ABSTRACT
The supplement is an addition from the outside, but it can also be understood as supplying what is missing and in this way is already inscribed within that to which it is added. To begin with, Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages argues that the origin of language is in the South. In this way the second reading can be said to supplement the first, as writing supplements speech. One of Derrida's clearest explications of the logic of supplementarity is in his reading of Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge in The Archeology of the Frivolous from 1973. It is in keeping with this insight that Derrida insisted both that no ontology could think the operation of the supplement. At the same time, the time of the closure of philosophy, that the logic of supplementarity imposes itself on us in our reading of the texts from the history of Western metaphysics.
