We are living through the sixth mass extinction. Capitalism, the essential driver of carbon emissions, is reaching its inevitably brutal endgame: techno-feudalism. Not only are we facing a climate emergency – we need to prepare for climate revolution.

In a series of reports from the front lines, philosopher-journalist Todd Dufresne provides an urgent analysis of the knowledge and morals that are fuelling this revolution. His manifesto outlines the links between Western values, capitalism, and climate change, rejecting the “pathology of politeness” afflicting mainstream climate activism and warning that the systemic violence of post-capitalist society will be met with violence. Dufresne champions the radical critics of capitalism whose ideas, courage, and exuberant energy have the power to forestall the social murder of humanity in service of short-term profits for a tiny, irredeemable elite.

A fearless – and fearsome – account of the world-historical social and material conditions confronting us, THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO FIGHT is a call to support utopic realism: a vision that embraces empathy, freedom, community, and universal human rights. It lays out what may be the only path to a world worth living in: left populism.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-capitalism-climate-change-1.5366775

Featuring a reading and Q&A with Alia Abaya. Refreshments provided. Sponsored by Alterna Savings and the Centre for Social Innovation.

Freud is best remembered for two applied works on society, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents. Yet the works of the final period are routinely denigrated as merely supplemental to the earlier, more fundamental ‘discoveries’ of the unconscious and dream interpretation. In fact, the ‘cultural Freud’ is sometimes considered an embarrassment to psychoanalysis.

Dufresne argues that the late Freud, as brilliant as ever, was actually revealing the true meaning of his life’s work. And so while The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and his final work Moses and Monotheism may be embarrassing to some, they validate beliefs that Freud always held – including the psychobiology that provides the missing link between the individual psychology of the early period and the psychoanalysis of culture of the final period. The result is a lively, balanced, and scholarly defense of the late Freud that doubles as a major reassessment of psychoanalysis of interest to all readers of Freud.

‘A superb book that will count among a handful of landmark works in the field of Freud Studies. Blending close readings of texts, a sustained attention to Freud’s rhetoric, and rigorous historical-cum-biographical contextualization, Dufresne provides a major reassessment of Freud’s late ‘cultural’ works.’

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, University of Washington

‘Dufresne serves as a deft, surefooted guide into the dazzling dark continent of drives explored by Freud’s later ‘cultural’ work. It is an intriguing journey.’

Richard Kearney, Boston College

‘In this provocative and engaging study, Dufresne demonstrates the philosophical relevance of Sigmund Freud’s late work – including The Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and its Discontents (1927), and the essays leading to Moses and Monotheism (1939) – as well as the strong link between Freud’s cultural critique and his psychoanalytic theory.’

Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania