ABSTRACT
No key ideas in Derrida, then, or nothing but key ideas: that was one of our starting points. This paradox might be most neatly illustrated in the notion of the supplement. It is apparent in everything he writes, but the most succinct treatment comes in his remarkable reading of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular in a chapter of Of Grammatology (1967) entitled ‘“… That Dangerous Supplement …”’ (OG 141–64). In the following pages I shall focus on this section of Of Grammatology in order to provide an introductory account of the notion of the supplement and suggest some of the ways the supplement is at work in literature and elsewhere.
