David McNally is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, and the author of Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation and Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique.

• Acknowledgments Note on Citations Introduction 1 Nietzsche, Darwin, and the Postmodern Fetish of Language2 Forgetting the Body: Linguistic Economies from Saussure to Derrida3 Bodies that Talk: Sex, Tools, Language, and Human Culture4 Body, Speech, and History: Language and Materialism in Voloshinov and Bakhtin5 Corporeal Reason: Language, History, and the Body in Walter Benjamin's Dialectics of AwakeningConclusion Notes Index

"McNally performs not only the service of 'supplementing' the recent discussion of the body, but in fact he completely reframes the question—to the point where, I would argue, the relevance of postmodern theories of the body will need to be shown in relation to McNally's argument, not the other way around. This book is thoroughly compelling, very well written and argued, and indeed a pleasure to read." — Bill Martin, author of Matrix and line: Derrida and the possibilities of postmodern social theory"McNally's argument that the body as configured in postmodern theory is really the 'other' of a new idealism is provocative and well grounded." — Diane Raymond, author of Existentialism and the Philosophical Tradition