A summary of what Glas is all about:

As I have pointed out previously Derrida is an anti-foundationalist.

In Glas we see him
subverting the foundations of philosophy, the book and literary criticism. We implicitly
accept that we can be sure that texts have some foundation. Derrida points out that this is not
necessarily so. If we try to define what a text is we realise that we need some definable, and
decisive, characteristics. Probably we would say that a text, in book, journal or magazine
form, will have some boundaries which mark it from its outside, so that it can be seen as a
unique work, with definite physical limits. Thus, any book or article will have a title and an
author and will belong to a recognisable genre: novel, poem, essay, philosophical treatise, etc.
It will be self-contained. In Glas, Derrida opens these apparently firm aspects up for
questioning and destabilises them not just by writing about them, but by making a text in
which they perform differently.

The word glas in French means the death knell tolling of a bell, as in Thomas Grays poem,
Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day . This
anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature. In doing so it
heralds the death knell of the logocentric totalising book and totalising philosophy. You
will recall that I said in the last session that Derrida is best known for his work on the
relation between thought and language with its playful interrogation of the borders between
philosophical and literary writing. In Glas, we have a primary example of this as two
columns of text are printed side by side in different typographical styles, formats and
languages. On the left-hand side we find Philosophy expressed by Hegel, who believed that
the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of Absolute Knowledge. In this perfect family,
the domain of reason belongs exclusively to the father, and the marginalized woman is left
with the roles of wife and mother. Derrida suggests that these gender roles underlie all of
Western philosophys notions, from the time of Plato onwards, of how knowledge should be
formed and passed down through strictly controlled channels. These gender roles also
provide a foundation for the authority of the name, the signature and the author.

Glas then opens philosophy up to the disruptive effects of Literature. On the right hand
column of Glas we have a subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, the
French homosexual and thief whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.
Neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened
up to the other column. In each column, Derrida cites and grafts from Hegels personal letters
and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genets journal of the thief and his
prose-poetry. Thus, Glas has boundaries, authors, titles, etc., but not of a stable kind. It has
multiplicity of authors and their authority is always placed in doubt. Glas has in fact an
excess of boundaries, so many that they spoil the unified text. They divide it up inside itself.
There is no wholeness or unity, no proper textual unity. Its fragments offer multiple
beginnings and endings. We have an inevitable mix of genres taken from literature (scenario,
prose-poem, novel, collage) and philosophy (essay, exegesis, dialogue, critique, commentary,
colloquy). Glas is almost a text and yet more than one, both text and non-text at the same
time.

Thus, by juxtaposing the two columns of text Derrida forces the reader to engage in, as he
puts it, the air battle between pure philosophical truth and perverse literary freeplay.
Derrida plays upon the names of Hegel and Genet. Hegel claimed that knowledge proceeds
ever upwards through the dialectic. That is, a dialogue between a thesis and an antithesis,
which results in a higher synthesis. But in Derridas hands, the name Hegel mutates into the
soaring aigle (Eagle) ascending on the wings of dialectic, turning and turning ever upwards in
spirals of thesis, antithesis and a higher synthesis, conflict and resolution until it nests in
Ultimate Harmony, in the mountain peak of Absolute Reason.

But then there is the other column. Genets column. Literatures column. Disrupting the
upward flight of this Hegelian Eagle of Philosophical Truth, turning and turning in its
widening spirals, there blossoms, like vast aerial gardens of anti-aircraft explosions, the
flowers of Genet, of Genets prose, of Literature. The flower power in this instance being
Genets blossoms of metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles
and dark labyrinths. By putting both on the same page, Derrida forces the reader to
experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors
that blossom up in explosions of meaning from within even the most rigorously unruffled
philosophical prose. These explosions of course disrupt the upward spirals of the Eagle of
Hegelian philosophy.

Derrida is always interested in the between. He is not trying to dismiss philosophy in
favour of literature but in developing something between Philosophy and Literature which is
(n)either Philosophy (n)or Literature. He forces us to see how each contains the other, for
philosophy may contain literary metaphors, but metaphor is itself a philosophical concept. In
effect Derrida is offering a critique of Hegels and to a large extent Western philosophy as a
wholes arguments for paternal authority, for the family, for the Holy Family and the State
in the regulation of truth and its guaranteed passage through authorized channels. So theres a
great deal at stake in the encounter between Hegel, the philosopher of right, and Genet, the
seaport rent-boy the conduct of philosophy in its search for truth, but also governance by
the state and by the laws of patriarchy. Derridas text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and
families into unstable figures. Their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual
hierarchies: the sacrosanct writing of truth, or the guaranteed transmissions of
knowledge.

In Glas, the texts of the philosopher have no assured resistance to those of the literary writer,
the thief, or others. But then the literary text has no such assurance either, being composed of
many previous writings in the form of intertext and direct or indirect quotation. Once
Philosophy, like Literature, admits that it is just writing, its boundaries are not secure and
Derrida will have completed his task.