Derrida: A Biography

Glas 1973–1975 261

But the reactions of friends and colleagues to this work were at
least as important to Derrida. Althusser, even though his personal
style was the polar opposite of Derrida’s, sent him a lyrical letter. He
had placed Glas on the coff ee table of his living room, and sang its
praises to anyone who dropped by:

Personally, I read you mostly in fragments – sometimes more

in one fell swoop, but in the evenings. Slowly. Always on

the coff ee table where there’s no question of working but of

listening to whoever’s talking opposite me, – I read and it’s

like listening to you. [.. .] You’ve written ‘something’ extra-

ordinary. You know this better than we, your readers, do.

You’ve got in ahead! because you’ve written, but we’ll catch

up, only to discover that you’ve moved on... That’s why

I’m making haste and speaking the language of my belated-

ness: I was bowled over, Jacques, by this text, this book, its

two columns, their double monologue and its complicity, the

toil and the gleam, the neutral and its pain, the dreary and its

splendour – and the internal repetitiveness, along each ‘track’,

of that contrasting choir. Please forgive me for these ridiculous

words, but it ‘says’ completely new things, that go past Hegel

and Genet; it’s a philosophical text without precedent which

is a poem of a kind I’ve never come across before. I’m still

reading.^9

Even more surprising, Pierre Bourdieu was also very warm in his
praise:

Dear pal,

I want to thank you, very sincerely, for your Glas, which I’ve

read with great pleasure. I was interested by your graphic

experiments, inter alia. I’m also trying, following another logic,

to break the forms of traditional rhetoric and your endeavour

has given me a great deal of encouragement. On the content, as

far as I can sense, – it’s not so easy to touch bottom... – I think

that we could agree on many points. I sometimes tell myself

that, if I did philosophy, I’d like to do what you’re doing.^10

In the United States, Glas roused the enthusiasm, in particular,
of Geoff rey Hartman, Paul de Man’s colleague at Yale. In this
strange book, he saw the consummation of one of the dreams of the
German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel: ‘Symphilosophy’,
a symbiosis of art and philosophy.^11
With Paule Thévenin, things were much more diffi cult. On 20
October 1974, Derrida shyly and awkwardly sent her the volume.
A few months earlier, he had given her the part concerning Genet