This project originated in the Glas reading group at Konstanz University's Graduate Programme in the Theory of Literature and Communication, and beyond that its conception would have been unthinkable without the Derrida discussion list at USF Tampa (LISTSERV@CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU, Florida) that was started by David Erben.

In Konstanz, the discussions with various participants of our 1996 Conference "Medien des Gedächtnisses" were helpful, and I should acknowledge the traces left in this work, online and off line, by the guest speakers I was able to invite to the Graduate Programme during my time there, particularly Samuel Weber, Peggy Kamuf, Geoffrey Hartman, Boris Groys, Elisabeth Weber, Rodolphe GaschÈ, and Laurence Rickels, most of whom I have included in the Hydra web in some form or another.

I am currently preparing upgraded documentation of conversations with them, as well as new bibliographies that might be of interest - please be patient.

Critical fellowship between the many screens has helped the Glasweb grow. But thanks are due first and foremost to John V. Omlor without whose work and friendship there would be no such "Glasweb" (t)here. I quote a paragraph John wrote in a proposal describing a work that also describes how one might read Glas:

The question of presentation is, in this case, the most difficult one to raise, without "relieving," within the (too) proper logic of a proposal. Already, it should be clear that the logic which would seek to present a glas-writing between these innumerable texts is both aleatory and necessary at the same time. It selects, cuts, and grafts, according to always already determined interrogations of a corpus (and interrments of corpses), those pieces and those legends that when read into and through each other, contaminate the field of the "original" texts to such an extent that the notions of contamination and originality (two very political signifiers) must be radically repositioned. It uses the "gl- effect," (all those agglutinating words which come from behind the throat or from the behind [derrière]), to stick together, temporarily, the fragments of a quasi-singular act of reading; not for the purposes of comparison or contrast (though such procedures will be inevitable and are only proper), but in order to reposition certain questions about the space between literature and philosophy and the show business of critical appropriation. This distyle proceeds not only along the fortunate accidents of the materiality of language (puns, consonant effects, signature effects, the transliteration of proper names, literalization of metaphor, etc); not only according to the always deferring logic of the post(e) (the failure of writing and reading as epistemological and, occasionally, even ontological practices to ever arrive at their destination (Sa)); not only according to the graphism of the graft (Glas' cuts, castrations, truncations and its binding erect, its monumentalization and fetishizing [...]); but it also proceeds along the movement of a certain Freudian game of fort/da, of profit and loss, of arriving and leaving, of mock-dialectics (sans Sa), of, in a word, "speculation." The task will be to produce what Glas calls a navette style, an alternate(ive) prosody that shuttles in an untranslatable fashion as it seeks to engage in as well as investigate a particular sort of (to put it too crudely) phenomenology of reading/writing. (On whose part? By whom? For whom? These are the questions that will continually recite themselves.) The movement, it seems to me, should be finally towards what Nietzsche, in Glas, calls "the vast and boundless Yes...."(Glas, 262b) But even this is impossible: