Jacques Derrida--Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (p.165) The place of the "Essay" What about the voice within the logic of the supplement? within that which should perhaps be called the "graphic" of the supplement? Within the chain of supplements, it was difficult to separate writing from onanism. Those two supplements have in common at least the fact that they are dangerous. They transgress a prohibition and are experienced within culpability. But, by the economy of differance, they confirm the interdict they transgress, get around a danger, and reserve an expenditure. In spite of them but also thanks to them, we are authorized to see the sun, to deserve the light that keeps us on the surface of the mine. What culpability attaches to these two experiences? What fundamental culpabi- lity is found fixed or deflected there? These questions may be elaborated in their proper place only if we first describe the structural and "phenomenolo- gical" superficies of these two experiences, especially the area they have in common. In both cases, the possibility of auto-affection manifests itself as such: it leaves a trace of itself in the world. The worldly residence of a signifier becomes impregnable. That which is written remains, and the experience of touching-touched admits the world as a third party. The exteriority of space is irreducible there. Within the general structure of auto-affection, within the giving-oneself-a-presence or a pleasure, the operation of touching-touched receives the other within the narrow gulf that separates doing from suffering. And the outside, the exposed surface of the body, signifies and marks forever the division that shapes auto-affection. Auto-affection is a universal structure of experience. All living things are capable of auto-affection. And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of auto-affecting, may let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the condition of an experience in general. This possibility --another name for "life"--is a general structure articulated by the history of life, and leading to complex and hierarchical operations. Auto-affection, the as-for-itself or for-itself--subjectivity--gains in power and in its mastery of the other to the extent that its power of repetition idealizes itself. Here idealization is the movement by which sensory exteriority, that which affects me or serves me as signifier, submits itself to my power of repetition, to what thenceforward appears to me as my spontaneity and escapes me less and less. One must understand speech in terms of this diagram. Its system requires that it be heard and understood immediately by whoever emits it. It produces a sig- nifier which seems not to fall into the world, outside the ideality of the sig- nified, but to remain sheltered--even at the moment that it attains the audio- phonic system of the other--within the pure interiority of auto-affection. It does not fall into the exteriority of space, into what one calls the world, which is nothing but the outside of speech. Within so-called "living" speech, the spatial exteriority of the signifier seems absolutely reduced.(1) It is in the context of this possibility that one must pose the problem of the cry--of that which one has always excluded, pushing it into the area of animality or of madness, like the myth of the inarticulate cry--and the problem of speech (voice) within the history of life. Conversation is, then, a communication between two absolute origins that, if one may venture the formula, auto-affect reciprocally, repeating as immediate echo the auto-affection produced by the other. Immediacy is here the myth of consciousness. Speech and the consciousness of speech--that is to say consci- ousness simply as self-presence--are the phenomenon of an auto-affection lived as suppression of differance. That phenomenon, that presumed suppression of differance, that lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier, are the origin of what is called presence. That which is not subjected to the process of differance is 'present.' The present is that from which we believe we are able to think time, effacing the inverse necessity: to think the present from time as differance. This very formal structure is implied by all analyses of the investments of the system of orality and of the audiophonic system in general, however rich and diverse the field might be. From the moment that nonpresence comes to be felt within speech itself--and there is at least a foreboding of it from the very threshold of articulation and diacriticity--writing is somehow fissured in its value. On the one hand, as we have seen, it is the effort of symbolically reappropriating presence. On the other, it consecrates the dispossession that had already dislocated the spoken word. In both senses, one may say that in one way or another, it had already begun to undermine and shape "living" speech, exposing it to the death within the sign. But the supplementary sign does not expose to death by affect- ing a self-presence that is already possible. Auto-affection constitutes the same (auto) as it divides the same. Privation of presence is the condition of experience, that is to say of presence. In as much as it puts into play the presence of the present and the life of the living, the movement of language does not, one suspects, have only an ana- logical relationship with "sexual" auto-affection. It is totally indistingui- shable from, even if that totality is severely articulated and differentiated. The logocentric longing par excellence is to distinguish one from the other. Its last resort would be to dissolve sexuality within the transcendental gene- rality of the structure "touching-touched," as a certain phenomenology might describe it. That dissociation is the very one by which one wishes to distin- guish speech from writing.. In the same way that the "fatal advantage" of sex- ual auto-affection begins well before what is thought to be circumscribed by the name of masturbation (organization of so-called wrong and pathological ges- tures, confined to some children or adolescents), the supplementary menace of writing is older than what some think to exalt by the name of "speech." From then on, metaphysics consists of excluding non-presence by determining the supplement as simple exteriority, pure addition or pure absence. The work of exclusion operates within the structure of supplementarity. The paradox is that one annuls addition by considering it a pure addition. What is added is nothing because it is added to a full presence to which it is exterior. Speech comes to be added to intuitive presence (of the entity, of essence, of the eidos, of ousia, and so forth); writing comes to be added to living self- present speech; masturbation comes to be added to so-called normal sexual expe- rience; culture to nature, evil to innocence, history to origin, and so on. The concept of origin or nature is nothing but the myth of addition, of sup- plementarity annulled by being purely additive. It is the myth of the efface- ment of the trace, that is to say of an originary differance that is neither absence nor presence, neither negative not positive. Originary differance is supplementarity as structure. Here structure means the irreducible complexity within which one can only shape or shift the play of presence or absence: that within which metaphysics can be produced but which metaphysics cannot think. This movement of the effacement of the trace has been, from Plato to Rousseau to Hegel, imposed upon writing in the narrow sense; the necessity of such a displacement may now be apparent. Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist. (To exist is to be, to be an entity, a being-present, to on.) In a way, this displacement leaves the place of the decision hidden, but it also indicates it unmistakably. --

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