Phil: "In short, while intentionality is a necessary part of language use, signification is equally necessary. This, however, would expand our understanding of what constitutes language use, including even music, with its intentionality and repetition of notes. Music is possible only if intentionality and signification are possible." Agreed. Consider Peter Westergaard's theory of tonality, which includes a meta-language of musical phenomenology. According to W, the *structure* of musical tone generation is the meaning of music. Meaning, in W's sense, is the reduction of the ambiguity caused by the way one note succeeds another in tonal music. (Harmony here is reduced to mere epiphenomenal status.) Yet Westergaard, like Schencker, was searching for the fundamental and primary here. Phil notes that, "Derrida is critical of any attempt to uncover something that is 'fundamental', 'primary' or 'central'." That is only a Derrida game. It is only a destructive game that postmodernists love to play against each other, a game that Lil' Orpheus -- still working on his thesis and now home for the holidays -- can use to shock his logocentric pa(rents) and get the upper hand on dear old deconstructed dad. It also does seem to be a "self-regarding dogma" in a way. It is precisely those fundamental, primary, and central concerns of literary theory that motivate people to read Derrida. Or is it the sophist Gorgias iterated as Derrida? ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html