ABSTRACT
If the supplement can be said to constitute one of Derrida’s ‘key ideas’, it would be to the extent that it figures an unsettling of borders, a troubling of inside/outside distinctions, a logic of leakage, underflow and overflow, in other words the destabilization of any ‘key idea’. In the following pages I shall attempt to show how this is also true for the concept of ‘text’. Derrida elaborates the concept of the supplement through a sharply focused reading of Rousseau, but the ‘strange economy of the supplement’ (OG 154) that his account brings into focus has a pertinence to all sorts of other contexts. His reading thus conforms to a proposition he makes elsewhere (and implicitly everywhere else in his writings): ‘No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’ (LO 81). Derrida always begins (wherever he happens to find himself) in a specific context, which is to say in trying to engage with a specific text or scene of reading. To say this is perhaps inevitably to court the misunderstanding that Derrida is a ‘textualist critic’, a ‘linguistic philosopher’ or a ‘linguisticist thinker’. I’m sorry if these sound like rather horrible phrases: they are not of my choosing. I will now try to explain, as briefly as I can, why they are also misguided and misleading.
