SupplementAn important feature of [[Derrida]]'s [[deconstruction]] and of his critique of [[logocentrism]]'s neglect of [[writing]], as typified by the Western tradition from [[Plato]] to [[Saussure]] and [[Levi-Strauss]]. Like [[differance]], the expression is deliberately ambiguous, ''suppleer'' can mean either 'to supplement' or 'to supplant'.Derrida adopts the term 'supplement' from [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argues in his essay on the origins of [[language]] that writing is no more than a [[supplement]] to, or parasite on, a natural spoken language, and who notes in his ''[[Confessions]]'' that [[masturbation]] is a 'dangerous supplement' to normal sexual intercourse.Derrida contends that, if [[speech]] has to be supplemented or supplanted by [[writing]], it cannot be naturally self-sufficient and must therefore be characterized by an [[absence]] or [[gap]], which he describes as an 'originary lack'[[Language]] does not, that is, originate in a natural state of completion as there is no extra-linguistic point of origin, but merely the 'originary lack'.It is the logic of supplementarity that makes nature or [[speech]] appear to be the prior term; at the same time, the chain of [[supplement]]s or substitutions reveals the [[lack]] within it.Any attempt to find a pure point of origin, such as [[Husserl]]'s attempt to ground [[phenomenology]] in pure perception, can be shown to follow the same logic and to mistake a [[supplement]] for an origin.[[Masturbation]] is a [[supplement]], but if it is to function as such, it must resemble what it repalces; it may be a form of [[autoeroticism]], but it still focuses on the [[imaginary|imagined]] [[object]] that can never be possessed.
==obscene supplement of the law==
Here, however, it would be productive to introduce the distinction between the public symbolic Law and its obscene supplement: the notion of the obscene superego double-supplement of Power implies that there is no Power without violence. Power always has to rely on an obscene stain of violence, political space is never "pure" but always involves some kind of reliance on "pre-political" violence. Of course, the relationship between political power and pre-political violence is one of mutual implication: not only is violence the necessary supplement of power, (political) power itself is always-already at the roots of every apparently "non-political" relationship of violence. The accepted violence and direct relationship of subordination in the Army, Church, family and other "non-political" social forms is in itself the "reification" of a certain ethico-political struggle and decision - what a critical analysis should do is to discern the hidden political process that sustains all these "non-" or "pre-political" relationships. In human society, the political is the encompassing structuring principle, so that every neutralization of some partial content as "non-political" is a political gesture par excellence.
==See Also==
* [[Derrida]]
* [[Speech]]
* [[Language]]
* [[Lack]]
* [[Object]]
* [[Masturbation]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
[[Category:Terms]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Postmodern theory]]
[[Category:Literary theory]]
[[Category:Political theory]]
[[Category:Politics]]
