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.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania

The tyranny of value, of calculability, is evident in every facet of contemporary education. This book contests that tyranny through critique and refusal. It is relentless and passionate, full of disgust. It reads like a manifesto, a call to arms. For anyone seeking to understand what we have come to and what we have lost this is the place to start – this is a serious and searing counterblast to the cruelty of numbers.

Stephen Ball, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, UCL

Against Value is a remarkably astute critical intervention, and one that our contemporary moment - both cultural and political - desperately needs. The language of ‘value’ has itself become a means through which the essential threat that art poses to our social norms can be contained and constrained. This book menaces that political conservatism, restoring the very possibility of a criticism that might actually go towards changing our society. That, though not the value of the book, is the point.

Thomas Docherty, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Warwick

This fascinating and multifaceted collection questions the audit culture currently destroying the arts and education. The assembled authors expose a pervasive and allegiance-demanding regime of “value” that parades itself as rational but is deeply and madly self-referential and empty. These arguments are frightening in a sense, as they ask us to take the first halting steps into an unknown territory where we re-learn how properly to defend what we really love--without regard to everything's serviceability to some externally imposed “value.” This first-rate volume helps to provide an initial vocabulary for describing what so many of us feel in our bones but cannot quite articulate.

David J. Blacker, Professor of Philosophy of Education and Director of Legal Studies, University of Delaware

This book is a tonic for those tired of the pieties of value-talk in the fields of education and the arts. It suggests that the very notion of value is totally compromised, unthinkingly reflecting, rather than challenging, the ills of neoliberalised society. Bravo to the editors for bringing together such a simulating collection of essays.

Lars Iyer, Reader in Creative Writing, Newcastle University

An ultra-narrow notion of value dominates contemporary art and education. The old adage that our time knows the price of everything and the value of nothing is more germane now than ever. Against Value in the Arts and Education assembles a brilliant array of commentators to sketch out a coming future, one in which the spent figure of homo economicus is finally abandoned, but also free of the false criticality and faux nostalgia that has functioned as neoliberalism’s twin for too long. This remarkable and prescient book will fundamentally reshape the debate to come.

Peter Fleming, Professor of Business and Society, Cass Business School, City University London