Glas 1973–1975 259
Glas was a radicalization of the work begun in Margins of
Philosophy and Dissemination, but it was also, in its own way, a
continuation of Mallarmé’s dream of ‘The Book’.* Compared to
traditional norms, it was the height of provocation. Without begin-
ning or end, divided up in many diff erent ways, playing havoc
with typographic conventions, the book also lacked any scholarly
apparatus: there were no footnotes, and there was no bibliography
whatsoever. In particular, Glas juxtaposed ‘the interpretation of
a major canonical corpus of philosophy, that of Hegel, with the
rewriting of a more or less outlawed poet-writer, Genet’:
This contamination of a great philosophical discourse by a
literary text that is reputedly scandalous or obscene, and of
several norms or kinds of writing by each other, could appear
as violent, already in the ‘page layout’. But it rejoined or
reawoke an old tradition: that of a page ordered in a diff erent
way in its blocks of texts, of interpretation, of inner margins.
And thus, too, the tradition of another space, another practice
of reading, of writing, of exegesis. This was, for me, a way of
assuming the practical consequences of certain propositions
in Of Grammatology concerning the book and the linearity of
writing.^6Marked as it was by the Zeitgeist, Glas can also be read as a reply
to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which had so irritated
Derrida. For, whatever the provocations and textual games of his
work, Derrida refused to abandon the rigour of argument. The left-
hand, most continuous column came out of the seminar of 1971–2:
Derrida followed one thread, that of ‘Hegel’s family’, from its most
biographical version to its most conceptual aspects; the text off ers a
detailed analysis of a few chapters in the Principles of the Philosophy
of Right. The right-hand, much more broken column drifts across
Genet’s entire oeuvre, bringing out the omnipresence of fl owers
in it and, through them, the very name of the author.† The path,
however, is left free and open: unlike Sartre in his Saint Genet: Actor
- The little-known article on Mallarmé published by Derrida in early 1974, in the
collective volume Tableau de la littérature française, in certain ways resembles a
‘reader’s guide’ to Glas. Following a French syllable such as or [French for ‘gold’,
among other things – Tr.] in undecidable games that sweep it far beyond signifi er
and signifi ed, Derrida focuses on ‘those infi nitely vaster, more powerful and inter-
woven chains, [.. .] unsupported, as it were, always suspended.’ ‘So what we are left
with is the way the “word”, the packets of its decomposition or its reinscription,
never identifi able in their singular presence, fi nally refer only to their own interplay,
and actually never emerge from it to lead towards anything else’ (‘Mallarmé’, in
Tableau de la littérature française, vol. 3, Paris: Gallimard, 1974, p. 375).
† Genet = jennet (horse), but genêt = the fl ower ‘broom’. – Tr.