“……..The Dangerous Supplement……”

     This essay is mainly criticism of Rousseau’s idea about nature, culture and supplement. That Dangerous suppliment is the statement given by Rousseau. Rousseau in his books ‘Emile’ and confession has crated a hierarchy between nature and culture and has places speech over writing for Rousseau speech is natural, superior, and it is like real sexual intercourse whereas writing is un nature, inferior and it is like masturbation. In this sense, speech is primary and writing is secondary. But Derrida says speech does not give permance to ones experience of nature. What is consider to be supplemented seems to be more powerful than the primary. To capture presence i.e. nature we use speech which evaporated or which does not have presence, therefore, Derrida says that so as to get permance speech much take recourse to writing. For Derrida, Rousseau writes because speech is not sufficient for him, he wants to give permanence to what he thinks, experiences, and to the image he has of himself. Hence, supplement is not dangerous but a fundamental requirement. Rousseau condemns writing as the distinction of presence and as diseased of speech but at the same time he taken writing as a way of keeping or recapturing speech.

     Derrida says spoken language dislocates the subject that it constructs, prevents it from being present to its signs. It terrments its language with complete writing. When speech fails to protect presence writing becomes necessary.
     Having noticed self-contradiction in Rousseau, Derrida destabilizes the hierarchy considering that this rupture dose not apply to Rousseau’s reasoning only but the whole western metaphysics is founded on the concept of the so-called law of supplimentarity. Derrida views that supplement has been treated so far as the other side of binary while this binary totally groundless became without the knowledge of other, the knowledge of one is impossible. This one and other are intricately blended since both exist simultaneously. One complements the other.

Friedrich Nietzsche “The Use and Abuse of History” deals with the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, which Nietzsche sees as the exclusive characteristic of human animal. Unlike the beast, human beings have to come to grips with the problem of leaving to forget an action, which presupposes the prior ability to remember. Whether he wants it or not, man has history. Nietzsche grants that man needs history in three ways. Read More...

Immanuel Kant The enlightenment, an intellectual movement in eighteenth century Europe celebrated human reason and scientific thought as the instrument of liberation from the superstition and ignorance inherited from the past. The period believed that man, at his best, was a reasonable creature committed to a reasonable activity of understanding the world, the creation of a reasonable creator. Read More...

Mikhail Bakhtin Bakhtin says that traditional stylistics and philosophy of language failed to read novelistic genre since they did not understand the artistic uniqueness of novelistic discourse. Their basic focus is on poetic language, individuality of language, image, symbol, style, they do not give spacious room to extra-linguistic affairs. They are habituated to learn single language ness not observing its carnivalesque feature. They also say that novel is more rhetorical genre having no artistic taste at all which Bakhtin opposes extremely. In this essay, by scrutinizing the general concepts of traditional stylicians and philosopher of language Bakhtin defences Read More..

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Jugen Habermas Modernity is rooted in the development of Enlightenment. Habermas talks of Max Weber’s separation of religion and metaphysics into three independent spheres. Science, morality and art. This division, Habermas says, ultimately gave space to three dimensions of culture, truth, morality and beauty, knowledge, justice and taste. Eventually, the project of Enlightenment aimed to develop these three aspects objective science, universal morality and low, and autonomous art. Read More...

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