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>"Insult" is an extremely loaded word, Keith. I don't believe I have >insulted either an essay or Mr. Prynne personally. You may feel called >upon to defend him in this way, but I think it's really not your place >to do so. OK, Henry, I'll accept that "insult" was probably the wrong word. What I meant to point to was the possibility that you had misread the claims of these few sentences and anyway had responded to them without much sense of their context. I also lack that sense of their context. I don't know about "my place" and as one reader of his work know that Prynne can defend himself. That's not my intention here. I do have an interest in list discourse however. I found your objections, shall I say, theatrical. I may have made the mistake of responding in kind. Too much election TV perhaps. I should probably say that I certainly have no objection to theatricality per se or to opinions being expressed here, but, as our friend in New Zealand noted, global dismissals deserve and will often provoke a response. I don't think that one can attack any instance of the personification of language or language use independent of the proposition that personification serves. While I am not altogether confident that I know exactly what Prynne is proposing given just those few sentences, my reference to Rorty was meant to indicate that I take your objection to efforts to "impute volition to language itself" seriously. But I am not at all convinced that this is what Prynne is doing. I'll leave it to others to speak about the matter with regard to various moments in the work of Heidegger and Derrida. At any rate the point was that this seems like a serious essay that deserves to be read. Those on the list who have read it--Nate, David, Ben, and Chris--seem to think so. I feared that you were dismissing it out of hand. The irony of course is that this stupid little tiff might now actually sell a few copies of _Quid_. Keston, if you are out there, Henry and I deserve freebies. all best Keith %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%