Derrida, Rousseau, and the Difference

Derrida, Rousseau, and the Difference ARAM VARTANIANNMLKJIHGFEDCBA 1 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA he major part of De la grammatologie is a textual analysis in the course of which Derrida “deconstructs” Rousseau’s philosophy while constructing his own. To analyze, in our turn, his reading of Rousseau, it will be useful to focus on the pivotal chapter entitled “Ce dangereux supplement,” where the hermeneutic assumptions and consequences of “grammatology” are most clearly manifest. We hope that such a study, despite its limited sphere, will prove germane to the broader topics of Derrida’s relationship to Rousseau, the validity of his critique of meta­ physical reason, and the type of literary criticism that has resulted from his philosophical position. Derrida realized that Rousseau would be an ideal candidate for inter­ pretation from the standpoint of a theory of language that controverted the age-old “logocentric” primacy, indeed the repressive rule, of speech over writing.1 Not only did Rousseauism offer an exemplary and culmi­ nating instance of the whole culture of logocentrism and the accompany­ ing metaphysics of presence, but the privileging of phonic signs seemed to have found support in its author’s Essai sur l*origine des langues. The only drawback was that Rousseau had neglected to make his views on language basic, or even particularly important, to his philosophy. To be sure, there was in the Discours sur I’origine de I’inegalite a probing account of the development of language and of its long-range impact, 129 1 3 0 / V A R T A N I A N zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA along with other factors, on the downward spiral of human history. But that account, besides evaluating the role of speech in moral and sociolog­ ical terms foreign to Derridean concerns, also omitted the crucial distinc­ tion between oral and written modes of expression. Although, in the fedcbaZYXW Essai sur I’origine des langues, Rousseau did eventually treat that ques­ tion, he did so only incidentally; moreover, he did not regard the work central enough to his thought to have it published in his lifetime. Derri­ da’s initial problem, therefore, was somehow to upgrade a marginal, or at least accessory, aspect of Rousseauism into one of its main preoccupa­ tions. This appeared feasible by the expedient of forging a bond between its linguistic theory, its actual use of language (or the ecriture peculiar to it), and the concept of nature recognized unanimously as comprising its core. Derrida thus reread Jean-Jacques’s oeuvre through the appropriate spectacles, seeking in it a pattern of features that might indicate an overarching nexus between scriptural practice, opinions on language, and metaphysical naturalism. Derrida found what he was looking for principally in a frequent and symptomatic recurrence of the verb suppleer and its substantive supple­ ment, What appeared significant in this “systeme d’ecriture” was not just its repetitive character and thematic pertinence but also, he believed, the instability of meaning it betrayed. Suppleer could mean “to add to” or “to supplement” as well as “to replace” or “to substitute,” while supple­ ment meant, in the eighteenth century, both an “addition” and a “substi­ tution” (though in modern French it has come to be used unequivocally, more or less like its English cognate).2 Derrida’s interest in this lexical anomaly was not altogether innocent. He brought to its understanding a presupposition of his own for which Rousseau had given no cause. This was the conviction that language, as now constituted, could be counted on to subvert and negate the entire tradition of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, which it had been made to embody —an expectation that led Derrida to undertake the dismantling of Western metaphysics by a still untried critical method. To this end, he discovered in the supplement, as a corollary of its semantic vacillation, a logical paradox for which he coined the neologism supplementarite, As a conceptual tool, this corresponded remarkably well to Rousseau’s description of nature, whose incoherencies it served at the same time to lay bare. A primordially perfect and self-sufficient nature had, incomprehensibly, been added to and substituted for. Strangely, every addition became, according to the Rousseauist version of history, a diminishment; and every substitution left...