The previous chapters open a set of questions about the relationship between time and self-consciousness, an axis which has received too little attention within literary studies. This neglect is all the more surprising since the idea of self-consciousness itself has played such a central role in the characterisation not only of contemporary fiction but of the more general social and discursive condition of the contemporary world. In prolepsis, we find on one hand a kind of temporal self-distance – a form of reflection which involves looking back on the present, from one's own point of view or that of another – and on the other hand a kind of reversed causation, in which this future retrospect causes the event it looks back on. But can this really be thought of as reversed causation or backwards time? The purpose of this chapter is to explore this question alongside a consideration of the relationship between time, consciousness and self-consciousness.

To begin, we might revisit the question of Derridean supplementarity, formulated in Speech and Phenomena as a temporal structure in which ‘a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on’ and which in Archive Fever takes the form ‘the archive produces the event as much as it records it’. In both cases, the word ‘produces’ indicates causality, so that the later possibility or the recording archive are assigned the status of cause in spite of their posteriority.