Subject: Auto-Differend
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 00:42:57 -0700



> Here's a very different website titled:
>
>  <A
> HREF="http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/auto/lyotgate.html">Lyotard Auto-
> Differend Page</A>
>
http://humanities.ucsb.edu/shuttle/auto/lytogate.html

>It automatically takes you from one page to another quite nicely.  It
appears
>to originate from this text:

>Jean-Francois Lyotard
>The Differend:  Phrases in Dispute
>trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
>Univ. of Minnesota Press 1988
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>vivir en paz,

>~patricia aqiimuk paul~
>Kikiktagruk Inupiat
>Seattle University School of Law

Besides _The Differend_, the Auto-Differend Site draws from _The Postmodern
Condition_ and _Just Gaming_.  I have not revised or added to the site since
1995.  If anyone on this list wants to contribute another
automatically-sequenced series of Lyotard quotes to the site, I could add
them to the page.  You need to play the "language game" of HTML, however,
and create the text-tracks yourself.  The trick of automatic sequencing
("client-pull") is easy, something I could communicate to any interested
party in two lines.  But there is a lot of invention possible in the
formatting of the text and graphics (and timing of the
client-pull)--especially given the new technical developments since I
originally designed this page.

In light of Lyotard's passing, I had thought of adding a quote-sequence from
Jean-Luc Nancy on the notion of "death" or perhaps "finitude." Such would be
a fitting epitaph for the author of _The Differend_.  (For example, from
Nancy's _The Birth to Presence_, pp. 155-56 (trans. Brian Holmes et al.,
Stanford Univ. Press, 1993): "Finitude does not mean that we are
noninfinite--like small, insignificant beings within a grand, universal, and
continuous being--but it means that we are infinitely finite, infinitely
exposed to our existence as a nonessence, infinitely exposed to the
otherness of our own 'being' (or that being is in us exposed to its own
otherness).  We begin and we end without beginning and ending: without
having a beginning and an end that is ours, but having (or being) them only
as others', and through others.  My beginning and my end are precisely what
I cannot have as mine, and what no one can have as his/her own."

But I haven't been able to set aside time.  The finitude of authors on the
Web, and their call on the infinity of others (called "linking"), is "death"
in Nancy's sense.

--Alan