My first reaction upon receiving Glas in the mail was that it may have inaugurated a new literary genre: the coffeetable book for academics. Elegantly printed (in several different typefaces, which correspond to the multiple "voices" of the text) and 10 1/4 inches square, Glas looks like the sort of book one would display or read in, but never read.

And, alas, Glas probably will remain unread by most readers…. Conversation between American-style rhetoricians and deconstructionists seems impossible, and the recent de Man case may well serve as a convenient excuse for evading such a conversation indefinitely. Thus far, David Cratis Williams, Dilip Gaonkar, and Martha Solomon are the only rhetoricians who have expressed sympathy with deconstruction, and I suspect Glas will send even them screaming into the night.

Derrida, of course, never was terribly accessible—with the possible exception of his early work on Husserl, Speech and Phenomena, and the essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference. Dissemination began what most might perceive as a descent into a Babel of parody, word-plays, and typographical tomfoolery. Glas is even more difficult than the later sections of Dissemination.

"Glas" means "knell" in French, and the title remains untranslated because throughout the book Derrida will search for the uncanny recurrence of the phoneme "gl" in the works of his two chief subjects: Hegel and Jean Genet, the French homosexual playwright/novelist and thief. The book consists of two seemingly unrelated columns of text, with an occasional third column, the first of which is excerpts from and commentary on Hegel's writings on primitive religion, Judaism, Christianity, and the family, and the second of which does the same for Genet. It is possible that the two columns also represent the two sides of a bell, with the third representing the bell's "clapper," which makes "communication" between the two sides of the bell possible. The book enacts stylistically Derrida's familiar preoccupations with the relationships among philosophy, rhetoric, and literature; the impossibility of absolute knowledge; the priority of writing over speech; and the semantic status of proper names. There is a relatively new focus on deconstructing sexuality, which should make the book of interest to American followers of the new French feminism. There is also a brief stab at a deconstructive reading of Marx. Any attempt, however, at isolating Derrida's "argument" is pointless, because Glas is finally "about" the experience of reading and about the peculiarities of academic prose, which Derrida continues ruthlessly to parody.

Gregory L. Ulmer, in an essay included in the companion volume, Glassary, makes an elegant defense of Derrida's style. Glas is "an essay in postcriticism in which style is assigned an epistemic or cognitive function." Derrida himself puts it this way: "Let us space. The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling or decoupling, gluing and ungluing rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric."

Perhaps a better way of illustrating Derrida's point is to cite a quotation from Genet in Glas: "When one is cunning … one can pretend to believe that words do not budge, that their sense is fixed or has budged thanks to us who become, voluntarily, one feigns to believe, if our appearance is modified just a bit, gods....