Sudhamshu1

Sudhamshu Narayan
ENG-402
Literary Criticism

The Idea of Danger in the Supplement

The year 1967 was a fruitful year for the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who
produced three books, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena
successively in which he outlined his philosophy of “deconstruction”. In his monumental
work Of Grammatology, which is divided into two parts “Writing before the Letter” and
“Nature, Culture, Writing “of which the former half describes traditional conceptions on the
birth of writing, writing as being subservient to speech and how these conceptions dominate
popular and academic speculations on writing and speech itself. The latter instrumentalizes
his elucidatory style to deconstruct several texts ranging from wide disciplines such as
linguistics (Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics), anthropology (Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes
Tropiques), and philosophy (Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages).

Derrida arrives at this junction in his philosophical career through his radical preference for
writing which in itself is an assault on the philosophical tradition of privileging speech
(logos) over writing. Against this “Logocentrism”(JD 49), Derrida suggests a new science of
writing, which he calls Grammatology. Derrida’s philosophy hence is a novel uncovering of
the binary logistics on which European philosophical argumentation relies on, the”
oppositional nature of existence”(SEP), in which one binary is favoured more than the other.
In philosophy the act of writing which is considered a manifestation of speech leads
philosophers to conceive speech as being a pure representative of meaning, value and truth.

In his comprehensive commentary on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, in

which Rousseau argues that writing is a “supplement” of speech, an external demonstration
of speech. This false binary for Derrida, is a tendency of the Logocentric, Western
philosophical tradition, which he claims is a “metaphysics of presence”(JD 49), which
regards writing as an absence, since there is no reader present during the act itself. This
dichotomy of absence/presence, Derrida argues is inadequate.
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Nevertheless for Rousseau, if writing is substituted for speech, it may corrupt the “pure
language” of speech and negate all meaning intended by it. This is when the “supplement” of
writing becomes a “danger” to the ideal, Platonic function of speech.

Derrida’s reading of Rousseau examines the underlying anxiety of such an ineffectual

dichotomy, and he argues that Rousseau’s assertion of writing as a supplement implies a
sense of absence in speech which can be retrieved by writing. And hence it is inaccurate to
think of writing as merely an absence. Speech and writing play with each other, reside in each
other, and not at odds with each other. The qualities that we attribute to both speech and
writing, with the former being “interior” and the latter being “exterior” relies on what he
stipulates as “a play of differences”(AF), inside and outside, are often short-sighted and do
not capture the essence of writing or speech.

This “logic of supplementarity” (RB 23) as Derrida observes within Rousseau’s essay, be it
“culture against nature” or “writing against speech” is contradictory as Rousseau’s distrust of
writing is dispute by his own vocation as a writer, as an individual who attains clarity through
writing, who relies on the “absence” of writing. This inclination of Rousseau to
simultaneously decry and laud writing is indicative of his resentment of the “lost presence of
speech”, of the absence of speech that he knows only the “dangerous supplement” can fill. Be
it writing and speech, fantasy and sexual experience or unnatural and noble, the latter always
falters and must be supplemented by the former, much to the disappointment of the Western
subject who realizes the inconsistencies of his own dualist thinking.
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Works Cited:

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.49.

Kakoliris Gerasimos , University of Athens, Writing as a Supplement: Jacques Derrida's

Deconstructive Reading of Rousseau's Confessions, Philosophy Study, June 2015, Vol. 5,
No. 6, 302-313 doi: 10.17265/2159-5313/2015.06.006

Angelfire, www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/derrida.html.

Prasad, Jayant. “Category: Derrida and Rousseau.” Derrida The Father of Deconstruction,
newderrida.wordpress.com/category/derrida-and-rousseau/.

Bernasconi, Robert. "Supplement". In Colebrook, Claire (ed.). Jacques Derrida : key

concepts. Abingdon, Oxon. ISBN 9781844655892. OCLC 898081003.