This book aims to provide a clear and perceptive analysis of the theories of cultural value offered by pschoanalysis, neopragmatism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, postmodernism, discourse theory and contemporary ethnography. The book is also an exploration of the strange and surprizing relationships between value, negativity, waste and pleasure. Among those whose work is discussed are Freud, Richards, Joyce, Bataille, Adorno, Beckett, Levinas, Derrida, Barthes, Jameson, Eagleton, Habermas, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lyotard, Rorty, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Bordieu, Clifford Geertz and James Clifford. Connor seeks to confront the central questions of value, ethics and aesthetics within contemporary theory and subject them to challenging reformulation. He explores the ways in which literary and cultural theory in the 20th century have both addressed and evaded such questions. The author argues that the question of cultural value is inherently paradoxical, since it requires a simultaneous commitment to the principles of absolutism and relativism that are usually taken as opposites. The function of culture and cultural theory must therefore be to inhabit rather than to escape this condition of paradox, by instituting and conserving the political possibility of continuous, constrained transvaluation.