Professor Andreas Malm’s Public lecture

10 Oct 2025 - 16:00 / 10 Oct 2025 - 18:00

Professor Andreas Malm’s Public Lecture: Return of the Repressed Heat: Towards a Freudo-Marxist Theory of Geoengineering
Friday, October 10th, 2025,  4pm – 6pm
Emmanuel College, EM001
75 Queen’s Park Crescent, Toronto

As temperatures and emissions continue to soar in tandem, solar geoengineering is rising steadily on the agenda. Planes have already been launched to test the basics of sulphate aerosol injection. Denial of the climate crisis – a denial that comes in the most multifarious forms – appears to be poised for an upgrading into repression. This talk will argue that geoengineering would constitute a materialised repression of global warming, with all the dangers posed by a seemingly inevitable return of the repressed. Drawing on one interpretation of the passage from denial to repression, it will make a broader case for Freudo-Marxist theory as key to understanding contemporary climate politics. As we move deeper into the heat, the responses – including the material make-up of technologies for managing the fallout – have to be recognised in their constitutive psychic dimensions. Freudo-Marxist theory, in the tradition of the second generation of political Freudians and the Frankfurt school, is an indispensable guide to this age of catastrophe.

The Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory is selected annually, to bring innovative comparative scholars to deliver one or two public lectures to the University of Toronto community, offer workshops and seminars at the Centre for Comparative Literature, and meet with faculty and students.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto Scarborough