In The End Decides

For the concept of the supplement

Which here determines that of the representative image

Harbors within itself two significations

Whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary.

The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus

A plenitude enriching another plenitude

The fullest measure of presence

But the supplement supplements

It adds only to replace.

It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of

If it fills, it is as if one fills a void

If it represents and makes an image

It is by the anterior default of a presence

The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself

The supplement will always be

The moving of the tongue or acting

Through the hands of others.

In it everything is brought together:

Progress as the possibility of perversion

Regression toward an evil

That is not natural and that adheres

To the power of substitution that permits us

To absent ourselves and act by proxy

Through representation

Through the hands of others

Through the written

This substitution always has the form of the sign

The scandal is that the sign, the image

Or the representer, become forces

And make the world move

Blindness to the supplement is the law.

We must begin ‘wherever we are’

And the thought of the trace

Which cannot not take the scent into account

Has already taught us that it was impossible

To justify a point of departure absolutely.

‘Wherever we are’: In a text where

We already believe ourselves to be