Desperately Seeking Supplement: How Polly Baker Sheds Light on Diderot’s Supplément

Abstract

This article offers a new reading of Diderot's Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville in the light of its titular term, 'supplement'. Specifically, it examines the significance of the 'supplement to the Supplement' which Diderot added some eight years after the work was ostensibly completed: Benjamin Franklin's Speech of Miss Polly Baker. The addition of the Speech highlights a central lesson of the Supplement: namely, that the only way to understand texts in Diderot's encyclopaedic age, in which knowledge was constantly shifting, is through a 'supplemental' practice of reading. According to this approach, texts must be intra- and intertextually cross-referenced - as famously encouraged by the renvois in the Encyclopedie. Polly helps Diderot to flag a key intertext to the Supplement, on which he also worked, and in which Polly's Speech also figured: the Abbe Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes. Through a close reading that works with notions of the 'supplement' and the 'supplement of a supplement', as advanced by both Derrida and the Encyclopedie, this article argues that as Franklin's Speech disrupts Diderot's original Supplement it simultaneously adds new meaning to the work, and clarifies what was always, implicitly, there. These actions of disruption and addition elucidate some of the text's most perplexing claims.