the United States might have seemed to many a conservative country, making the founding of the magazine an act of “supererogation,” as the Catholic reactionary put it, in fact it was anything but: it was a bold counterstroke against liberal hegemony.

the totally supererogatory outbursts of Capital

contradictions and superpluses, the unconscious, the unsayable. They are not supererogatory to reality: to the contrary. Nor ca they be so to those who strive to change it.

there is something distinct about social sadism in modern capitalism, and in neoliberalism in particular. This is surplus cruelty in a specific sense, sadism supererogatory in relation to the – conjunctural, contested – ‘functional’ requirements of the system

It was as if by the mere act of betraying her husband, she had adequately bested him; it was supererogatory for her to gloat, and, if she gloated at all, it was over her fine restraint in not-gloating, over the integrity of her moral sense

if it is prized in people who have to do it surely it would be a supererogatory virtue in someone who wasn’t even married.

To reinvent the wheel of the rose window would be a supererogatory chore.