ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida's Glas seems to defy the familiar categories of genre. Straddling the distance between philosophy and literature, Glas combines widely diverse writing styles, modes, levels of discourse and even type-faces. Derrida takes on the additional task of commenting on the way his own signature, the name that signs Glas, operates, just as he claims Genet has done. Drawing on a persistent metaphor that he analysed in 'La Pharmacie de Platon', he describes the relation of author to text as one of filiation. Yet he qualifies his appraisal of Genet's use of the signature, suggesting that the subversive aspect is only an appearance. he thus displaces the commonplace notion of autobiography as the telling of a life to a different plane: Genet engages the specifically legal aspect of identity, only to refuse it in favour of a poetic or rhetorical one.
