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Clang (Volume 62)
A new translation of Derrida’s groundbreaking juxtaposition of Hegel and Genet, forcing two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other
Jacques Derrida’s famously challenging book Glas puts the practice of philosophy and the very acts of writing and reading to the test. Formatted with parallel texts, its left column discusses G. W. F. Hegel and its right column engages Jean Genet, with numerous notes and interpolations in the margins. The resulting work, published for the first time in French in 1974, is a collage that practices theoretical thinking as a form of grafting.
Presented here in an entirely new translation as Clang—its title resonating like the sound of an alarm or death knell—this book brilliantly juxtaposes Hegel’s totalizing, hierarchical system of thought with Genet’s autobiographical, carceral erotics. It innovatively forces two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other: philosophical and literary, familial and perverse, logical and sensory.
In both content and structure, Clang heightens the significance of all encounters across ruptures of thought or experience and vibrates with the impact of discordant languages colliding.
Jacques Derrida’s famously challenging book Glas puts the practice of philosophy and the very acts of writing and reading to the test. Formatted with parallel texts, its left column discusses G. W. F. Hegel and its right column engages Jean Genet, with numerous notes and interpolations in the margins. The resulting work, published for the first time in French in 1974, is a collage that practices theoretical thinking as a form of grafting.
Presented here in an entirely new translation as Clang—its title resonating like the sound of an alarm or death knell—this book brilliantly juxtaposes Hegel’s totalizing, hierarchical system of thought with Genet’s autobiographical, carceral erotics. It innovatively forces two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other: philosophical and literary, familial and perverse, logical and sensory.
In both content and structure, Clang heightens the significance of all encounters across ruptures of thought or experience and vibrates with the impact of discordant languages colliding.
312 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 1974
18 people are currently reading
933 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
650 books1,797 followersJacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
November 10, 2008
Well, some of the sponge/Ponge riffing is pretty cool, but I can't help feeling that reading Derrida here (as in many other texts) is the equivalent of being forced to watch him masturbate while he's watching porn--a video of himself masturbating. Sorry Good People of Theory Town.
January 23, 2015
Thus book shatters your concepts of book, text and reading when you open it and begin. For there is no beginning as there is no end. Its margins roll on and off beyond the pages and sew/cut into the fabric of our very lives.
I cannot begin commenting on Glas. I would never end. In a sense all I ever write is a reflection, a resonance of the knell, the bell, the ringing that shatters so softly, that is Glas.
I cannot begin commenting on Glas. I would never end. In a sense all I ever write is a reflection, a resonance of the knell, the bell, the ringing that shatters so softly, that is Glas.
July 10, 2020
this one is a reading experience i have never had before. i almost don't know if Reading is the right word; it was like a contradictingly quick consumption, bolting down a hefty morsel. relies so much on the visual of the page but somehow, somehow, the imprint it left was anything but the image/text/form???? that being said, it's intertextuality ten-fold. like you're in a house of mirrors while also falling down an endless rabbit hole. amazing
May 29, 2007
While some may consider this book a little abstract, Derrida's glosses of Genet and Hegel are filled with poetry. My advice in reading this book is to enjoy the way that Derrida deconstructs the notion of a book and not to worry too much about making sense of everything.
February 7, 2025
“It’s a witticism [mot d’esprit]: difficult to decipher, nocturnal in its form, addressed also to the unconscious, profound wisdom incapable of giving its reasons, a sort of cryptogram…”
I have never read anything like Clang. I will never read anything like it again. I wonder, even, if I've read it at all (I began Clang knowing that, if I somehow got to its last page, I will have only "technically" read it). For, says Derrida, Clang reads you. It also reads itself as it goes along.
I do not know what it means to tombfall. I do not know what a hardbind is. For all their figuration in Clang, I remain horribly, hilariously ignorant of the sense of every neologism deployed here: in addition to the above, and off the top of my head, there's antherection, the bit, paranthesis, and dissemence. To make heads or tails of these (and more), I'll have to rely on the testimony of whoever's crazy enough to have written on Clang.
A user before me, writing ten years ago, said they cannot venture to commentate on this "book": "I would never end." For the time, at least, I feel the same. Clang has been a nine-month-long roller coaster ride. I need a break.
I have never read anything like Clang. I will never read anything like it again. I wonder, even, if I've read it at all (I began Clang knowing that, if I somehow got to its last page, I will have only "technically" read it). For, says Derrida, Clang reads you. It also reads itself as it goes along.
I do not know what it means to tombfall. I do not know what a hardbind is. For all their figuration in Clang, I remain horribly, hilariously ignorant of the sense of every neologism deployed here: in addition to the above, and off the top of my head, there's antherection, the bit, paranthesis, and dissemence. To make heads or tails of these (and more), I'll have to rely on the testimony of whoever's crazy enough to have written on Clang.
A user before me, writing ten years ago, said they cannot venture to commentate on this "book": "I would never end." For the time, at least, I feel the same. Clang has been a nine-month-long roller coaster ride. I need a break.
March 18, 2018
The book that started it all
Read
March 14, 2025Having now finished a seminar on this book and written a research paper on it, I can say it is one of the more challenging texts I've encountered. If you've read your Hegel, then you will find the left-hand column quite illuminating, as it is was based off of two seminars and quite pedagogical in nature. It powerfully focuses on the figural position of the Jew in dialectical logic and the role that the family of Hegel plays throughout his writing. However, the right-hand column on Jean Genet lacks any of the lucidity which carries the left-hand. It more or less amounts to an intentional appropriation of Genet's work that is supposed to signify the horrifying power of language and history to consume even the most radical of texts. You may not find a sentence to be as clear as the former in the entirety of the right-hand column. I do not recommend that any given person read this book. You must have a familiarity with Hegel and Genet. You should also read it with other people. It is an experimental text whose formal composition is intentionally confusing. You've been warned.
Published in French in 1974, Glas marks a watershed moment in Derrida’s intellectual development. Whereas Derrida’s earlier work was rather optimistic about deconstruction’s possibilities, such sanguinity regarding deconstruction’s challenge to the stability of metaphysics is hardly noticeable in Glas. For example, Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, an earlier collection of essays written between 1959-66, contended that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger marked the historical moment in which it was no longer assumed that structure had a fixed and immobile center founded upon a certitude that could master anxiety. Rather, these writers demonstrated, for Derrida, how the center of structure is not an invariable presence with a fixed locus, but a functional concept that merely underwent a series of substitutions. With Glas, Derrida wagers that the Western metaphysical tradition possesses a greater ability to absorb and incorporate what seeks to denounce it than Derrida previously understood.
Don't hesitate to DM me and ask for the paper I wrote, I'd be happy to share.
Published in French in 1974, Glas marks a watershed moment in Derrida’s intellectual development. Whereas Derrida’s earlier work was rather optimistic about deconstruction’s possibilities, such sanguinity regarding deconstruction’s challenge to the stability of metaphysics is hardly noticeable in Glas. For example, Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, an earlier collection of essays written between 1959-66, contended that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger marked the historical moment in which it was no longer assumed that structure had a fixed and immobile center founded upon a certitude that could master anxiety. Rather, these writers demonstrated, for Derrida, how the center of structure is not an invariable presence with a fixed locus, but a functional concept that merely underwent a series of substitutions. With Glas, Derrida wagers that the Western metaphysical tradition possesses a greater ability to absorb and incorporate what seeks to denounce it than Derrida previously understood.
Don't hesitate to DM me and ask for the paper I wrote, I'd be happy to share.
Read
June 20, 2016Takes you some interesting places in your head. And if you allow it, this way of seeing and expressing and re-seeing can spread into other areas of your creative life.
December 7, 2025
Glas is concerned with a succession of shapes/figures: the circle, the triangle, the column, the cut, the pyramid, the flower. It is a question of the closed circuit of exchange and what comes to disrupt it, of the phallus and its potential subversion, but also of what remains in the transitions between each stage of development in Hegel's system, as opposed to what changes. As such, Derrida mines Hegel's corpus on the movement from the family to bourgeois/civil society to the State, with his theology always operating in the background or foreground, especially on the transition from Judaism to Christianity (in the "speculative Good Friday," the human and the divine, transcendence and immanence, come to inmix). Central here is the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the concept of Pleroma—it could be taken either as totality or as surplus. Therefore, Derrida does not so much seek to proffer a critique of Hegel as to think him inside out. (Hamacher's reading of Hegel seems to be largely derivative of the above.) Theology also brings us to Hegel's philosophy of nature: the "flower religion" points to the figure of the flower as the bridge between the vegetative and the animal: interestingly enough, because here is introduced culpability, which is to say the Oedipal unconscious (we are also treated to Hegel's gloss on the passage from the animal to the human, as two desires marked by their relation to temporality: the introduction of the present). Central to Hegel's account of political transition is the institution of marriage, which returns Derrida to familiar problematics: filiation, phallocentrism (Father-Sun-Eagle), sexual difference. Against Kant's gloss (on virginity, polygamy, marriage as the domination of woman over man), we see Hegel transcend his usual grafting of the active/passive dichotomy onto the masculine/feminine divide via Hegel's reading of Antigone—just not that of the Phenomenology. For elsewhere, Hegel provides a much better gloss: in the brother-sister relation (child as death, mediation), for Hegel, there is in a sense no sexual difference, and Antigone as figural of the sororal is able to link singularity to universality (that of ethical action) precisely by bypassing the particular (of political life, which Creon falls to). So, over and against Hegel's standard reading of woman as being barred from political life due to her familial partisanship, we here get an opposite reading: it is not woman who is mired in the particular, but rather that which overcomes it, even transcends sexual difference. It in fact becomes political life itself which is particular, as against the universality of the divine. Much has been made of the two columns which structure this text, and I would like to present a novel reading: instead of phalli, legs, not even sexual difference, we should rather read them as the difference between two sexual differences: heterosexuality transcending itself on the left, and the interplay of homosexuality on the right. For Derrida's reading of Genet again includes a discussion on the figural role of the flower, except here it is taken as pharmakon, as allegorical symbol of both phallus and vagina, castration and hymen. We see this "androgyny" on the left-hand side as well, in Hegel's discussion of the isomorphism between the two structures, but on the right, we begin from this thesis instead of arriving to it. The "transvestism" of (male) homosexuality, so central to Our Lady of the Flowers, becomes here our central conceit. Back on the left, we end with the Klang, from noise to voice, resonance.
April 17, 2022
Penso che se esistesse una civiltà intelligente extraterrestre riderebbe di noi che abbiamo consentito a pubblicare questa cianfrusaglia.
Un pasticcio tra un commentario (brutto, sconclusionato, stupido, trito, sragionante, con qualche aulicismo qua e là) medievale stile scolastico, un vuoto esercizio di parole, una recensione che ha bisogno di un editore.
Ecco l'essenza non di un libro decostruito (il concetto, sia mai che sbagli la parola magica), ma di un accademismo che va qua e là con i riferimenti, con un'educazione confusa ma disperatamente accomodante, dispersiva, ammiccante.
Il classico libro per chi non sa roba scientifica e vuole dire: guardo come sono intelligente, ho letto questo e l'ho capito.
Spazzatura. Meno male esiste la differenziata.
Un pasticcio tra un commentario (brutto, sconclusionato, stupido, trito, sragionante, con qualche aulicismo qua e là) medievale stile scolastico, un vuoto esercizio di parole, una recensione che ha bisogno di un editore.
Ecco l'essenza non di un libro decostruito (il concetto, sia mai che sbagli la parola magica), ma di un accademismo che va qua e là con i riferimenti, con un'educazione confusa ma disperatamente accomodante, dispersiva, ammiccante.
Il classico libro per chi non sa roba scientifica e vuole dire: guardo come sono intelligente, ho letto questo e l'ho capito.
Spazzatura. Meno male esiste la differenziata.
March 3, 2018
The most difficult thing I've ever read. If insight were a loaf of bread, Derrida snatches each intently torn morsel out of my mouth before I have time to chew and swallow.
Book review from 1987: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/13/boo...
Book review from 1987: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/13/boo...
May 11, 2021
First impression: wait, why is it two books at once?
Second thought: what is he trying to say about Biblical exegesis?
Third thought: well whatever he means, he’s being pretty disgusting.
Final thought: wait- did he mean to say that Marx was an exegete of Hegel?
Second thought: what is he trying to say about Biblical exegesis?
Third thought: well whatever he means, he’s being pretty disgusting.
Final thought: wait- did he mean to say that Marx was an exegete of Hegel?
Read
November 26, 2022Read for school. Um.....no words. I don't understand this at all, and I couldn't possibly do some of the particularly poignant sections justice here. Regardless, I see why Derrida's writing is so polarizing for people. This is a mindfuck to be sure
December 10, 2024
In 1986: Leavey hears Glas ask "how far have we got"?
2021: Bennington and Wills put their fingers into the calcified throat of the text and press the lips apart to sound out "where are we"? Is this an anniversary or a destination?
In Clang the signature has been carried off, just as Derrida feared. The G is gone, and so on. It is highly irresponsible. Bennington and Wills propose that "Glas is now able to function more freely". We laugh knowing that to the author, freedom is the product of parental injunction- yet the intention is pure. Note that Bennington and Wills are not married as of the time of this review.
Glas is a math textbook. I'd like to thank the finite linear combinations of characters - impossible to avoid becoming attached to despite their obscurity - especially the Vasaline, the golden fleece, the tightrope wire and the grapes beneath the zipper of Stilitano's trousers. On the other hand I found the floral protagonist overrated. It's always a bummer when a main character dies without fanfare in the sequel.
Bennington and Will's choice of the portmanteau "hardbind" is tough to swallow. This neologism gives several of Clang's most cryptographic passages an awkward immediacy. I believe it would have been progressive to revert Leavy's 'bands erect' to it's original 'bander'. The same is true for 'tombfall' -> 'tombe'. No one wants to work anymore!
2021: Bennington and Wills put their fingers into the calcified throat of the text and press the lips apart to sound out "where are we"? Is this an anniversary or a destination?
In Clang the signature has been carried off, just as Derrida feared. The G is gone, and so on. It is highly irresponsible. Bennington and Wills propose that "Glas is now able to function more freely". We laugh knowing that to the author, freedom is the product of parental injunction- yet the intention is pure. Note that Bennington and Wills are not married as of the time of this review.
Glas is a math textbook. I'd like to thank the finite linear combinations of characters - impossible to avoid becoming attached to despite their obscurity - especially the Vasaline, the golden fleece, the tightrope wire and the grapes beneath the zipper of Stilitano's trousers. On the other hand I found the floral protagonist overrated. It's always a bummer when a main character dies without fanfare in the sequel.
Bennington and Will's choice of the portmanteau "hardbind" is tough to swallow. This neologism gives several of Clang's most cryptographic passages an awkward immediacy. I believe it would have been progressive to revert Leavy's 'bands erect' to it's original 'bander'. The same is true for 'tombfall' -> 'tombe'. No one wants to work anymore!
to-keep-reference
January 28, 2016
Derrida - Para Principiantes Pág.125
Want to read
May 12, 2012This seems challenging, but I'd like to attempt it at one point.
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4/5/12 - "Glas"sary lol. Will refer to it if I need to.
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4/5/12 - "Glas"sary lol. Will refer to it if I need to.
July 4, 2012
all I read is difficult literature and critical theory - and this was still incomprehensible to me
July 2, 2007
Gorgeous typesetting, wish I had the HC...
October 22, 2014
ambitious but pavonine reading of two texts at the same time.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews