The System and Its Waste: Derrida and Foucault on Sexuality
1. The System
When Foucault opens Technologies of the Self, he does not begin with sexuality as a private experience or with desire as something that originates within the individual. He begins with a system: “rules, duties, and prohibitions,” together with the “interdictions and restrictions” associated with sexuality. The vocabulary is significant. It presents sexuality first as a field organized by distinctions between what may and may not be done, what is permitted and what is forbidden. The individual appears within an already established order of obligations and limits.
This also points to what Foucault means by sexuality. He is not simply referring to a natural domain of sexual acts, desires, and pleasures. Sexuality is a historically constituted field in which conduct, desire, knowledge, norms, and relations to oneself become organized. The question is therefore not simply how individuals behave sexually, but how they come to understand and regulate themselves within a particular historical organization of sexuality.
At this level, the structure seems relatively straightforward. There are acts that are permitted and acts that are forbidden; behaviors prescribed by rules and others excluded by them. One could therefore approach sexuality by reconstructing the normative order that establishes these boundaries. What is allowed? What is prohibited? What duties govern conduct? Such questions identify the formal structure within which sexual behavior becomes intelligible.
But Foucault immediately refuses to stop there. He says that he was concerned “not simply with the acts that were permitted and forbidden” but with “the feelings represented, the thoughts, the desires one might experience,” and with the impulse to search within oneself for “any hidden feeling” or “any movement of the soul.” The distinction between permitted and forbidden acts is therefore not the endpoint of the inquiry. It opens onto another question: what does a normative distinction require the individual to do with himself?
This shifts the analysis from the regulation of conduct to the formation of a relation to oneself. A prohibition does not merely mark the boundary of acceptable behavior. It can also make certain desires, thoughts, and feelings into objects of attention. Once something is forbidden, the individual may be required to determine what he wants, whether such a desire exists, what its presence means, and whether something hidden within himself must be brought to light.
The normative order thus acquires an interior dimension. Its operation is not confined to external conduct. It can enter into the subject's own examination of himself.
This becomes clearer in the question Foucault formulates about the history of sexuality: “How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden?” The verb decipher changes the problem. The forbidden is no longer merely something that must not be done. It becomes something that must be interpreted. The subject is called upon to establish a truth about himself in relation to a prohibition.
The question is therefore not simply what a rule excludes. It is what kind of subject is produced when a person is required to understand himself in relation to that exclusion.
Foucault's inquiry consequently moves beyond the classification of acts toward the practices through which individuals become objects of knowledge to themselves. The prohibition remains part of the structure, but the object of analysis has shifted: from the boundary itself to the subject who must negotiate, interpret, and articulate his relation to himself within it.
2. The Forbidden
This gives the forbidden a more complicated status than simple exclusion. At the level of conduct, the prohibited act occupies a negative position: it is something that should not be done. At the level of self-relation, however, it can acquire another significance. The individual may have to examine whether the desire exists, what form it takes, where it comes from, and what it reveals about him.
The forbidden therefore does not remain outside the subject's experience. It can become one of the objects through which that experience is organized and interpreted.
This is why Foucault's analysis cannot be reduced to an opposition between external rules and internal feelings. The rule and the individual's relation to himself are connected. A prohibition can establish the conditions under which a person is required to scrutinize his own desires. The subject does not merely encounter a boundary imposed from outside; he is led to understand himself through it.
The point becomes especially important when Foucault connects prohibitions with an obligation to tell the truth. His question is not simply how sexuality was regulated, but how individuals came to be required to establish and disclose a truth about themselves in relation to it. The problem is therefore not only what must not be done, but what must be known and articulated about oneself in relation to what is forbidden.
Sexuality consequently becomes a privileged field for the production of self-knowledge. A prohibited desire does not disappear merely because the corresponding act is excluded. It can become something that has to be examined, named, confessed, resisted, or interpreted. The exclusion of a possibility can thus generate a demand for knowledge about the person to whom that possibility presents itself.
This changes the analytical importance of the forbidden act. It is no longer merely an example of conduct that falls on the wrong side of a rule. It becomes a point at which the relationship between norm and subject can be observed. What matters is not simply that an act has been classified as illegitimate, but that this classification may require the individual to establish a particular relation to his own desires.
The forbidden therefore occupies an ambiguous position. It is excluded as conduct while becoming significant as an object of reflection. It is denied legitimacy while acquiring importance for self-knowledge.
The crucial point is not that the forbidden somehow escapes the system. It is that its exclusion becomes one of the ways the system operates. The boundary does not simply separate acceptable from unacceptable conduct. It can organize practices through which individuals examine their desires and establish a relation to themselves.
Foucault thus begins with a system of rules and prohibitions but arrives at a problem that the formal description of that system cannot by itself resolve: the subject who must decipher himself in relation to what the system forbids.
Part II — Derrida and the Supplement
3. The Supplement
Derrida's reading of Rousseau's sexuality gives this problem a different form. Here the issue is not primarily the relation between prohibition and self-knowledge, but the status of a sexual practice that Rousseau treats as secondary to a supposedly natural and proper form of sexuality.
Masturbation appears in Rousseau's account as a substitute for sexual relations with women. It is artificial where sexual intercourse is imagined as natural; indirect where the latter promises direct contact; supplementary where the other is treated as primary. Rousseau calls it a “dangerous supplement.” Derrida takes this designation seriously because the word supplement already contains a tension: something added to what is presumed complete, but also something that makes good an insufficiency. The supplement appears secondary while simultaneously responding to a lack.
Masturbation is dangerous in Rousseau's account because it replaces the presence of another person with an image and allows desire to proceed without the risks and demands of sexual intercourse. Yet this very distance also gives it a protective function. Derrida points to Rousseau's admission that intercourse with women aggravated his ill health, while the corresponding “vice” appeared to produce less injurious effects. What Rousseau condemns as a deviation can therefore serve as a means of avoiding what he regards as a greater danger.
The supplement consequently occupies two positions at once. It threatens the natural order Rousseau wants to preserve, but it also protects the individual from dangers associated with that order. It transgresses the prohibition while helping him maintain it. As Derrida puts it, the supplement “transgresses and at the same time respects the interdict.”
This double function is what makes the example philosophically significant. If natural sexual relations were entirely sufficient, masturbation could remain a merely accidental substitute. Yet Rousseau's own account gives the substitute a function that cannot simply be dismissed. It provides a way of dealing with a desire that the supposedly primary relation does not straightforwardly contain.
The issue, then, is not whether Rousseau secretly preferred masturbation. Derrida is after something more structural. Once the supposedly secondary practice is examined, the distinction between original and substitute becomes difficult to maintain in the simple form in which Rousseau presents it. The substitute is not merely added to an already complete relation. It becomes part of the economy through which that relation is desired, avoided, and represented.
Derrida's analysis therefore moves from masturbation toward what he calls “sexual” auto-affection and, ultimately, auto-affection more generally. But the sexual example remains important because it makes the structure visible in concrete form. Masturbation appears to be a deviation from sexuality properly understood, yet its very function reveals that desire is already entangled with mediation, distance, representation, and substitution.
The result is not that masturbation simply replaces natural sexuality as the new primary term. Derrida's point is more disruptive than that. The opposition itself becomes unstable. What was supposed to be merely secondary begins to show something about the conditions under which the primary term can be desired and experienced in the first place.
The supplement therefore matters not because it occupies the center, but because its apparently marginal position makes the structure of the center more difficult to sustain.
4. When the Secondary Becomes Necessary
The connection with Foucault can now be made without treating the two thinkers as offering versions of the same argument.
Foucault begins with the organization of sexuality through rules, duties, prohibitions, and restrictions. Derrida begins with Rousseau's distinction between natural sexual relations and masturbation as their dangerous supplement. Their objects and methods are different. Yet both analyses become more revealing when attention shifts from what occupies the privileged position to what has been excluded, subordinated, or designated as secondary.
In Foucault, the forbidden act leads toward the subject's relation to himself. What is prohibited becomes something that must be examined and interpreted. In Derrida, masturbation leads toward the instability of the distinction between an original sexual relation and its supplement. What is secondary becomes necessary to understanding the economy in which the primary term is constituted.
The important parallel is therefore not that prohibition and supplement mean the same thing. They do not. Nor is Derrida simply providing a theoretical explanation of what Foucault discovers historically. The more precise connection lies in a shared methodological possibility: follow the subordinate term closely enough, and it may reveal something that the organizing distinction itself conceals.
In Foucault, the forbidden is not simply outside the system. Its exclusion can become productive of practices of self-examination. In Derrida, the supplement is not simply outside the original relation. Its supposed secondary status is part of the structure through which that relation is constituted.
The distinction between central and marginal therefore becomes less secure once the marginal element is followed through its actual effects.
This is especially clear in the sexual material. Rousseau needs masturbation to remain a deviation from proper sexuality, yet his own account gives it a function within the organization of desire. Foucault's prohibited acts occupy a negative position within a normative order, yet the relation to them becomes part of the individual's production of self-knowledge.
Neither case requires us to reverse the hierarchy and declare the secondary term primary. That would simply reproduce the same structure from the opposite direction. The more interesting discovery is that the supposedly secondary element is structurally involved in the operation of the system that subordinates it.
This raises a different question: What does a system reveal about itself through the things it places in a secondary position?
The question is more precise than asking whether the excluded or supplementary element is “really” central. It asks what work the classification itself performs.
A prohibition does not merely identify an act as unacceptable. It can establish a field in which the subject must examine himself. A designation such as “supplement” does not merely identify an addition. It can conceal the dependence of the supposedly complete term upon mediation and substitution.
The subordinate element thus becomes analytically decisive without ceasing to be subordinate within the system being examined. Its very status is what makes it revealing.
5. The Remainder
What emerges from these two readings is therefore not simply something that has escaped the system. The remainder is more interesting than that. It is what becomes visible when we follow the element that the system cannot fully absorb into its preferred distinction.
For Foucault, the forbidden act becomes significant because the subject must establish a relation to it. Prohibition does not end the matter; it can generate practices of examination through which the individual seeks to understand and regulate himself. The excluded possibility thus participates in the formation of the subject.
For Derrida, masturbation occupies a similarly revealing position within Rousseau's account. It is presented as a dangerous substitute for natural sexuality, yet it also functions as a protection against the dangers of that supposedly primary relation. Its secondary status therefore cannot be separated from the economy it is supposed merely to supplement.
The point in neither case is to elevate the remainder into a new center. The forbidden does not become legitimate simply because it reveals something about prohibition, just as masturbation does not become the true form of sexuality because it unsettles Rousseau's hierarchy. The discovery lies elsewhere.
What appears secondary may disclose the conditions under which the primary term is organized.
This gives the remainder a particular methodological importance. Rather than beginning by asking what a system regards as central and taking that hierarchy for granted, one can examine what it excludes, prohibits, or relegates to the margins. Such elements may be especially revealing because the system's relation to them is rarely neutral. It has to classify them, contain them, or explain them away.
The remainder is therefore not simply what the system leaves behind, it is what the system leaves behind but cannot cease to organize.
And it may be precisely there, in its relation to what it excludes or subordinates, that the system becomes most legible.
References
Bradley, A. (2008). Derrida’s Of grammatology: An Edinburgh philosophical guide. Edinburgh University Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)
Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). University of Massachusetts Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1995). The confessions (A. S. B. G. S. R. & J. H. Brumfitt, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1782–1789)
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