Boris Groys, who has the trepidation-inducing title of Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, is the author of The Total Art of Stalinism, a provocative essay in which he argues that the avant garde desire to transform the entirety of reality, to make life itself into a unitary art work, found a form of twisted completion in Stalinism. It was a brave as well as a controversial volume, and it was particularly astute in reading socialist realism, both plastic and literary, not as a repudiation of the supremacist art of Malevich or the futurism of Mayakovsky, but as a continuation of the desire to create a politically feasible and genuinely populist avant garde, albeit within the now totalitarian strictures of Stalinism. Given this background, I was intrigued at the publication of this new book. Although I would recommend it to anyone already interested in critical theory and the avant garde, it is not quite the book I thought it was. It is an introduction, but one that presupposes you are already fairly well acquainted.

"Antiphilosophy" is defined by Groys as the work of thinkers who have the same relationship to philosophy as the "anti-art" of Marcel Duchamp and other dadaists and post-dadaists has to art: this is both an almost traumatic breach with every preconception of the past and a vital rejuvenation of a stale form, a gifting to the future. These anti-philosophers, broadly speaking, begin with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and, mediated by Heidegger, lead into so-called "continental philosophy": Sartre, Barthes, Levinas, Derrida, Baudrillard et al. In comparison with philosophy in the anglophone tradition, this strand of thinking encompasses both Marx and Freud (and indeed, in Adorno, Althusser, Lacan and Žižek, they have had many heirs). The keynote, as Groys argues, is a commitment to Marx's dictum that philosophy had hitherto only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point was to change it. There is a pressing need for an unpatronising book that outlines these fractious, contradictory and ennobling thinkers for an intelligent rather than a specialist audience, though that is not what Groys has written.

In the preface he admits that "the texts that are collected in this book were written at different times, for different purposes, in different languages, and initially they were not intended to be read together". That does not mean that there are not overarching themes, and one of the great strengths of the collection is how Groys brings Russian thinkers into play, into a series of arguments that has often, parochially, been characterised as the free-for-all French versus the logically bean-counting British. In his chapter on Nietzsche and Russian thinkers, for example, he brings a radically new perspective to writers such as Bulgakov and Bakhtin. In western versions, Bakhtin's "carnivalesque" has often been read as a sly opposition to the totalitarian: it underpins the work of Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and Robert Coover. By putting Bakhtin back into his Soviet context and looking closely at Bakhtin's reading of Nietzsche, Groys offers a startling alternative: the carnival, with its "thronings and dethronings", its ritual humiliation, its sense of theatre and the fear that someone might mistake the theatrical for the actual, was describing, not opposing, the Stalinism of the 1930s.

Two essays stand out. Groys writes beautifully about Walter Benjamin, and again proposes an eyebrow-raising idea: that Benjamin should be read as a theologian rather than as a philosopher. Benjamin certainly fits badly with a conventional version of philosophy, and Groys argues that the difference between philosophy and theology is the difference between the future and the past: the philosopher desires the truth which is just out of reach, while the theologian commemorates and repeats the transformative event which is becoming more and more distant. Groys even manages not to quote one of Benjamin's most famous observations: "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet". If you close only one eye, the image could as easily be product upon product lavished on the feet of Capital.

The other electrifying piece is on Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel, and his "technologies of immortality". Jünger is a writer often held at arm's length – when Benjamin reviewed him the title read "Theories of German Fascism" – but Jünger sits uneasily in histories of nazism. A death-bed convert to Catholicism and aristocratically disdainful of the Nazis, neither executed as an inspiration for the Stauffenberg plot by the Gestapo nor tried at Nuremberg as an inspiration to Hitler, he was nonetheless the closest Germany came to an Italian futurist, a lover not of truth, but war. Jünger yearned for the individual to cease to be and for the machine to replace society, since, to his mind, they already had. Groys unpicks the hysteria in Jünger, and wonders why, if what he said was already true, he felt the need to say it, and so loudly. But the sting is the end of the essay. Many of Jünger's ideas are now current in a thin version of "post-humanism" – the electronic collective, the convergence of made and man, the idea of going beyond consumer society. Would so many thinkers adopt these ideas if their ancestry were transparent? Groys shows that Jünger's ideas never really chimed with nazism – but they did with Hollywood. Other essays, particularly when he writes on the internet and Marshall McLuhan, display both insight and naivety. After having written so vividly on the persistence of the totalitarian and the theological, Groys sees the internet as somehow free from these. Imagine this: your neighbour now knows all your Google searches. Whether you find this terrifying or not, it's worth wondering about.

There are other joys in this book – Groys's essay on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the unspeaking nature of art brings to this reader's stark attention a linguistic irony: that vouloir dire means in French "to mean", and also "desire to say". In that one slippage, the whole of anti-philosophy's conundrum is caught in flash-photography. Or as Heidegger said so often, Die Sprache spricht – "Language speaks" being the inadequate translation. When readers have a pocket-sized book on these ideas, they will be delighted by Groys.

• Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books is published by Polygon.