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 Gray’s
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 deathk nell 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 philosophy’s 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
Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s
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 Derrida’s 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. Genet’s column. Literature’s 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 Genet’s prose, of Literature. The flower power in this instance
being Genet’s 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 Hegel’s – and to a large
extent Western philosophy as a whole’s – 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 there’s 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. Derrida’s 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.