Although Levi Strauss in his use of the word supplementary never emphasizes, as I do here, the two directions of meaning which are so strangely compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses this word twice in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, at one point where he is speaking of the overabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which this overabundance can refer In his endeavor to understand the world, man therefore always has at his disposal a surplus of signification (which he shares out amongst things according to the laws of symbolic thought which is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study).