Hegel, Glas, and the Broader Modernity

A Conversion Disorder

“…For Sussman, Glas sings this 'gl'; it 'pursues a meandering path, passing from one semantic field to another with unpredictability, impunity, speed, and seeming arbitrariness (that is, the arbitrariness is "always-already" installed in the language network itself)'. 38 Not mere word-play, this mark overturns traditional ideologies of sexuality and difference. Like the flower/glove knot, and swinging neither in the masculine nor the feminine, the 'gl' has, Derrida insists, 'no identity, sex, gender, makes no sense, is neither a definite whole nor a part detached from a whole': 'Gl remain(s) gl', he writes (119b-120b).…”