Page 87 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 7: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences-Jacques Derrida

7.3.5 Supplement Notes
The logic of the supplement is also an important aspect of Of Grammatology. A supplement is
something that, allegedly secondarily, comes to serve as an aid to something 'original' or 'natural'.
Writing is itself an example of this structure, for as Derrida points out, "if supplementarity is a
necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as
the supplement of the supplement, sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant".
Another example of the supplement might be masturbation, as Derrida suggests, or even the use
of birth control precautions. What is notable about both of these examples is an ambiguity that
ensures that what is supplementary can always be interpreted in two ways. For example, our
society's use of birth control precautions might be interpreted as suggesting that our natural way
is lacking and that the contraceptive pill, or condom, etc., hence replaces a fault in nature. On the
other hand, it might also be argued that such precautions merely add on to, and enrich our natural
way. It is always ambiguous, or more accurately 'undecidable', whether the supplement adds
itself and "is a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence", or whether
"the supplement supplements… adds only to replace… represents and makes an image… its place
is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness". Ultimately, Derrida suggests that the
supplement is both of these things, accretion and substitution, which means that the supplement
is "not a signified more than a signifier, a representer than a presence, a writing than a speech". It
comes before all such modalities.
This is not just some rhetorical suggestion that has no concrete significance in deconstruction.
Indeed, while Rousseau consistently laments the frequency of his masturbation in his book, The
Confessions, Derrida argues that "it has never been possible to desire the presence 'in person',
before this play of substitution and the symbolic experience of auto-affection". By this, Derrida
means that this supplementary masturbation that 'plays' between presence and absence (eg. the
image of the absent Theories that is evoked by Rousseau) is that which allows us to conceive of
being present and fulfilled in sexual relations with another at all. In a sense, masturbation is
'originary', and according to Derrida, this situation applies to all sexual relations. All erotic relations
have their own supplementary aspect in which we are never present to some ephemeral 'meaning'
of sexual relations, but always involved in some form of representation. Even if this does not
literally take the form of imagining another in the place of, or supplementing the 'presence' that is
currently with us, and even if we are not always acting out a certain role, or faking certain
pleasures, for Derrida, such representations and images are the very conditions of desire and of
enjoyment.

7.4 Time and Phenomenology
Derrida has had a long and complicated association with phenomenology for his entire career,
including ambiguous relationships with Husserl and Heidegger, and something closer to a sustained
allegiance with Lévinas. Despite this complexity, two main aspects of Derrida's thinking regarding
phenomenology remain clear. Firstly, he thinks that the phenomenological emphasis upon the
immediacy of experience is the new transcendental illusion, and secondly, he argues that despite
its best intents, phenomenology cannot be anything other than a metaphysics. In this context,
Derrida defines metaphysics as the science of presence, as for him, all metaphysics privileges
presence, or that which is. While they are presented schematically here, these inter-related claims
constitute Derrida's major arguments against phenomenology.
In various texts, Derrida contests this valorisation of an undivided subjectivity, as well as the
primacy that such a position accords to the 'now', or to some other kind of temporal immediacy.
For instance, in Speech and Phenomena, Derrida argues that if a 'now' moment is conceived of as
exhausting itself in that experience, it could not actually be experienced, for there would be
nothing to juxtapose itself against in order to illuminate that very 'now'. Instead, Derrida wants to
reveal that every so-called 'present', or 'now' point, is always already compromised by a trace, or
a residue of a previous experience, that precludes us ever being in a self-contained 'now' moment.
Phenomenology is hence envisaged as nostalgically seeking the impossible: that is, coinciding

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 81