2. Indication, Expression, and the Function of Lack

Insofar as lack designates, among other things, a certain insufficiency and thus a deficit, my interpretation suggests that the notion is already operative at the very outset of Derrida’s reconstruction of Husserl’s distinction between the two forms of the sign. Although Derrida does not explicitly deploy the term in the chapters of Voice and Phenomenon to which this section is devoted, a careful reading of the strategy governing his reconstructive analysis of the First Logical Investigation — and, in particular, close attention to the passages on which he places special emphasis — reveals the implicit operation of the notion of lack throughout. It must be noted, first of all, that for Husserl the sign is already defined by a substitutive character: It is always a sign “for something,” and is therefore always marked by the structure of standing-in-for. The essential distinction within the use of signs thus turns on the difference between two specific logics of referentiality. Indication, however, is the form that in itself implies an irreducible lack and, with it, a corresponding deficiency — one that, as Derrida progressively shows, cannot be so easily eliminated even when the second type of sign, namely expression, is thematized in its apparent purity and in the supposed absence of indication. Lack, then, names a specific mode of relationality or referentiality marked by an internal deficit or gap.

Thus, after presenting various forms of indication (Anzeige) in their natural and cultural configurations, Husserl proceeds to pose the question of what constitutes the essential unity of indication and offers the following answer:

If, then, whether we are dealing with objects or with states of affairs, indication functions within the difference between the actual or given and the non-actual or non-given, thereby motivating the transition from the latter to the former, the “because” (weil), as “the objective correlate of motivation” (Husserl, Reference Husserl2001, p. 184), provides only a relative generality. Although such a transition may possess contextual certainty, it can never attain the apodictic certainty of pure necessity. Indication is therefore a mode of referentiality, and its reference — or its pointing (Hinweisen) — operates only across a distance that can never be abolished. Indication thus remains irreducibly empirical. It follows, then, that the irreducible element of probability and the limited necessity proper to indication — and thus the impossibility of apodicticity — mark the insolubility of non-presence as distance. In this way, the evidence of intuitive and immediate givenness always remains in withdrawal; it is precisely this non-identity of non-presence that renders the introduction of conviction and supposition both necessary and unavoidable, whether by reason of the limitation of the empirical situation or by virtue of the principle of probability inscribed within the distance between the actual and the non-actual.

The other kind of sign, expression (Ausdruck), presents what is expressed in direct presence and thus domesticates within itself the distance proper to referentiality. If we assume that the reduction and exclusion of indication have been successfully carried out, and that the possibility of a direct thematization of expression is thereby secured, Husserl reiterates and reaffirms the principle underlying the distinction of expression: “From indicative signs we distinguish meaningful signs, i.e. expressions” (Husserl, Reference Husserl2001, p. 187). Consequently, although indication is not devoid of signification and thus, by virtue of the structure of signifying, functions as a standing-in-for something else, it nevertheless lacks meaning (Bedeutung) in the strict sense. Expression, therefore, is understood as conveying meaning without distance or separation.Footnote ²

At this point, Derrida’s translation of Bedeuten as vouloir-dire, together with his determination of expression as a sign that refers to what has meaning and thus as a sign that wants-to-say, points to a structural logic that can be realized only in the movement of expressing as wanting-to-say. In doing so, it names precisely that conception which, for Husserl, is defined through the exclusion of the possibility of lack, whereas Derrida will seek to reinscribe lack within it. Thus, “ex-pression is exteriorization” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 27), that is, the externalization of a sense already residing within. Bedeuten as vouloir-dire externalizes the ideal content of conscious intentionality. Although Husserl, unlike Gottlob Frege, identifies and employs both terms synonymously in the Logical Investigations, Derrida here introduces the distinction elaborated in Ideas I in order to articulate the duplicating and, within this duplication, exteriorizing function of meaning.Footnote ³ If sense (Sinn) designates the entire noematic sphere, including its non-expressive stratum, and if meaning (Bedeutung) is identified with the ideal sense-content of expression as grasped in the word, then expression reveals itself as the uttered doubling of sense.Footnote ⁴ Bedeuten thus expresses the ideality of meaning, an ideality that, as such, was always already contained within pre-expressive intentionality. Yet as the emergence and self-exteriorization of ideal content, this exteriority never departs from the voluntaristic self-presence of the subject present to itself. The exteriority of meaning in expression is the exteriority of ideality, one that comes to light only after the bracketing and reduction of the exteriority of the world. As the ideal pole of intentionality, it is immanent to consciousness without constituting a reell part of subjective intentionality; ideality is, rather, an irreell pole of intentionality. Meaning, therefore, is indeed an emergence, an expression directed outward — an exteriority that nevertheless remains entirely within consciousness. In other words, the meaning at work in the signifying function of expression is not separated from the direct presence of the sign and thus remains internal to expression as a meaningful sign. That the expression of meaning can, on the one hand, occur only in speech, and that, on the other hand, this meaning in speech remains wholly subject to the voluntaristic self-presence of the subject — these two determinations mutually confirm one another. Put differently, wanting-to-say is realized exclusively in the discourse of the linguistic sign, and, as wanting-to-express-itself, it is nothing other than the realization of the subject’s wanting-to-say in its relation to itself:

This structural comparison between the two logics of signification cannot function without the implicit role of lack, even though Derrida does not yet mention it explicitly at this stage. If expression functions only in speech, and if its transparent givenness becomes operative solely within the complete and lucid self-relation of the subject, then everything that falls short of this perfect self-referentiality must be excluded from the thematization of expression. It is precisely through this lack that the additional layer of indication is first made manifest and then bracketed out in the name of the purity of expression. Thus, the physical aspects of speech — gesture, facial expression, and the like — must be emphasized precisely as “involuntary utterances,” that is, as non-expressive signs, insofar as they mark the lack, or absence, of that direct givenness of meaning. With regard to the indicative character of gestures and similar phenomena, Husserl writes as follows, explicitly invoking the role of lack within the full presence that is taken to define every indication:

This passage plays a central role in Derrida’s overall deconstructive reading of Husserl. Although Husserl is ostensibly analyzing the gestural and physical dimension that accompanies speech, the passage in fact provides, at a fundamental level, the definition of indication and of its difference from expression. It is the absence of intuitive presence, the lack (Fehlen) of direct givenness, that determines the very structure of the indicative sign. The meaning of expressive movements — as movements in space and therefore as fundamentally spatialized — can be added and fulfilled only through interpretation. Meaning thus comes to occupy the place of the missing direct and conscious unity between the one who expresses and what is expressed. When gesture, by virtue of its spatiality, not only exists in the world but also surrenders its meaning to involuntary association, and when its signifying function can become meaningful only through interpretation, indication designates the structural lack of immediate self-present experience. Indication therefore operates within this irreducible non-identity as a structure of deficiency. For Husserl, this lack may be supplanted by the supposedly lackless immediacy of the listener’s self-presence. Yet such supplanting, precisely because of this irreducible non-identity, remains necessarily limited and therefore indicative. There is thus something essentially disjunctive in the relation to the other that renders this lack, and with it the function of indication, indispensable.

For it is precisely through this lack — through the absence of the direct and immediate presence of the self-relating subject — that Derrida transforms the difference between the two kinds of signs from a substantial distinction into a functional one. The difference between expression and indication therefore does not coincide with the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Rather, because of the non-identity inherent in communication, the phenomenological distance constitutive of relation to alterity, and thus the lack of direct intuition of the other’s conscious experience, the necessity of communication reveals itself as the dependence of meaning upon what Husserl calls the “articulate sound-complex” (Husserl, Reference Husserl2001, p. 188). Within this structural deficiency, spatialization and mediation prove irreducible: “This irreducible mediation involves every expression in an indicative operation” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 33). Since expressive discourse therefore operates only as a mediated correlation between manifestation (Kundgabe) and reception (Kundnahme) — that is, since expression can appear as manifestation only through the spatiality of the physical side of the sign, and since the communicated meaning can be apprehended only by means of the indirect, presentifying apperception of the signified — presence, with the appearance of the other, loses its full self-presence and can manifest itself only on the basis of this non-identity. Within this incomplete — that is, deficient — presence, the reciprocal and correlative acts of manifestation and reception can function only through indicative supposition and thus take place solely on the basis of “inadequate intuition” and “putative grasp.”Footnote ⁶ In this way, the irreducibility of lack within direct presence mobilizes and condenses the necessity of mediation and spatiality within the non-identity of presence’s relation to itself. For if, as Derrida writes, ultimately what separates expression from indication is what could be called the immediate non-self-presence of living presence, then it follows that “[t]he relation to the other as non-presence thus signifies the impurity of expression” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 35). Even if the precise manner of this implication has not yet been fully clarified, it is already evident that alterity and lack are structurally entangled.

When, in this manner, the relation to the other implies that the relation of the self to itself is marked by non-identity, and thereby, through irreducible analogical apperception, structurally excludes any direct or immediate presence — rendering the spatialization of meaning within the physical side of the sign unavoidable — Husserl is compelled to delimit expression from its “original function of communication” (Husserl, Reference Husserl2001, p. 189) and to restrict it instead to “solitary life” (Husserl, Reference Husserl2001, p. 190). The reduction of communication entails the reduction of the necessity of the correlation between manifestation and reception, that is, of that relationality in which original intuition is drawn into fundamental inadequacy and indirect referentiality. Consequently, the distance introduced into communication between signified and signifier, through which the signifier always already functions indicatively, must be suspended. What Husserl is evidently seeking to secure is the immediate and direct presence of meaning within the subject’s intuitive relation to itself.

Thus, in the absence of distance and lack, there is presumed to be no need for indirect signification. No indirect reference is required here, since within this mode of self-referentiality no deficiency is admitted. The general referential structure of the expressive sign therefore becomes a self-cancelling referentiality — a referentiality without distance and without difference. Expressive referentiality does not, in this sense, de-monstrate, but rather monstrates directly the ideal content. Anzeigen must therefore be distinguished from Hinzeigen:

It is clear here that Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s argument functions only through a correlation between lack and being-in-need-of, the symmetrical opposite of being-full and thus being without lack. For completeness, and therefore the absence of lack, signifies at once both the excess and the deficiency of signification — a duality that Derrida will later conjoin and reformulate within the concept of supplementarity, which, as I shall argue in Section 4, is inseparable from the notion of lack. Within this immediate relation of the self to itself, neither Kundgabe nor Kundnahme has any function; communication is therefore absent. But this reduction of the sign-function takes place only through the revelation of the complete self-sufficiency of self-relation, and therefore through the displacement of lack as something external to it. Thus, after demonstrating the deficiencies of communicative discourse with respect to its claim to evidence, and after shifting the centre of analysis from intersubjectivity to “solitary speech” in order to make the purity of expression visible, Husserl finally remarks as follows:

It is precisely this exteriority — arising from the absence of any necessity of reference within full self-presence — that confers legitimacy upon derivation and thus upon the reduction of the sign. For insofar as a fundamental presence and a complete relation of the self to itself are presumed to be given, the split between representation and reality is at once opened and, in the same movement, the insufficiency of the sign’s representational capacity in relation to that full and immediate self-relation is disclosed. It is this exteriority between reality and the need for re-presentation that determines the deficiency of the sign, a deficiency that, as the present reconstruction seeks to show, ultimately finds its ground in the more fundamental exteriority between lack and self-relation. At this point, Husserl’s argument, according to Derrida’s reading, repeats the classical schema of metaphysics as “a philosophy of intuition” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 44), and in this sense constitutes a form of “transcendental intuitionism” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 84). Because representation is only re-presentation, and can therefore be derived only from full presence, signification as such appears, within solitary speech, as mere phantasy and is thereby reduced. Only within structural distance, and in the lack of direct intuition that characterizes the relation to the other, does the sign acquire its genuinely operative function. In solitary discourse, by contrast, it is mere representation, because there is in fact no need to re-present what is already present in and for itself.

In this way, what has emerged thus far demonstrates that, although Derrida does not explicitly employ the term “lack” prior to the sixth chapter, this should in no way prevent us from recognizing its implicit yet central role in articulating the argumentative structure of the text. Lack, together with the determinations inscribed by it — distance, non-presence, difference, etc., — is precisely what Husserl seeks to exclude from direct self-relation. So, insofar as the function of re-presentativity, and thus of indication and of the sign in general, inscribes itself within what Husserl designates as the “lack” (Fehlen) of direct and full givenness in the relation to the other, it becomes evident that the function of the sign and the very possibility of lack are structurally intertwined. The distinction between indication and expression depends upon protection against precisely this possibility. It is for this reason that Derrida writes that indication, and indeed the sign as such, comes into play only when “the living spirituality of a meaning [vouloir-dire] is not fully present” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 31, emphasis added). This not-being-full is lack itself: the non-identity of the given with itself. Only the reduction of this lack makes possible both the essential distinction between indication and expression and the purity of full presence as opposed to the necessity of signification.Footnote ⁷

However, the concept of lack with which we have operated thus far remains, to some extent, modulated by the idea of completeness and is therefore still inscribed within the dichotomous logic of fullness and the absence of fullness. The principal challenge for the present reading, therefore, lies not only in extrapolating the structural role of lack, but also in distinguishing it from the metaphysical logic that would seek to circumscribe it, where what lack logically refers to, within this framework, is plenitude, of which it would be merely the privative counterpart. Yet it is precisely this concept of lack, together with the dichotomous logic that governs it, that constitutes the target of Derrida’s critique. Put differently, non-fullness must be thought otherwise than as the simple negation of plenitude: Lack must be understood as the lack of that which cannot but sustain this lack, and therefore otherwise than as a merely negative relation to fullness. As I shall argue, the dissolution of the exteriority between self-relation and deficiency does not establish a logic of reference oriented toward a withdrawn plenitude; rather, lack is not the lack of plenitude, but the lack of a supplement. The notion of lack operative up to this point must therefore be radicalized as Derrida’s reading unfolds and as concepts such as supplementarity, différance, and arche-writing are introduced in order to displace the exteriority between lack and self-relation. This will be the task of Section 4.Footnote ⁸ For the moment, however, I turn to Derrida’s analysis of auto-affection, not simply in order to reconstruct his account of the phenomenological experience of the voice, but above all to show why the full force of his argument becomes intelligible only once difference is thought together with the function of lack.

3. The Self-Referentiality and the Logic of De-Spatialization

As we have seen, the superficiality of the sign is grounded in the assumption that that for which it stands must, in and of itself, be regarded as a presence without lack; in relation to such plenitude, the sign can only appear as superfluous and secondary. The self that relates to itself is “absolutely near” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 69) to itself and therefore has no need of a reference operating across a distance. The temporal modality of the relation “in the same instant” is thus essentially bound to the exclusion of spatialization. It is for this reason that Husserl describes the function of the sign, within such immediate proximity, as purposeless. Yet it is purposeless only because there is here supposedly no lack within whose horizon it would become necessary.Footnote ⁹ Even if the distinction between different kinds of signs were to prove untenable — and Derrida does indeed demonstrate the illegitimacy of the purity of that distinction — the more fundamental determination of the sign as superfluous and deficient would remain intact. For this immediacy of the self to itself, free of distance and alterity, defines the prelinguistic stratum of experience as a signless and therefore lackless self-presence. Derrida’s critical displacement, however, consists precisely in reinscribing lack within self-relation itself, thereby rendering visible the differential structure and the originary relation to alterity as the very condition of possibility of self-relatedness. In this way, the prelinguistic sphere no longer appears as pure self-presence, but rather as a non-coincidence with itself, as a lacking-of-itself (Fehlen seiner selbst), and thus as traversed by an originary lack.

As soon as Derrida recalls the Husserlian determination of the model of the object, not from the axiological register — on the basis of which the previously discussed example is dismissed by Derrida as unjustifiable — but from the logical-theoretical core, the necessity of the gaze becomes explicit. Thus, even false discourse, understood as a failed reference to a possible object, does not thereby become meaningless, whereas nonsensical discourse is meaningless precisely because it permits no possible reference to an object. Once the fundamental form of meaningful discourse is determined according to the schema “S is P,” then, regardless of the type of sign — whether the Hinzeigen or Beweisen proper to expression, or the Anzeigen or Hinweisen characteristic of indication — the object-relatedness of the sign is demanded by the essential determination of language from its logical-theoretical core. In short, the essential unity of both types of sign resides in the fact that they must maintain a reference “to the space, to the visibility, to the field and horizon of what is ob-jected and pro-jected” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 62). Yet in this very movement, the peculiar non-spatial spatiality of ideality presents itself in its invisibility before sight. Thus, when, as Derrida remarks, “the invisible is the pro-visional” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 62), and when the ideality of the object must therefore be presented only within intuitive presence, a medium becomes necessary in which these three levels of mediation may be produced within one and the same possibility.Footnote ¹⁰

It is the structure of self-referentiality proper to the voice, together with the presentation of the object effected within it, that provides and opens the medium required for this mediation. Thus, when phenomenological silence proves impossible to sustain, and when the spatiality of relation to the object insinuates itself into the solitary life of the soul through the sign itself, a double necessity emerges: a necessity both to assume this spatiality and, as we shall see, to transform it. Hence, Derrida writes: “It is here that one must speak” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 63), and again, “it is here that one must hear oneself” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 64). Derrida must therefore show why only the voice is capable of responding to and satisfying these three intertwined necessities: pure logical grammar, of the structure of showing, and of showing within presence through the reduction of external spatiality.

For Derrida, therefore, the enigmatic privilege of the voice must be measured against the ideality of the ideal object itself. If “the ideal object is the most objective of objects” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 65), escaping every empirical limitation, infinitely repeatable beyond any hic et nunc, and always recoverable in its self-identity, then the voice appears as the medium capable of producing precisely these structural features of the givenness of ideality. First, the voice is pure fluidity and diaphaneity, because in the very process of signification it simultaneously effects the immediate effacement of the corporeal and external side of the signifier. The voice therefore does not leave the subject; it does not remain outside, but persists wholly within interiority, such that it need not “fall outside of me, outside of my breath” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 65). By virtue of this diaphaneity and absolute availability, the voice introduces no remoteness, distance, or exteriority between the subject and its intention to express itself. The pure temporality and fluidity of the voice, in contrast to the spatiality of writing and its belonging to the exteriority of opaque distance, preserve the intuitive self-presence of the subject. The purity of hearing-oneself-speak consists not only in the inseparability of the signifier from the subject’s vouloir-dire, but also in the fact that the production of the voice, because it requires no external “appendage,” represents the pure manifestation of the subject’s autonomy. It is precisely in the dependence of the phonic layer upon speaking subjectivity that the self-relating subject expresses, in the voice, that very source which grants to writing its signified and its vouloir-dire. Consequently, writing lacks self-relatedness, whereas the voice appears as the ultimate manifestation of self-referentiality itself. Second, the voice never ceases to belong to me, it is because, in hearing-oneself-speak, there is no delay and no deferral between the one who speaks and the one who hears. There is thus a complete and simultaneous coincidence between the active and passive moments of the process. The subject hears itself in the very moment in which it speaks. The voice hears itself within the same instant of pure presence and thereby constitutes the pure form of self-relation — without delay, postponement, or irretrievable difference — and is therefore, in principle, without lack. Third, precisely by virtue of this lacklessness and the immediate presence proper to self-relation in the act of hearing-oneself-speak, the voice, in its immediate self-effacement, becomes the medium capable of presenting ideality directly and without exposing it to the danger of distance before the gaze. The entire system of the spatiality of showing is thus “internalized” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 67) within the voice. In other words, it is through this internalization of spatiality and this domestication of externality that the voice produces what we may call the “de-spatialization of spatiality.” Only through this de-spatialization can the voice, as Derrida observes, assume its decisive philosophical role, namely, within the essential distinction — central to phenomenology as such — between indication and expression.

In precisely this way, the voice and the act of hearing-oneself-speak constitute what Derrida calls “pure auto-affection” that, as an immediate form of self-referentiality, functions as a kind of phenomenological epoché of externality and purifies the inner space of all alterity; this inner space as domesticated spatiality is nothing but de-spatialized space. It is in this way that this auto-affection, understood as the immediate and present relation of the self to itself, is for Derrida the very possibility of what the metaphysical tradition — thinking from the primacy of the voice — defines as subjectivity and being-for-itself: a self-relation that enacts itself as for-itself without recourse to the detour of difference.Footnote ¹¹

In contrast to the logic of de-spatialization, it becomes clear that the deconstruction of immediate self-relation seeks to reconstruct the productive movement of openness as spatialization, or what Derrida will call “spacing.” If the logic of auto-affection manifests the very category that grounds not only Husserl’s discourse in question here but also, for Derrida, the metaphysical tradition as such, then it becomes clear why Derrida, with the notion of arche-writing, insists precisely on originary spacing.Footnote ¹²

Derrida subverts the apparent immediacy of the auto-affection of hearing-oneself-speak in two steps. First, one must acknowledge that the immediate self-relation of self-presence in hearing-oneself-speak presupposes the inseparable unity of sound (son) and voice (phonē). Yet if this unity is indissoluble, it also implies that it is precisely the exteriorization of sound — its being in the world — that first makes possible the phenomenological experience of hearing oneself. The heard and that which hears are thus irreducibly bound together, and within this interrelation the logic that posits a pure distinction only in order subsequently to exclude contamination is already undermined, since exteriority can no longer be treated as something merely reducible or bracketable. On the contrary, it is only on the basis of this inseparable unity of interiority and exteriority that what has traditionally been called subjectivity can announce itself at all, such that the nearness to oneself that defines auto-affection already presupposes an opening to exteriority and is therefore always exposed to a minimal exteriority. Second, this necessary relation between interiority and exteriority is equally the necessary difference through which the appearance of pure self-identity first emerges, since identity with itself can be produced only through the doubling of speaking and hearing, of activity and passivity, within one and the same moment. Together with the necessity of exteriorization, this differentiality deprives auto-affection of the status of a purely immanent self-relation and instead reinscribes it within a differential logic in which there is rooted the very possibility of what metaphysical thought seeks to exclude from it.Footnote ¹³

However, to read originary spacing merely as the introduction of mediation into immediacy is to miss the full force of Derrida’s argument at precisely this point. Derrida’s own exposition of the differential structure of auto-affection in the voice remains strikingly brief, which may itself indicate that the principal centre of gravity of his argument lies elsewhere. Moreover, the mere claim that self-relation is mediated does not carry the discussion very far once one recalls that Husserl is being read here, by Derrida, as a symptomatic figure for the entire structure of metaphysics, as Cisney has rightly observed.Footnote ¹⁴ The irreducibility of mediation is not, after all, in itself a challenge to G. W. F. Hegel. The claim that identity with itself presupposes doubling and non-identity, and that this irreducible non-identity within doubling constitutes the very condition of possibility of every self-relation, would not in the least surprise Hegel. For Hegel, self-relation can occur only on the basis of the thorough negation of immediate self-relation; there can therefore be no undeferred relation of the self to itself. Doubling, difference, self-externality, the intertwining of passivity and activity,Footnote ¹⁵ and thus mediation itself constitute the very condition of self-referentiality as suchFootnote ¹⁶ — and Derrida affirms this on numerous occasions.Footnote ¹⁷ This must mean, once again, that the principal critique of self-relation as such — whether mediated or unmediated — must be mobilized from elsewhere. Although Cisney, unlike many other readers of the text, does register and emphasize the positive function of originary lack at several points,Footnote ¹⁸ his reading nevertheless falters on two decisive levels. First, since the distinction between the two concepts of lack is never elaborated, the full critical potency of Derrida’s notion of lack remains unexplored. Second, although the notion of lack appears in the central and concluding paragraph of Derrida’s argument — and although Cisney acknowledges it — he fails to reconstruct the centrality of this lack and to reconnect it with the other conceptual terms Derrida introduces here. As a result, the full critique of self-relation remains underdeveloped and unexamined. The following section will attempt — via development of what I would like to refer to as vicarious logic of supplementarity — to accomplish both tasks.

4. Lack and the Vicarious Logic of Supplementarity

If the inscription of difference and externality within the purity of self-relation neither exhausts its critical function nor, indeed, succeeds, as we noted above, against the Hegelian logic of self-relation, from where, precisely, does the Derridean destitution of self-relation derive its force? At this stage in the unfolding of the text, Derrida turns to the function of writing as analysed in Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, above all to the constitutive necessity that compels the passage from speech to writing.Footnote ¹⁹ The fact that writing alone can secure the definitive institution of pure tradition, and that speech is therefore “not sufficient” (Derrida, Reference Derrida1989, p. 87), discloses an internal lack within speech itself with respect to the decontextualization required for the constitution of such a tradition. The insufficiency of speech lies precisely in its incapacity to satisfy the demand for subjectlessness and thereby to effect absolute virtualization and universalization. Yet the subjectlessness of writing, as analysed in the Introduction, also names the problem Derrida leaves unresolved in that early work, and thus suggests that the invocation of this text at this juncture points toward the site of its resolution. Although Derrida never fully develops in the Introduction the inquiry he explicitly announces — “scriptural spatiotemporality (whose originality we will soon need to determine)” (Derrida, Reference Derrida1989, p. 87) — such a development is nonetheless required by the internal logic of his argument: if, on the one hand, writing is required by universal transcendental intersubjectivity and is therefore analysed at the level of that intersubjectivity, and if, on the other hand, the temporalization of subjectivity already implies a relation to alterity and is itself structured intersubjectively (Derrida, Reference Derrida1989, p. 87, Footnote 90), then writing, and with it subjectlessness, must be more originary than the constitution of pure tradition. The question thus becomes: If writing is already required within the subject, how is one to think the subject’s originary non-presence to itself? It is here that lack assumes its full conceptual force, for original lack must be understood as the subject’s absence from within its very originary presence to itself. In this sense, the notion of original lack not only resolves the problem Derrida leaves undeveloped in the Introduction, but also designates the point from which the full radicality of his argument proceeds.

How, then, do lack, supplementation, and what I would like to call the vicarious logic come into play here, radicalize Derrida’s argument, and demonstrate that, at this level, the argument remains incomplete? Derrida’s insistence that the phonetic must necessarily be embodied in the medium of writing points to the inner fragility, deficiency, and lack constitutive of speech itself; indeed, the very inscribability of speech implies that “the possibility of writing was inhabiting the inside of speech which itself was at work in the intimacy of thought” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 70). Although this final step offers a glimpse of the general structure of the argument I am attempting to reconstruct here, it remains unclear how, precisely, it is to be understood. What is the nature of this lack that necessitates the supplementation of speech by writing and thereby opens speech to the chain of supplementation?

Now, if the classical distinction between voice and writing is structured by the opposition between the fluid, diaphanous interiority of temporality and the exteriority of spatiality, then the very inscribability of speech compels the dismantling of that opposition and thereby contests the logic of de-spatialization by foregrounding the movement of originary espacement. It is precisely in order to expose the problematic status of this pre-expressive stratum — understood as supposedly free of lack — and, consequently, the illegitimacy of its distinction from the representative structure of language, that Derrida turns to Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness, where the metaphysical import of the text is brought into confrontation with the very dynamics that unsettle and ultimately displace that metaphysical charge.Footnote ²⁰

To what, then, does the necessity refer that drives the presumed sufficiency of speech into the exteriority of writing? If the purported purposelessness of the sign was justified by the claim that, in the immediate intuition of oneself by oneself in presence, all referentiality appeared both superfluous and deficient, then the necessity of writing signifies precisely the contrary: It exposes the fragility and deficiency of that prelinguistic self-relation and brings to completion the final step in dismantling the supposed exteriority between lack and self-relation, as Derrida begins to articulate the latter on the basis of the former. Since the presence of the primal impression (Urimpression) cannot be conceived as isolated or non-relational, but finds the very condition of its possibility only in preserving itself within the other of the living now — namely, in maintaining itself in retention — its self-identity is from the outset determined by a threefold structure. First, because “the living now, producing itself by spontaneous generation, must, in order to be a now, retained in another now” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, pp. 72–73), the difference between presence and non-presence — in its minimal modalities of retention and protention — must already have occurred for presence to be able to relate to itself at all. Only by re-turning from the other can presence constitute itself as presence — whereby its purity is displaced in the very same moment. The sameness of presence occurs only insofar as the other and non-identity have always already preceded it.Footnote ²¹ This moment of the “always already” is the structure of what Derrida calls the “trace”: “the living present arises on the basis of non-self-identity, and on the basis of the retentional trace” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 73). Second, it follows, then, that insofar as the same relates to itself only through the other, it is not merely the case that the same is placed in relation to alterity; rather, self-relation as such becomes possible only through this deferral. Nachträglichkeit thus precedes what initially presents itself as immediate and only subsequently appears as deferred. In other words, the possibility of the becoming-other of the same is more originary than the same itself, and it is precisely this that defines the structure of the trace. Derrida thus continues the citation: “The self of the living present is originally a trace” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 73). Third, presence, insofar as it relates to itself only as retentive and ever-vanishing, is given solely as what is maintained — that is, the givenness of presence is necessarily preceded by the re-giving of this givenness. Without the capacity for repetition, the punctuality of the primal impression would vanish at the very moment of its emergence. Thus, re-turn (re-tour), understood as re-giving and re-petition (ré-pétition), precedes the very possibility of presence, and by this way Derrida undercuts classical logic or “onto-logic of repetition” (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Brault and Kamuf2020, p. 269). Presence, therefore, relates to itself only insofar as it functions in retention as something held fast — it is always already the return of itself: Its return as the return of the same is infinitely necessary and inscribed within presentness as such. In this sense, presence is not something original, but the result of an originary movement of différance that both constitutes and defers it.

This threefold structure not only displaces self-relation from the sphere of immediate self-presence toward otherness and differentiality, but, in doing so, also reinscribes it as a constitutive deficiency in relation to itself and marks it from within by the irreducible necessity of reference to the other: the being of presence is an originary deficiency within itself. Indeed, if the now, “in order to be now,” can relate to itself only through the other in the form of a re-turning, then presence reveals itself, at its innermost core, to be necessarily dependent upon the other. The now requires the other. It is precisely in order to underscore this structure of being-in-need that Derrida accentuates the re- in the various forms of Nachträglichkeit by means of the hyphen. The re- of re-presentation, re-petition, re-tention, re-turn does not refer externally to something that could exist without this representative structure of “re-,” but rather marks that very “fold of the return” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 59) through which alone the same can open itself within its self-relatedness and identity with itself. The re- thus names the common root of repetition in its most general form: The constitutive delay and deferral of the self through which reflection, that is, the self’s relation to itself, is rendered impossible at the very level of its possibility. The re- is therefore the trace from which presence itself is produced and articulated. As originary delay and re-giving, this trace points precisely to that state of being-in-need of relation to the other which undermines the supposed self-sufficiency and immediacy of self-presence. Because, as Derrida emphasizes, the sameness of the living present is originarily a trace, the self of self-presence can be initiated only from the standpoint of the other; and because it is always already caught within the necessity of its relation to alterity, this necessity of the other simultaneously discloses the originary necessity of relationality as such. It is in this sense that the relational structure of the trace designates the primordial character of this relatedness as the same’s originary being-cast beyond itself and, at the same time, as the interruption of any unmediated reflective return to itself. It is precisely this structure — the originary character of the re- and the fundamental deficiency that Derrida will increasingly identify as lack — that he is describing in the following passage from Of Grammatology and will begin to name more directly in Voice and Phenomenon:

Reconstructed in these terms, the lack within presence reveals itself as the impossibility of fully folding back upon itself, and thus as an indication that its immediacy is made possible only through a relational structure oriented toward alterity.Footnote ²² The lack within presence therefore marks its out of joint with itself, which is “the disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself” (Derrida, Reference Derrida1994, p. 29). For this very reason, presence is from the outset fractured open toward the other, such that its interiority always already passes beyond itself and is, in its very origin, exposed to the outside. Thus, the apparent purity of auto-affection is traversed, enabled, and at the same time destabilized by the work of what Derrida elsewhere calls “hetero-affection.”Footnote ²³

If this hetero-affection of self-relation names its “openness to exteriority in general” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 73) and hence the originary exportation of the inside toward the outside, then this very deficiency must be understood in terms of what Derrida calls “espacement,” that is, as the impossibility of any pure founding self-relation.Footnote ²⁴ Lack, therefore, does not name the negative absence of something that whose eventual presence might come to fill the gap; rather, insofar as it marks originary relationality, lack designates the very site of othering. As we shall see, the supplementary logic of vicaration marks precisely the lack proper to that which itself sustains this lack: It is the lack of a supplement. Hence, lack does not itself lack that which might possibly close the gap, for the gap is not a privation awaiting — albeit its infinite deferral — fulfilment but the irreducible opening of relationality as such.

Here, once we have reconstructed and explicated the logical movements implicit in Derrida’s argument, we are in a position to illuminate the final, pivotal paragraph of the book’s central chapter. If we now relate the relational structure of the trace — of the “re-” — to the line of originary lack previously delineated, and if the logic of necessity, specifically the necessity of inscription, is disclosed only through this connection, then not only does the final paragraph of the sixth chapter become fully intelligible, but the central function we have attributed to originary lack is likewise confirmed. It is here that the inscription of lack within self-relation reaches its fullest articulation, as Derrida effectively reverses the relation between self-relation and lack: Self-relation is now thought from out of lack itself and is thus constituted from the very beginning as, and through, a lack within itself in relation to itself. Lack, in this sense, proves to be more originary than originary self-relation as such. It is in precisely these terms that Derrida summarizes the sixth chapter:

In this way, lack is coordinated within the movement of supplementarity: Since presence, in its very being, is lacking to itself (manque à soi-même), and since, as this lack, it always already bears within itself a relation to the other and thus an opening to exteriority, lack signifies not merely the imperfection of self-presence, but, more fundamentally, its inscription within the relational structure of supplementarity.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, the self’s lacking of itself and the originary non-self-presence of self-relation are not to be understood primarily as the negative inversion of an allegedly complete self-relation, as though deficiency merely introduced lack into an originally intact self-identity. Rather, the originary nature of the supplement and of the trace means that both what is lacking and what lacks are equally inscribed within the open movement of supplementation. Both — the supplemented and the supplementing — function as supplements. The being-originary of lack therefore implies that origin itself is, from the beginning, a supplement. This is what I will refer to as the vicarious logic: “The supplementary difference vicariates [vicaire] for presence in its originary self-lack in regard to itself” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2011, p. 75).

If that toward which lack points is itself what vicariates, stands in for, and thereby sustains this very lack, and if this representational substitution allows both terms to be determined as supplements, then the opening toward the outside, together with the relational logic of reference and deferral, becomes irreducible. Lack does not lack, and therefore does not call for, something that — however unattainable — would nonetheless promise its completion or fulfilment; it is not the mere absence of that which might one day seal the fissure. On the contrary, because that toward which lack points precisely vicariates and maintains this very deficiency, the promise of completion, despite its ideal seduction, is from the outset crossed out, neutralized by the logic of supplementarity. What is promised can only ever be another supplement within the general economy of supplemental relationality: It promises not the fulfilment of lack, but only its vicariousness, and is therefore structurally autoimmune. The logic of vicariousness proper to supplementation, which sharpens the specific logic of lack and articulates it beyond the negative logic of absence, is confirmed by Derrida elsewhere as well:

This supplement is always already more or less than itself, and it is precisely this excess or insufficiency that sustains the supplement and determines the sense of what lack is a lack of. Lack is, in this sense, the lack of a supplement, and what I call vicarious logic designates precisely this representation of lack by a supplement. The vicarious function of the supplement therefore fills lack only by maintaining it. For this reason, vicariousness must also be understood as the abundance of lack: “The overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2001, p. 367). This is why, for Derrida, this notion of lack should not be located “in a proper place of the proper body” (Derrida, Reference Derrida1987, p. 461); by virtue of its vicarious logic, it is uncircumscribable and cannot be regulated within a complementary relation to the negative, privative logic of absence, that is, to the logic of something whose retrieval would reconcile lack with itself, even as a merely regulative yet impossible horizon. The vicarious logic of this lack, unlike the various forms of a complementary logic of lack, is defined not primarily by the unattainability or withdrawal of that which is lacking, but by the non-existence of any such complement; for this very reason, it can give rise neither to a regulative ideal nor to an Idea in the Kantian sense. This is precisely why Derrida insists upon the excess of the supplement over all logics of complementarity: “the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside” (Derrida, Reference Derrida1982b, p. 43).

What defines the metaphysical gesture of the complementary, negative conception of lack is precisely the attempt to extract lack from the logic of vicarious representation. As noted above, the difference between these two logics does not lie merely in the moment of withdrawal, for the regulative ideal, or the Idea in the Kantian sense,Footnote ²⁷ is likewise defined both by the imperfection of what is given and by the essential unattainability of the absolute ideal of givenness. The decisive difference lies, rather, in the fact that lack, when understood as the movement of supplementation, cannot be conceived as a lack of completeness and therefore as the negative counterpart of plenitude. What lack lacks is at once the apparent answer to this lack and the total failure of that answer: In a certain sense, this failure can be marked as a failure only when it is measured against the metaphysical desire to fill or overcome lack. (And to speak of “failure” at all is therefore already to submit, however provisionally, to the necessity and imposition of metaphysical language.) This is why the supplement fulfils lack only by vicariating, representing, and maintaining it. The movement of reference and deferral thus remains structurally open, since that of which lack is a lack already vicariates and stands in for this very lack. In this way, the referring-toward-the-other becomes irreducible, and lack proves inseparable from what Derrida describes as the movement of différance.

In this respect, Hägglund’s critique of what he identifies as the Lacanian conception of lack as an “ontological lack” (Hägglund, Reference Hägglund2008, p. 199), a “lack of fullness” (Hägglund, Reference Hägglund2008, p. 195), or indeed “the fundamental lack of being” (Hägglund, Reference Hägglund2008, p. 192) is more than justified from a Derridean perspective. Drawing on the Lacanian distinction between “désir” and “pulsion,” Hägglund, extending the analyses of Joan Copjec and Alenka Zupančič, reconstructs this difference through the relation between adequacy and inadequacy. Copjec, for her part, elaborates the distinction between the Thing — as the primordial object, as the mother — and the simulacra of that originary object generated by its very loss. For Jacques Lacan, as Copjec shows, representation does not represent something self-identical that would exist in itself, thereby relegating simulacra to the status of mere appearances. Re-presentation is therefore not the presentation of an impossible object of presentation, as though the Thing subsisted intact beyond its presentations; rather, representation gives what it loses and thus produces the possibility of partial objects of satisfaction. Only in this way, as Copjec argues, can one account for that “peculiar kind of representation that permits us to grasp hold of some nonbeing, some jouissance, or satisfaction” (Copjec, Reference Copjec2002, p. 36). This splitting of the order of representation or appearance is decisive, since it allows objects to stand in for a lost wholeness, and thus to make possible the apprehension of some jouissance, but only by maintaining the loss and therefore the impossibility of whole jouissance. “Some jouissance” is enabled precisely by this division. As Copjec observes, “when this partial object arrives on the scene, it blocks the path to the old conception of das Ding, which is now only a retrospective illusion” (Copjec, Reference Copjec2002, p. 37). It is an illusion because what is irreducible is precisely division, absence, and lack. In this context, illusion signifies being only through “a delegate, specifically, that betrays its mandator” (Copjec, Reference Copjec2002, p. 36). Thus, although this logic of delegation forfeits any direct access to the Thing, and although nothing remains but delegative representation inscribed within the lack or absence of the Thing, it is nonetheless clear that the logic of delegation, despite the impossibility of arresting it, still presupposes, for the coherence of its articulation, divisions such as some and whole jouissance, partial and primordial object. Lack here remains loss, and more precisely the loss of a primordial object. In this way, the notion of lack continues to be coordinated with the concept of wholeness, and representation retains a grounding teleological relation to the lost primordial object. Representation, as a function of the drive, creates “an object, a thing in the very place where unified jouissance, das Ding, is absent” (Copjec, Reference Copjec2002, p. 39). The arrival of the Thing is infinitely deferred, and through this deferral “the splitting in the order of appearance” (Copjec, Reference Copjec2002, p. 37) is produced, such that a thing can appear in the place of the Thing, thereby becoming more than itself yet less than the Thing.

Although the difference between Derrida and Lacan may be traced on several levels, the scope of this article requires that I restrict myself to the question of lack. Since Copjec’s analysis of the Thing departs primarily from Sigmund Freud’s (Reference Freud2003) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one may draw a subtle distinction between Derrida and Lacan by turning to Derrida’s own reading of the same Freudian text. If one keeps in view the relation among repetition, representation, supplementation, and lack, it becomes possible to see that no primordial referent is required in order to articulate the notion of lack, since the represented as such already functions as a supplement within the movement of supplementation. The represented is, paradoxically, itself the supplement of a delegate and is therefore likewise a delegate. Lack, then, is the lack of a supplement, not the loss of a primordial object. It is precisely this logic of originary repetition that commands Derrida’s interest in his reading of Freud, and Derrida himself states the principal aim of that reading in the following passage, where the logic of the supplement — and with it the logic of lack that I am attempting to reconstruct here — is articulated with particular clarity:

Hence, “the original devil” names the productive redoubling of repetition, a structure in which the original or primordial object is not simply missed, and in which its absence is not what gives rise to representative supplementarity. Rather, the primordial object itself functions as a supplement to the representative substitute. “The original devil” thus designates an arche-relationality within which any primordial object is lacking precisely because it is inscribed in this relational field as a supplementary term, albeit one possessing a distinct economy or status in relation to other supplementary terms.Footnote ²⁸

Therefore, although Hägglund is undoubtedly right to criticize the complementary logic governing metaphysical conceptions of lack, his work offers no explicit indication — still less any reconstructive account — of Derrida’s positive deployment of the notion of originary lack, despite the abundance of textual evidence to that effect cited above. It seems, consequently, that Hägglund takes lack itself to be inarticulable except ultimately in metaphysical terms. In this respect, he remains within the very dichotomy between lack and differentiality that Johnson, in her otherwise highly productive engagement with Derrida’s reading of Lacan, also reproduces.Footnote ²⁹ The vicarious logic of lack, however, as I have sought to reconstruct it on the basis of this textual evidence, points in the opposite direction: For Derrida, lack is not merely an object of deconstructive critique, but also names a counter-movement to the metaphysical project and thus constitutes, as I have tried to show, an indispensable element of his central argument. The concept of lack is itself the site of an agonistic encounter between metaphysical logic and its destitution or transformation. What is thereby undermined through this transformed logic of lack is not only the negative conception of lack; more importantly, it becomes clear that the vicarious logic of lack reconstructed here, following Derrida, cannot be thought within the logical structureFootnote ³⁰ of what he identifies — and what we have reconstructed — as the movement of complementarity.