Through this series of supplements. Derrida writes. there emerges a law: that of an endless linked series, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing that they defer: the impression of the thing itself of immediate presence. or originary perception. Immediacy is derived. Everything begins with the intermediary The more these texts want to tell us of the importance of the presence of the thing itself. the more they show the necessity of intermediaries. These signs or supplements are in fact responsible for the sense that there is something there (like Maman) to grasp. What we learn from these texts is that the idea of the original is created by the copies. and that the original is always ararred-never to be grasped. The conclusion is that our common-sense notion of reality as something present, and of the original as something that was once present, proves untenable: experience is always mediated by signs and the original' is produced as an effect of signs, of supplements