The “judgment of surplus value”. Selection and reproducibility

Abstract

The essay focuses on the delicate role of the publisher who, in crafting his own judgment on the work to be published (or not to be published), finds himself engaged in a problematic search for a balance between the need for profit – imposed by the economic nature of the enterprise he represents – and the need for militancy with respect to the orientation of the values ​​to be conveyed to readers, through his own editorial policy. It is not simply a matter of making a “value judgment” on which the survival of the company practically depends (“the value judgment issued from within a publishing house is always also a judgment on the added value that the work will be able to produce”), but of betting “from time to time on the difference that the individual work embodies with respect to the market itself. The publisher compares the canon of tradition and the conventions of the market, and in this interstice seeks the reasons for his own identity”.

This contribution was published in the volume Il giudizio di valore e il canone letterario, edited by Loretta Innocenti, Rome, Bulzoni, 2000, pp. 89–99 («I libri dell’Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta. Studi di letteratura comparata e teatro», 16).