8 Glas 1973–1975
Glas, in all its formal complexity, did not come from out of nowhere.
Jean Genet’s text on Rembrandt published in Tel Quel in 1967,
‘What has remained of a Rembrandt torn into very regular little
squares and fl ushed down the toilet’, was already divided into two
unequal columns, as would be ‘Tympan’, the fi rst text in Margins of
Philosophy. But above all, just before embarking on Glas, Derrida
had begun another planned book in two columns, The Calculus of
Languages, on Condillac. The unfi nished manuscript preserved at
IMEC comprises seventy-eight typewritten pages: clearly, the sheets
of paper were introduced into the typewriter twice over, with two
diff erent justifi cations (i.e. right or left). From time to time, each of
the texts is interrupted by a few blank lines, which enables Derrida
to master the correspondences between the two columns, despite the
rudimentary DIY methods at his disposal. After a while, the second
column abandons the art of writing according to Condillac to make
room for a commentary on ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, an essay
of Freud’s to which Derrida would return at length in The Post
Card. Otherwise, The Calculus of Languages is fairly well behaved –
far from the typographical and stylistic eff ervescence of Glas.
The manuscript of this in every way exceptional text has, unfor-
tunately, been mislaid: there is no trace of it in Irvine, or in IMEC,
nor apparently at Galilée. But Derrida described the genesis of
Glas on several occasions. In particular, his correspondence with
Roger Laporte, one of his main interlocutors at this time, is full
of invaluable details. Laporte, who had been appointed profes-
sor at Montpellier in 1971, had initially felt very isolated there,
but he soon struck up a friendship with Bruno Roy, who ran Fata
Morgana. This small publishing house, which aimed to be ‘at the
crossroads of artisanal excellence and literary exigence’, had already
published short texts by Foucault, Deleuze, and Levinas, as well
as The Madness of the Day by Blanchot. It was this publisher to
whom Derrida at fi rst wanted to send the highly idiosyncratic work
of which he was thinking. In April 1973, in a letter to Laporte, he