We begin with Lyotard's opening paragraph on the "differend":

As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [differend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy. However, by applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule). Damagesresultfromaninjurywhich is inflictedupon therulesofagenre of discourse but which is reparable according to those rules. A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse.1

There are the standard questions that need repeating: Whose justice? Whose history? Whose memory? Whose architecture? Whose modernity? Lyotard's dazzling passage introduces the concept of the differend as the residual or excess element in the scene of the encounter, any encounter, between heterogeneous modes of discourse. Tobe attentive to the differend is to bear witness to the irreducible alterity of the other, at the very point where either party seems to resist the very terms of the encounter. Lyotard opens the framing of the differend with a European example-the problem at hand is juridical, posed as a problem of evidence. Those who witnessed the gas chambers in action, those who could testify to their existence and use, died in them. In their absence, how are others to persuade the tribunals that the gas chambers did indeed exist, or more important, to whom do they owe justice when the victims themselves no longer live to phrase their tes- timony? Since the rest of the world did not die in the gas chambers, what world would be a beneficiary of this justice? The questions asked earlier can be reframed, not only as whose justice, but also as justice for whom? In its ultimate unwillingness to address these questions within its own territo- ries, Europe exports the "Jewish" differend to Asia.

Let us reframe the differend through an Asian example.

• 1. 1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi.