Glas (also translated as Clang) is a 1974 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It combines a reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophical works and of Jean Genet's autobiographical writing. "One of Derrida's more inscrutable books," its form and content invite a reflection on the nature of literary genre and of writing. Structure and content Columns Following the structure of Jean Genet's Ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes ["What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet"], the book is written in two columns in different type sizes. The left column is about Hegel, the right column is about Genet. Each column weaves its way around quotations of all kinds, both from the works discussed and from dictionaries—Derrida's "side notes", described as "marginalia, supplementary comments, lengthy quotations, and dictionary definitions." Sometimes words are cut in half by a quotation which may last several pages. A Dutch commentator, recalling Derrida's observation that he wrote with two hands, the one commenting on the other, noted that the two-column format aims to open a space for what the individual texts excluded, in an auto-deconstructive mode. Allan Megill described the text as a "literary-philosophical collage." Typography is an important part of the text's presentation and argument; the English translation was designed by Richard Eckersley, noted for his renderings of deconstructionist texts. Gregor Dotzauer, writing for Der Tagesspiegel, argues that the two columns are explicitly phallic symbols, opposing each other in a power struggle that neither can win. Literary theorist Susan Handelman has described the book's structure as being reminiscent of the format of the Talmud. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a 1977 article published in Diacritics, interprets the columns as the legs of a woman, and Derrida's marginal notes as a male member in the act of penetration: "As the father's phallus works in the mother's hymen, between two legs, so Glas works at origins, between two columns, between Hegel and Genet." According to Gayatri Spivak, the two columns should be seen as architectural elements: "capital, pyramid, pillar, belfry and so on." In between those columns Derrida attempts to find space for himself in the form of marginal notes. This fight for space is reminiscent of an adolescent rebellion against a looming father figure, Hegel, and Derrida notes that his own father died while he was writing