In a key chapter from Of Grammatology, ‘“… That Dangerous Supplement …”’, Derrida describes the strange operation of the supplement in Rousseau’s work, tracing its chain of associations with writing, masturbation, and blindness. In the same chapter, Derrida goes on to formulate his deconstructive approach to textuality by explaining that the supplement forms ‘a sort of blind spot’ in Rousseau’s text. Derrida thus addresses the physical condition of blindness in Rousseau’s work while continuing to exploit the literary trope of blindness in his own writing, the ‘blind spot’ forming another ‘blind spot’ of the text en abyme. In this paper, I would like to offer a reading of blindness in Derrida’s work. Drawing from some selected texts in disability studies, I want to attend to the trope of blindness in Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Memoirs of the Blind as well as in Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight and Louis Althusser’s Reading Capital. This reading of blindness in Derrida’s work, then, not only broaches the intellectual affinity between Derrida and his contemporaries but also demonstrates the crucial part that the trope of blindness has played in the emergence of deconstruction and other critical practices of reading.

This essay argues that David Wills’s work re-articulates the relation between technology and language by treating language as a form of mechanicity engendered by tropological substitution. This tropological machinery, Wills suggests, operates automatically while producing and subtending supposedly ‘natural’ phenomena. The essay traces this argument through Wills’s early work up to his book Inanimation, arguing that these tropological dimensions of language become an increasingly important part of his account of how technology operates reflexively. The essay closes with an argument for how tropological language is a central figure for what Wills calls ‘inanimation’, the constantly displaced border between life and its others—death and the inanimate. It concludes that Wills’s conception of the relation between language and technology produces a unique ‘zone of indistinction’ between the animate and the inanimate, a form of ‘life’ that is no longer purely biological.

Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s 1962 lecture On Time and Being concludes the last session of the 1978–79 seminar published in Donner le temp II. There, Heidegger suggests that the task of thinking consists of thinking Being without regard to metaphysics, while ceasing all overcoming of metaphysics as such. What is given as the task for thought is that which onto-theology makes impossible to think, that is, the constitutive aporetic remainder of metaphysical thinking. This essay contends that for both Heidegger and Derrida the task of thought consists in this same matter of thinking, with which the question of the gift primarily deals. It maintains that in order to think the giving of the gift without regard to metaphysics, the gift could be thought in terms of anxiety. In this perspective, anxiety emerges as a thoughtful affect that gives an access to thinking the impossible, cutting through the onto-theological order of metaphysics. Finally, bringing together Heidegger and Lacan’s accounts of anxiety allows us to creep deeper into this liminal dimension of what is to be thought.