Famously, and somewhat ambiguously, Marx dedicated Capital to Charles Darwin. Darwin figures prominently for McNally, too, and he starts out with a chapter on Nietzsche's relationship to him. McNally finds it curious that there is little contemporary discussion of that relationship: “For here I detect something of a symptomatic silence, an avoidance that hints at a resistance. Read Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and their followers when they discuss Nietzsche. The near-total absence of Darwin's name is striking” (p. 15). McNally argues that while Darwin provided the inspiration for Nietzsche's attack on the transcendental philosophy of Kant, he later rebelled against the egalitarian implications of Darwinism and produced an idealist reaction against his own early “materialist impulse.” This reaction is entailed in the imperative of self-overcoming, the desire to free oneself of the physical and psychic limitations of the body. It also entails a struggle with language, since for Nietzsche language encapsulates the consciousness of the herd in its universalizing concepts. Thus for true experience to be revealed, it must somehow find expression through the language that conceals it. This antidemocratic, disembodied Nietzsche, he claims, is the inspiration to Heidegger and the darling of postmodernism (p. 38).

McNally's approach runs the risk of forcing his concerns onto the vaguely defined “school” he seeks to undermine rather than engaging with the substance of any particular theorist. For example, McNally notes that Deleuze does mention Darwin in his Nietzsche and Philosophy, but only to point out Nietzsche's preference for Lamarck's more active, transformative notion of evolution. He chides Deleuze for not pursuing the significance of Lamarckianism for Nietzsche and claims that it is to be found in Beyond Good and Evil, where McNally sees an effort to create an “aristocratic biology” (p. 27). However, McNally ignores the main focus of Deleuze's book, which is on Nietzsche's critique of nihilism and of dialectical philosophy. Since McNally's project is to validate some form of dialectical thinking, dealing with Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche at that level would seem more productive than projecting an overriding concern with language onto his text.

One theorist McNally does engage in a fairly systematic, albeit brief, way is Derrida. McNally argues that Derrida takes over the worst elements of the theory of language of Ferdinand de Saussure; namely, the notion that linguistic meaning is a product of differentiation within language systems, that meaning is constituted out of the difference between signs within a system. For McNally, this notion of language is an exact replica of the functioning of commodities within capitalism, wherein the value of a thing is determined by its relationship to other things rather than in relation to some intrinsic value or usefulness. Saussure's theory of language is modeled on an economic system, but that system is taken as timeless and universal, whereas in truth it is historically specific. If anything, Derrida is more consistent than Saussure in following this model, McNally claims, a consistency that is best illustrated in Derrida's Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. There, Derrida is said to construct a notion of the subject as capitalist, as a calculator of identity through debt and exchange, “[a]nd since subjects are constituted in and through language for Derrida, language too must be a system of calculation, a capitalist system” (p. 61). In such a system, there is no discerning between the real and the counterfeit, between cash and credit. McNally then links Derrida to Jean Baudrillard's writings on simulacra to establish the point that postmodernists have reproduced the contemporary world of financial markets and consumer sovereignty, and thus fallen prey to the phantasms of a commodified society.

The phantasm theme and a notion of language that originates in a prelinguistic material world is the principal subject of McNally's largest chapter, on Walter Benjamin. But before he gets there, McNally turns first to contemporary work in evolutionary biology, then to the literary studies of the Russian writers Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin. Neither are necessary. The survey of Darwinism, paleontology, and anthropology is there to prove a few things: that bodies “speak” through gesture and mimesis, that the capacity to think and to cooperate therefore precedes language, and that the body is historical. All of this may be true, perhaps even more than trivially true, but McNally's confidence will not be shared by everyone, since he is selectively synthesizing a wide variety of theories that support his polemical purposes. His effort here might be reminiscent of Rousseau's use of the materials available in his time to construct a hypothetical evolution of human beings and society in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, but McNally lacks Rousseau's sense of irony.

Voloshinov is enlisted to provide a theory of language that is attentive to a “diverse range of socially structured contexts in which people live their lives,” which are in turn products of specific relations of production (p. 117). However, McNally finds that Voloshinov cannot transcend such undialectical oppositions as between the natural and the social and the biological and the historical. Bakhtin has the merit of bringing the body back into language and McNally emphasizes his interpretation of carnival as an occasion not only for the inversion of dominant notions of the body in the carnivalesque celebration of the body's “lower stratum” (genitals, bellies, excretory functions, etc.), but also for the expression of unrealized communal aspirations. But McNally also criticizes Bakhtin's interpretation for failing to place the carnival within the context of developing capitalist markets and to see the role carnivals also played in legitimating various social hierarchies through the exclusion or parodying of oppressed groups.

McNally's interpretation of Benjamin's theory of language emphasizes the notion of mimesis, “the act of imaginatively entering into material things” (p. 185). This concept figures in Benjamin's understanding of childhood play as an entering into the physical world. Happiness is this oneness with the world, a relationship that is occluded in adulthood, and the mimetic faculty “takes refuge in language.” Thus there emerges “a sort of linguistic unconscious” that is the repository of our sensuous relationship to the world of things (p. 187). McNally rightly emphasizes that Benjamin increasingly came to identify the relationship between people and between people and things in terms of the fetishism of commodities. The task, politically and intellectually, thus becomes to liberate the happiness that is repressed in language and to realize a nonfetishistic relationship to the world of things. McNally notes that Benjamin's notion mirrors Freud's concept of the unconscious and that Benjamin tried to work out on a collective basis Freud's idea of shock. Dialectical images played this role for Benjamin, images that would disrupt the fetishized world of experience and release the repressed memory of happiness. The key move here is to reproduce Freud's notion of the individual unconscious as a collective unconscious, individual memory as collective memory, which is particularly prevalent in Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project. This is a dubious move in Benjamin's theory, at best, but McNally reads Benjamin as maintaining that, in the era of mass consumption, “[b]ourgeois society produces … a tremendous uniformity of desires and wishes, its inhabitants really do dream the same collective dreams” (p. 199). This notion is never demonstrated by McNally with any concreteness, and its general character effaces the language of class and gender he is otherwise at pains to deploy.

McNally's polemical intentions thus undermine the parts out of which this book is fashioned. He is determined to find commonalities among theorists as divergent as Deleuze, Derrida, and Baudrillard and begs the question by labeling them all postmodernist. The specific texture and concerns of these writers and others are thus lost to view, and the very real challenges they pose, in turn, to McNally's “materialist” categories are ignored or glossed over. The chapter on Benjamin, in many ways the most interesting, comes up short when Benjamin's concepts prove to be less orthodox than McNally's. It is also noteworthy that in attempting to reclaim Benjamin from those whom he classes as postmodernists, McNally ignores the engagement with Benjamin's notion of language by Derrida or Paul De Man. McNally's book thus not only begins but also ends in a polemic that leaves everything standing as it was before.