Resounding Glas: Paragraph Volume 39, Issue 2

One of Derrida’s most complex, intriguing and challenging texts, Glas is a work of resounding importance for literature, for philosophy, for literature, and for the relationship between the two. This collection of essays, featuring leading scholars in the field, seeks to trace its resonance four decades after its publication. A number of interconnected problems and themes will be examined, including Derrida’s deconstruction of the Hegelian interpretation of Antigone, the philosophy and politics of familial and civil life, questions of sexual difference and dissidence, the question of the signature, the complex role played by figuration and language, and the continuing relevance of Glas today. While some of the essays undertake rigorous close readings of the text, at the same time as tracing the limits of such reading as they are indeed anticipated by Glas itself, others take this work as the occasion to explore its reverberations in other writings and in a host of topics and problems germane not only to literary and philosophical studies, but to cultural and political worlds far beyond the confines of academia.