Derrida’s Blind Spot

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.