Throughout the Spring of 2023 the Centre for Expanded Poetics has hosted a bi-weekly speaker series organized by coordinator Nora Fulton, in which CEP-affiliated graduate students as well as guests from beyond both Concordia and Canada have given talks about their research, focusing on one object or obstacle of study or interest. Each talk features respondents from the other participants in the series and an open question and discussion period for those who attend. Occasional Talks is open to all to attend.

To close out the semester, we will be hosting one final event in this series on Saturday, April 29th, at 2PM, with Cordelia Belton, a Chicago-based philosopher and communist who will be giving parallel talks at both McGill and University of Montreal. Belton’s interests center on the relation of value judgments, production for value, and practical reason, which together compose the topic of a forthcoming book on communism; she is also pursuing work on the ethics of social categories, as well as on the question of their use without external reference.

Belton’s talk, titled “Value's Judgments and Communist Practical Reason,” will center on what in Marx is referred to as 'value-form theory' (see, German Marx historian Michael Heinrich) from the standpoint of judgments of value. In this talk she will address value-form theory’s critique of generalised commodity production qua money, markets and wage-labour, and that critique’s application to various patterns of social judgment regarding behaviour. Addressing this critique will be shown to require the construction of a different standard of judgment, one we can very loosely call an attempt to fill in with determinate content the slogans of 'production for need' and 'production for use', and one that ultimately challenges or renders superfluous arguments from social domination.

Please join us on the 29th of April at 2PM for both this exciting event, and a celebration of the end of a successful series of talks. (Snacks, as ever occasionally, will be provided.)