Horisch, Jochen. Heads or Tails: Poetics of Money. Translated by Amy Horning Marschall. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 349 pp. $39.95 hardcover. This book represents translation of Jochen Horisch's Kopf oder Zahl: Die Poesie des Geldes, first published in 1996 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Germanists interested in Horisch's topic and his approach will likely want to return to the German original; but the availability of this fascinating study, written by one of the most innovative Germanists working in Germany today, for wider audience of literary critics marks significant contribution to general literary scholarship. This is especially true since Amy Horning Marschall has provided an eminently readable and accurate translation of work by an author whose penchant for linguistic play makes translation no easy task. Although Horisch describes his investigation as brand of literary history that is oriented around the interrogation of larger problems that find their articulation in literary discourses (36), his work can perhaps be more accurately characterized as broad-ranging intellectual history schooled on Foucauldian model. At the same time, other recent theoretical programs-from Derridean deconstruction to Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum to Luhmann's systems theory to the Critical Theory of the early (pre-Habermasian) Frankfurt School-substantially inform Horisch's eclectic and syncretic intellectual endeavor. These diverse theoretical strands are woven around the warp of vehement opposition to hermeneutic, or communication model of literary understanding, concretized above all in Horisch's denunciation ofJurgenHabermas's theory of communicative action, which he sees as false heir to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Horisch attempts to position his own approach, which he dubs ontosemiology, as the genuine heir of the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the little known Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who theorized with the most consequence about an epistemological homology between the invention of money and the commodity form, on the one hand, and the evolution of the transcendental subject of Western philosophy, on the other. Ontosemiology can be viewed as another, more differentiated manner of describing Derrida's more unitary critique of Western metaphysics. Ontosemiology refers to what Horisch interprets as the universal problem that countless religions, philosophies, theories, and world views expressly or implicitly claim to solve ...: how to prove or establish correlation between being (Sein) and meaning (Sinn) (22). This fundamental pursuit of Western metaphysics, for Horisch, can be divided into three primary historical epochs, each centered around dominant symbol or manifestation of this union of being and meaning: the Host, representing the transubstantiation of matter and spirit in Christian communion; money, which establishes the equivalence of all things as commodities by relating them to conventional standard; and the new electronic media, which transform all real events into the data of information. first of these historical stages, that of the Christian Host, H-risch identifies with the period of Western civilization until about 1600, at which time he asserts (and here his dependence on Foucault is clear) that a farreaching decoupling of signifier and signified and of `les mots et les choses' gains ground (195). Around 1600 the substantialist paradigm of the Host is supplanted by the functionalist paradigm of money, which reigns supreme until about 1900, when its dominance begins to be threatened by the new, (post)modern media. In this study Horisch is most interested in an examination of the three centuries governed by the rule of the monetary metaphor. He subtitles his book The Poetics ofMoney because he believes that under the dominance of the monetary medium literature assumes privileged role as one of the primary vehicles for its critique. …