Glas 1973–1975 257
mentioned for the fi rst time a planned book in two columns, on
Genet’s work. In his mind, this was just a volume of seventy to a
hundred pages, ‘with a rather complex typographical composition’
- in other words, a project that seemed to suit Fata Morgana down
to the ground. In spite of the usual overwork involved in preparing
his students for the agrégation, Derrida was ready to announce,
on 30 June, that he was working regularly on this text and that the
Condillac had been ‘left to one side for a while’.^1
It was over the summer, fi rst in Les Rassats and then in Nice, that
Derrida wrote most of the work, in a sort of fever, with no tools
other than his little mechanical typewriter. He very quickly discov-
ered that Glas was taking on a form and a size that would inevitably
cause problems for manufacturers and publishers. But the more
progress he made, the more he also had ‘the impression (supersti-
tious, anxious, neurotic – it’s almost the real subject of this text)
that it was the last thing he [was] writing, and also the fi rst book
(composed, planned as such)’.^2
In the radio programme ‘Le bon plaisir’, broadcast on France-
Culture, he said that he had fi rst completed the text on Hegel that
had emerged from the 1971–2 seminar on ‘Hegel’s family’, ‘while
bearing in memory, so to speak, or in planned form’, the text
devoted to Genet.
The two main bands lived together in my memory as I was
writing them, and it was then, belatedly, that I calculated where
to insert the Judas holes, on the bodies of the two columns.
But, concretely, it was done in a very artisanal fashion, which
must have required several rewritings, goings over, cutting and
pasting on the manuscript, on the page, of an ultimately arti-
sanal kind. But the artisanal was to some extent mimicking the
ideal machine that I would like to have built so as to write the
thing all in one go.3*Over the weeks, the text ‘grew in a somewhat monstrous way’,
and Derrida realized that fi nishing it off and getting it published
would involve several diffi culties. He was discontented with the
extract from Glas that appeared in September 1973 in the issue
- In a later interview, he went into more detail: ‘It was well before computers that I
risked the most refractory texts in relation to the norms of linear writings. It would
be easier now for me to do this work of dislocation or typographical invention – of
graftings, insertions, cuttings, and pastings – but I’m not very interested in that
any more from that point of view and in that form. [.. .] Glas – whose unusual
page format also appeared as a short treatise on the organ, sketching a history of
organology up to the present – was written on a little mechanical Olivetti’ (‘The
word processor’, in Paper Machine, pp. 25–6).