Abstract

Of all the possible answers to the question “What is the relation of Hegel’s phi-losophy to the feminine?”, Jacques Derrida’s is surely one of the strangest imaginable: it is, he says, a relation of identity. According to Derrida, the supersession movement that or-ganises Hegel’s System –the Aufhebung– is feminine, and this in the very sense that Hegel gives to femininity. The interpretation of Hegelianism underlying this response is at the heart of Glas –a strange, difficult, and little-studied book– or at least of the text’s left col-umn, devoted, as it is well known, to Hegel’s family. In these pages I intend to reconstruct Derrida’s interpretation, to elucidate its limits and thus to shed some light on the ques-tion of the role of women in Hegel’s philosophy.