Supplement at the Origin

The Trinity and Comic Metaphysics

No contemporary writer has illumined the fundamentals of ancient and modern “tragic metaphysics” as simply and importantly as Jacques Derrida, known best as the “founder” of deconstruction. Derrida, however, uses the terminology of “supplementarity” in place of the dramatic metaphor. Plato, recognizing that the sensible world moved toward death, attempted to rescue some stability and fixity through his theory of forms. Derrida tells this same story using different terminology. On Derrida’s reading, “Platonism” (and by this he means the entire Western metaphysical tradition) assumes that any departure from or addition to a pure origin is necessarily a regression, an exile, a “fall.”¹

Any supplement is necessarily a violent supplement, attempting to overthrow and dismantle the origin. Derrida thus brings to the open one of the basic assumptions behind the problematics of mutability, desire, and change that we explored in the previous chapter. Ancient, modern, and postmodern metaphysics is a metaphysics of death because it is a metaphysics that denies or laments the inevitability of supplementation. Derrida helpfully exposes and deconstructs this model, but at the same time, not surprisingly given his atheistic assumptions, maintains and even intensified its most tragic features. Because Derrida expresses this problem in quasi-Trinitarian terms, he provides some of the elements for a Trinitarian critique of tragic metaphysics, while at the same time opening himself up in turn to a Trinitarian critique.

In the following pages, I will first summarize Derrida’s treatment of supplementarity, an exploration that will lead us directly into Trinitarian theology, which deconstructs Derrida as residually Platonic. At that point, I change the key signature to show briefly how Derrida’s description of supplementarity lurks behind the tragic metaphysics of the Western tradition. He doesn’t realize how much he shares with the Platonisms he attacks.

I.

Derrida’s fullest treatment of supplementarity arises in connection with the Western tradition’s treatment of the relation of speech and writing, which takes its cues from Socrates’ account in the Phaedrus. Speech is the “original” form of language, while writing is considered a derivative and somewhat degenerate “supplement.” To explain the problems of writing, Socrates appealed to the Egyptian myth of Theuth (or Thoth) concerning the origins of written letters:

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality (trans. Benjamin Jowett).

Writing is problematic for a number of reasons. Theuth’s salesmanship notwithstanding, King Thamus recognizes that the effect of writing will not be to enhance or improve memory but to undermine it. Men who read books will not be wise, but pseudo-wise, having the appearance of wisdom without its reality. Writing lacks breath (pneuma, also “spirit”) and thus is necessarily dead discourse. Writing, further, detaches knowledge from immediate presence of the teacher or writer, which raises problems both practical and theoretical. Practically, a written work wanders off to be read by any and everyone, regardless of their ability to read well: Who knows what horrors of criticism a bad reader will concoct? Theoretically, for the Western tradition, the detachment of writing from presence means that writing is two removes from reality.

Derrida’s Plato imagines a world where thought is uncontaminated by writing, or supplemental commentary of any kind, a world where thought is pure thought, where the speech, emanating from the present speaker, stands transparent and obvious for all, no additions, questions, or interpretation necessary. This is the world of the forms, where things are real. The sensible realm, which contains only copies of real things, is the realm of supplementation, interpretation, and writing. Derrida cites Aristotle’s famous formulation of the relationship between ideas and signs, to the effect that spoken words are symbols of ideas while written words are symbols of the aural symbols of speech. Derrida also points out that Socrates makes explicit connections between writing and painting, and what Plato’s Socrates says elsewhere about tragedy, poetry, and visual art is applicable to writing: All of them, because they are two removes from the real, are distorting. Writing is necessarily a lie. So, for Derrida’s Plato, writing (and with it all forms of supplementation) are forms of violence against the origin.

Derrida rejects the Platonic privileging of speech to writing not in order to reverse the hierarchy but in order to demonstrate that the problematics of supplementarity apply as much to speech as to writing, that supplementarity is the hidden story of reality.