Benoît Loiseau
The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine
The Death of the Clinic is an essay of medical history written as a letter to my late mother. It is a book of literary nonfiction that traces a hundred years of radical experiments in social medicine, travelling through the histories of five grassroots clinical projects: the Institute for Sexual Science in Weimar Berlin; The Peckham Experiment in human biology in interwar London; the psychiatric clinic of La Borde in postwar France; the feminist health centre of Le Dispensaire des Femmes in 1970-80s Geneva and the Community Research Initiative at the peak of New York’s AIDS Crisis.
The central concept I put forth in this book is that of “anarcho-organicism,” arguing that these radical clinics’ horizontal modes of organization and anti-hierarchical ethos derive from the joint influences of anarchism and organicism. Drawing on figures such as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Gustav Landauer, Martin Buber, Herbert Read, François Tosquelles, John Scott Haldane, Kurt Goldstein, and René Dubos, I argue that these clinics crafted visions of health that are philosophically and practically dialogical, favouring the politics and aesthetics of relations.
Ongoing thread. More from Benoît Loiseau to follow.
Curator: Bora Pajo
The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine
Loiseau, B. (2026). The death of the clinic: Radical experiments in the art of medicine. Yale University Press.
Get the book →October 7, 2026
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Benoît Loiseau
Benoît Loiseau is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at University Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis and NYU’s Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture. His research explores gender and sexuality through the lenses of medical humanities, contemporary philosophy, and aesthetics. His first book, The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine, is out with Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, and Yale University Press in the US. His next book, The Queer of Autofabulation: Disobedient Self-Fictions After HIV/AIDS, is forthcoming with NYU Press.
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