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Poetics of Value. The Primacy of Insurgency as Marxist Methodology

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Published Oct 2025

Elliot C. Mason

Author: Elliot C. Mason
Throughout value-form theory, the present is understood as a homogenising form of subsumption, determining all lives in its commodification of time. In Poetics of Value, Elliot C. Mason employs the ‘fugitive’ imaginary of black studies to locate other temporalities that antagonise the present. Through close readings of four contemporary poets, Mason finds an exposure to social temporalities that exceed the productive time of value. Poetics of Value proposes the survival of fugitive temporalities as a methodology for Marxism, exceeding the temporal forms of both value and its Marxist criticism.

Biographical Note

Elliot C. Mason is a postdoctoral researcher, translator, and activist who has written widely on poetry and politics. Most recently, he is the co-editor, with Valentina Moro, of Judith Butler and Marxism: The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care.

Readership

This book is particularly relevant to specialists in Marxism, especially those focused on value-form theory, graduate students in philosophy and literature, theorists of poetry, students of Marxism, scholars and students in black studies, poets, and literary theorists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Poetics and Politics of Survival
1 The Primacy of Insurgency
2 Marxist Temporalities
3 The Excess of Subjects
4 Poetic Temporalities
5 The Coming Poets
6 The Coming Chapters

Part 1 Subjects of Value

Introduction to Part 1

1 Critique of the Temporality of Value
1 The Operation of Form-Determination
2 Marxian Primacies
3 The Primacy of Value
4 Cultural Presents
5 Antagonistic Primacies
6 Moten’s General Antagonism
7 The Routes and Roots of Survival

2 Alli Warren and the Production of Subjectivity
1 Value’s Poetry
2 Determining Forms
3 The Real Abstraction That You Are
4 The Capitalist Abolition of Subjectivity
5 The Particulars of Water and Power
6 Let We Be Moral
7 The Structure of Belief
8 Life before Life
9 San Francisco Renaissance
10 The Emotive Poetics of Sociality

3 Rob Halpern and the Crisis of America
1 Before the Pain
2 In the Face of Failure
3 Poeticising Crisis
4 The Masquerade of Profit
5 Constant Interruption
6 The Subject’s Patiency
7 The Limits of Freedom

Part 2 Socialities of Value

Introduction to Part 2

4 Rowan Ricardo Phillips and the Form of Friendship
1 Moving Bodies
2 Rectifying Inclinations
3 Upright Reasons
4 Inclining Rectitude
5 Friends before Form
6 Plans for Survival
7 A Moving Abstraction in Blu
8 Citing Friends
9 Planning Plans

5 Fred Moten and the Primary Antagonism
1 Assembling a Friendship
2 Listening to B
3 Opening to Others
4 Calling on the Subject
5 Misinterpellating
6 Temporalities of Insurgency

6 Speculations on the Poetics of Value
1 Giving an Account of One’s Theory
2 In the Space Left
3 In the Left Space
4 The Excess Left of Poetry

Afterword: The Primacy of Insurgency

Appendix: Study Group for the Undercommons
Bibliography
Index