Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

not end here. Derrida then proceeds to co-implicate the absence of a 'real' mother in Rousseau's
life with the logic of deferral and substitution. Having (it is widely supposed) lost his ,natural'
mother in childbirth, Rousseau's life was thereafter populated by a chain of surrogates. In his
relationship with Thérèse, which is itself supplemented via the dangerous vice of masturbation,
Rousseau also discovers the supplement of his adoptive mother who is herself the supplement of
the 'true' mother. And yet, for Derrida, even this natural mother is not outside the chain of
supplementary substitutions: 'Jean-Jacques could thus look for a supplement to Thérèse only on
one condition: that . . . Thérèse herself be already a supplement. As Mamma was already the
supplement of an unknown mother, and as the "true mother" herself, at whom the known
"psychoanalyses" of the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau stop, was also in a certain way a
supplement.' (156)
The attempt to retrace this chain to any 'natural', or 'first' mother is therefore condemned in
advance to the vain regress that Rousseau's text encounters in attempts to uncover the origin of
language. At the well-spring there will always be another source, a pre-originary substitution, a
further supplement of a presence itself irremediably absent like the lost mother. And it is easy to
see how this endless and hollow supplementarity will resonate at the heart of Rousseau's political
philosophy, wherein the quest of a pure state of nature will ceaselessly run up against protocultural
forces. In all these areas, the thought of an originary presence is destined to discover a
supplement at the origin, the supplement of an origin itself supplementary, a presencing absence,
an absenting presence.
Naturally such an interpretation assumes the greatest degree of communication between
Rousseau's life and work. Indeed its strength resides in the felicity with which Derrida evokes a
purely Rousseauian world wherein sexual, social and maternal neuroses, an essay on the origin
of languages, and a political philosophy of uncorrupted origins are patterned and figured around
the deviant logic of the supplement. As such, 'That Dangerous Supplement' repeats not only the
content but the format and ethos of traditional psychoblography. But such an excursion is the last
thing we have been prepared to expect from the Grammatology, or Derridean deconstruction in
general. How is this chapter, with its troupe of biographical figures, to be reconciled to the
injunction that 'the names of authors . . . have here no substantial value', that they 'indicate
neither identities nor causes'? No sooner does Derrida depart from the psychobiographical locale
of the supplement than he raises a question of method.
Reading Rousseau in terms of autoeroticism and mother-substitutions cannot, we are told, be
deemed psychoanalytic in the customary sense. Here Derrida's accents are distinctly Lacanian:
Although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text. That is
why, in spite of certain appearances, the locating of the word supplement is here not at all
psychoanalytical, if by that we understand an interpretation that takes us outside of the writing
toward a psychobiographical signified, or even toward a general psychological structure that
could rightly be separated from the signifier. (159)
On one level this means, quite simply, that we are to regard the psychobiographical as but one
form of writing or signification amongst others, for when we read biography or autobiography we
are reading, as everywhere we must, nothing other than writing. And for all its banality, this is a
necessary point, in that it provides the most direct route of return for the author as a biographical
figure in criticism. The writer's (auto)biography is writing, and there is therefore no reason to
either valorise its significance in the act of interpretation, or to outlaw its deployment on the
grounds that it is somehow an improper form of textuality. Thus we can re-mobilise the
autobiographical without lapsing once more into positivist or geneticist assumptions. Yet Derrida
wants to take this further. In its most infamous hour, the text declares:
There is nothing outside the text [there is no outside-text; il n'y a pas de hors-texte]. And that is
neither because Jean-Jacques' life or the existence of Mamma or Thérèse themselves, is not of
prime interest to us, nor because we have access to their so-called 'real' existence only in the text
and we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right to neglect this limitation. All reasons
of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more
radical reasons. What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the 'dangerous
supplement' is that in what one calls the real life of these existences 'of flesh and bone', beyond
and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there has never been
anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutional