Against Value in the Arts and Education

Sam Ladkin is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield. Robert McKay is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Emile Bojesen is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Winchester.

• Acknowledgements / 1. Introduction: Against Value, Sam Ladkin, Robert McKay and Emile Bojesen / Part I. Critique / 2. The Authority of Value, and Abjection from Value, Marilyn Strathern / 3. Post-critical, Hal Foster / 4. Invaluable Elephants, or The Against-Value of Critique (for Animals), Robert McKay / 5. Enlightenment Against Value? Two Intuitions and Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Tom Jones / 6. Bargain-Basement Thought, Jonathan P. Eburne / 7. Techno-Criticism and/against the Value of the Flesh, Fabienne Collignon / Part II. Arts / 8. Useless Commodities, Disposable Bodies: An Essay on Value and Waste, Rob Halpern / 9. Art and Devalorization: Asger Jorn’s Theory of Value, Karen Kurczynski / 10. Art = Capital? Reflections on Joseph Beuys’ Das Kapital Raum 1970–1977, Christian Lotz /11. Value and Abjection: Listening to Music with Edward W. Said, Rachel Beckles Willson / 12. Intransigent Play: Detail, Form and Interpretation in the Music of Derek Bailey, Dominic Lash / 13. ‘The nice thing about value

This challenging collection explores the aporias of value with great energy and gusto, questions the social consensus implied by ethical criticism via negative dialectics enlisting Kant, Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, Beuys, Nancy, Foster and a few others. Such an effort calls up Geulincx’s motto of Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (“Where your value is nothing, you will want nothing”) upon which Beckett founded his refusals. If values are ubiquitous in our market societies, it is up to a contrarian “Nothing” to interrupt the circuits of power and open new portals of discovery.