida claims produces the possibility if a “breathing space”(143)—the condition for the experience of a play between indeterminacy and determinacy.

Derrida introduces the term “supplement” to describe the paradoxical unanimity of these two experiences, because the term articulates that the supplementary figure (here figured as writing) completes the subject while simultaneously revealing that same subjects dependence upon it. Derrida contends, “ when speech fails to protect presence, writing becomes necessary. It must be added…it diverts immediate presence of thought to speech into representation…[it is] a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present…a violence done to the natural destiny of the language” (144) [emphasis in original].

At the same time, it adds by enriching, expressing the “fullest measure of presence” and it “culminates and accumulates presence” (144) [emphasis in original]. However as the supplement adds to the subject, it elaborates the meaning of self-presence while forever maintaining its subsistence on difference, because the fact that something needs to be added to the original points up a pre-existing emptiness or lack. The supplement completes the self-presence of the subject while calling into question the possibility of an unmediated self-presence. In this way, the supplement “adds only to replace,” filling the void of “ what ought to lack nothing at all in itself” (145). The supplement is always “exterior” to the self and Derrida positions it as “compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes the place of” (145). It follows that the self is always constituted by a relationship to the other (the supplement) in a tenuous dialectic in which the subject has both the need to maintain and abolish the presence of the supplement to attain an unmediated subjectivity. Derrida proves that such absolute negation of the other by the subject is impossible: “ he cannot give up what immediately restores to him the other desired presence, no more than he can give up language” (153).

The link between supplementary and language is the touchstone for Derrida’s reading of
Rousseau because presence is always re-instituted through language. The substitution of the supplement “always has the form of the sign” (147), and Derrida equates Rousseau’s supplementary experience of masturbation (adding to and replacing sexual desire) with his need to employ the written word to perfect his speech, because both are “symbolic and immediate” (153). This cause immeasurable frustration for the subject who seeks a subjectivity for- and in-itself. Yet, as we saw, the subject simultaneously “ holds it [the supplement] at a distance and maintains it…its economy exposes and protects us at the same time according to the play of forces and the difference of forces” (155). This is why the supplement is “dangerous” and why both Rousseau and any human subject desires to abolish the supplementarity of the other through language.