Derrida attacks the presence/absence binary on the basis of the inadequacy of presence alone. His example in “That Dangerous Supplement” is from Rousseau, who professed in his work two things that Derrida picks out as similar: a fixation on his foster mother and a preference for speech as more true to the speaker’s intentions than writing. In the former case, despite living with his foster mother and seeing her daily, Rousseau still felt the need to undertake rituals, of a sort, to feel close to her — he’d kiss the ground she walked on, for example. Her physical presence did not diminish the absence of her that Rousseau perceived; in effect, he supplemented presence with absence, and his doing so gave presence perspective. Rousseau couldn’t conceive of one without the other. In the latter case, Rousseau’s stated distrust of writing doesn’t really hold up in his work. He seems to look at speech through writing, and writing becomes a presence in itself, one that reveals that speech, too, has inadequacies.

The title “That Dangerous Supplement” refers to masturbation, actually. But that part of the chapter is pretty nuanced, and I’d need the book to say much about it.

Basically what I’m saying here is that death, as the absence to life’s presence, supplements life, makes it finite, brackets it within the realm of conception — and, once life is conceivable, our minds can work with it, can attach meaning to it. Life would still be something minus death — it’d be the supplement to pre-existence, I’d imagine. All this relies on the Saussurean idea that we define things based on their relationships to other things.

Geh, now I want to do a balls-to-the-wall Derrida post. Maybe I will when I get back out to school, and that will make a lot more sense than what I’m pulling out of memory here.

My problem, though, is purely one of narrative structure. I’m not hung up on Tomoya’s journey; I’m hung up on the journey of viewing through which the show carried me in a way I found ultimately disagreeable. The caveat here is that I really did enjoy most of the show for what it was; I don’t outright dislike the whole thing because I’m dissatisfied with the ending.