Honestly, the only reason I'm writing anything here is that I can't help but feel that, given the previous reviews, inane praise for a book is worse than intelligent criticism (and probably worse too than inane criticism). Bains' primary virtues are overall clarity in his exposition of his chosen authors and his attempt to bring from obscurity a forgotten late medieval thinker (John of St. Thomas or John Poinsot and his contemporary exegete John Deely). Bains (by way of Deely) has provided an excellent resource to break the synonymy between semiotics and structuralism that has tended to dominate the literature on signs in continental philosophy.
Bains' audience is, of course, those who are already prepared for the claim that his book "presents a semiotic that subverts the opposition between realism and idealism" and those not prepared will naturally find his writing stilted if they think a book on metaphysics should be read as if it will contain characters with "dialog [sic]". For his intended audience, on the other hand, his writing is as reasonably jargon-independent as one can expect (and particularly less than the usual treatment of Deleuze). This is not to say that Bains is free from jargon completely but that he does not generally hide behind jargon to mask superficiality with catchy phrases.
Nevertheless, in the end, the work is largely exegetical and Bains himself claims he makes "no claims to absolute mastery of the materials engaged with in the pages that follow" and that this work is his attempt to begin working through the questions he poses (which I won't bother to summarize since the Amazon blurb and book preview are readily accessible). Readers of Bains' more familiar interlocutors (Deleuze, perhaps von Uexhüll, who has just been translated into English, Maturana, and Varela) will find little new here and Bains' account of Poinsot is essentially dependent on Deely. What one gets, however, is an interesting analysis of Deleuze's ontology not by way of the usual invocations of Spinoza and materialism but through the rejection of the nominalist debate that made the early modern subjective turn possible (from Ockham to Descartes to Kant).
If I myself have any quarrel here it would be Bains' elision of a "logic" with an "ontology" of relations and for not raising this as a conceptual problem. But even for those familiar with the literature on Deleuze et al, Bains' book offers not only a worthwhile perspective on the problem of relations but a reasonably clear overview of what is at stake in affirming the primacy of relation over being in the metaphysical tradition.
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