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.

[6] 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.

[8] 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.

This rebellion against his inheritance also evident from the way in which he creates confusion by juxtaposing his initial, "D," to distracting red herrings: "The debris of d-words is scattered all over the pages.

Spivak notes, "I can read Glas as a fiction of Derrida's proper name turning into a thing, [...] crypting the signature so that it becomes impossible to spell it out.

"[3] Derrida himself described the text as "a sort of a wake," in reference to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; Alan Roughley argues, It is clear that his reading of Joyce's text haunts the way in which Derrida has constructed his exploration of Hegel and Genet by positioning separate and discrete textual columns next to each other so that it is necessary to read intertextually and follow the ways in which the textual play operates across and between the margins or borders of the page(s) and space(s) separating the columns.

[13]John Sturrock, reviewing the English translation of Glas for The New York Times, commented that "as a piece of writing it has no known genre".

Moreover, as scholars like Peter Krapp observed, both Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines and Derrida's Glas look astonishingly similar and argue parallel points.

Both books are the product of radical textual montage, using elaborate cut-and-paste strategies that caused problems in getting into print; both were reissued in the 1980s and hailed as influential for an entire generation: "Both were vigorously misrepresented by acolytes and detractors and unfairly associated with exclusively text-based approaches to contemporary media.

"[16] According to Lukacher, "The publication of this translation and its brilliantly assembled apparatus will have a lasting and profound impact on philosophical and literary theory in English.