258 Derrida 1963–1983
of L’Arc devoted to him; it ‘went against everything [he] wanted’,
mainly because it simply reproduced a fragment from the section on
Genet, without giving the least idea of how the whole thing should
look.^4
With the start of the academic year and the various engagements
accepted by Derrida, his rate of writing slowed down. But he still
hoped to fi nish the work over the Christmas vacation. Given the
dimensions that Glas had assumed, the plan to publish it with Fata
Morgana no longer made sense: Bruno Roy’s publishing house
specialized in short books and could not take on such a techni-
cally complex and fi nancially risky project. So the work would be
published by Galilée, a house that Derrida increasingly approved
of and whose name in any case harmonized wonderfully well with
the verbal chains around which the text was organized – from the
gladiolus (glaïeul) to the gob of spit (glaviot), from galleys (galères)
to glory (gloire).
Studying the project with Michel Delorme and the layout artist
Dominique de Fleurian, Derrida started to realize how diffi cult
and expensive it would be, in concrete terms, to produce the book.
Page layout would take months of work, making countless meetings
and constant adjustments inevitable. Created a good ten years or
so before word processing came on the scene, together with com-
puter-assisted publication, Glas was, for the author as well as the
publisher, an extraordinary technical feat. One needs to remember
that in those days, fi rst proofs came in the form of scrolls on thermal
paper that needed to be cut and pasted by hand on a luminous table.
The least little change meant you had to start all over again. The
work was printed, states the colophon, on 27 September 1974, and
was published in the ‘Digraphe’ series edited by Jean Ristat. The
fi rst run was of 5,300 copies; it would take years for the entire run to
be sold.
It was the book’s material aspect that most impressed at fi rst
sight. Glas was a volume of twenty-fi ve centimetres by twenty-fi ve,
a highly unusual format, especially for an essay. The cover was
austere and grey; there was not the least blurb. When you open the
book, you are even more surprised:
First: two columns. Truncated, at top and bottom, and carved
in their sides too: cuts, tattoos, incrustations. A fi rst reading
can suggest that two texts, rising one against the other or one
without the other, do not communicate. And in a certain delib-
erate way, this remains true, as far as the pretext is concerned,
the object, the language, the style, the rhythm, the law. A dia-
lectic on the one side, a galactic on the other, heterogeneous
and yet indiscernible in their eff ects, sometimes leading to a real
hallucination.^5