ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida's Glas seems to defy the familiar categories of genre. Each page is divided into two columns: on the left, a meticulous discussion of Hegel's philosophical works, from his early writings to the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Aesthetics; on the right, a fragmented, lyrical celebration of Jean Genet's literary writings. Derrida's strategy is to show how Genet's autobiographical writings comment on and eventually undermine the very assumptions about the role of the signature which inform all definitions of autobiography. In this view, Genet's practice of antonomasia would stem from the desire for the proper, the wish to erect his signature into a tomb or dwelling or to shape his entire corpus into the tomb of his proper name. Derrida's reading of Genet as well as his own textual practice in Glas, suggest that this obscuring of boundaries is involved in autobiographical discourse itself. Autobiography may be nothing more than the sounding of its own knell.
