Todd Dufresne

Dufresne was born in Fort Frances, Ontario, in 1966, moved to Thunder Bay with his family in 1976, then Atikokan in 1978, then Thunder Bay in 1980, taking his diploma from Hammarskjold High School in 1985. Dufresne took his BA in Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in 1989, and his MA and PhD in 1992 and 1997, respectively, both in York’s Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought. In 1998 he became a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Psychoanalytic Thought Program at Trinity College, University of Toronto. Dufresne became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 1999 at Lakehead University, Associate Professor in 2004, and Professor of Philosophy in 2009.

During 2018-19 he is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Visiting Professor of English at Seikei University in Tokyo.

Dufresne is editor or author of 12 books, including Returns of the ‘French Freud’: Freud, Lacan, & Beyond (Routledge 1997), Tales From the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text & Context (Stanford UP 2000), Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture & the Death of Psychoanalysis (Continuum 2003), Against Freud: Critics Talk Back (Stanford UP 2007), The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, & All the Riddles of Life (Cambridge UP 2017), and The Democracy of Suffering: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Philosophy in the Anthropocene (forthcoming McGill-Queen’s UP 2019). He is currently working on two projects: a series of lectures about the climate emergency; and a collection of essays.