Abstract

The word floruit is typically used to designate the year around which a thinker or writer is thought to have ‘flourished’. Traditionally, that age is set at forty. In this paper, I ask whether texts too might be assigned a time of flourishing, a floruit – or perhaps more than one – that would no longer be attached to the life of the author but to the unique time of the trace or the archive, a flourishing that might best be thought in terms of what Derrida called survivance or living-on. I develop this notion of a flourishing beyond the life of the author, indeed beyond the human altogether, by returning to Glas, a text that was published forty years ago and that is soon to undergo – or at least this is my hope – a new infusion of critical interest and a new flourishing. I argue that by returning to Glas and its seminal analyses of Hegel and Genet on the themes of life, death, blood, spirit, glory, the death penalty, the proper of man, and so on, we will be better able to understand and take the measure of Derrida's return to these same themes in his final seminars a quarter of a century later.