ABSTRACT
The consummate performative irony of Glas is that certain of the metaphors that Hegel appropriates in consolidating a cluster of attitudes defining a secular, modern ‘mainstream’ of Western culture are common to the figures that Genet explores in elaborating the ‘other,’ sensational facet of the same tradition. Language, whether the language of poetic figures or logic, is expansive enough to entertain antipodal, radically differant polysemic significations of and scenarios for common terms. Glas, in its typographic architecture and its motifs of splitting, reverberating, ringing, and castrating, to name a few, performs the relation between the ideology of Western culture(s) and its margins; the reflexive achievements of speculation and the mirror’s tain;2 the dialectical, organic, and consummate fate for the West that Hegel envisioned and that Genet’s gay-criminal ‘underworld subverted.’
