The Death of the Clinic: Benoît Loiseau in conversation with Sarah Schulman

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Weaving together biography, memoir and cultural history, The Death of the Clinic is a groundbreaking exploration of five experimental clinics in recent Western history: a sex clinic housed in a stately mansion in Weimar Berlin; a preventive health centre in pre-NHS London; a post-war institute of psychiatry and medical philosophy in a French château; a feminist health centre born from the women’s liberation movement in Geneva; and a grassroots research initiative featuring clinical trials run by and for people with AIDS in 1980s–90s New York. 
Loiseau’s investigation is anchored in his own encounters with medical care and in the quiet influence of one health worker who shaped his life: his mother. In moving and reflective interludes addressed to her, Loiseau illuminates the emotional and ethical stakes of medicine today. Reframing Michel Foucault’s seminal book, Loiseau’s The Death of the Clinic is a radical invitation to rethink the clinic – not as a fixed institution but as a living, evolving practice rooted in care, resistance and collective imagination.
There will be a signing after the event. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Benoît Loiseau is a writer, critic and scholar of French and comparative literature. A founding editor of queer anthology The BitterSweet Review, he has written for ArtReview, frieze, the Guardian, the New York Times and The White Review. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at New York University and Paris 8 University. The Death of the Clinic (Fitzcarraldo Editions / Yale University Press, 2026) is his first book. His next book, provisionally titled The Queer Art of Autofabulation: Disobedient Self-Fictions After HIV/AIDS, is forthcoming with NYU Press.
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University and is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her 21st book is The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. 
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is Manhattan’s only queer bookstore, located on the second floor of the LGBT Center. We’re open Tuesday-Sunday from 1-7pm and accessible by the 6th Ave 1 2 3 L trains and 8th Ave A C E trains. Our cafe, The Bureau Cafe, is open Tuesday-Sunday from 9am-7pm. 
Advance Praise
‘…Benoît Loiseau offers us a different way through twentieth-century queer and trans histories… This is a stunning book that juxtaposes fine-grained histories of medicine, anarchy, psychiatry and resistance.’—Jack Halberstam, author of Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto
‘…an inspiring, essential book.’ —Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together
‘…this is a book of a generation with the potential to make, and remake, the world.’ — Joseph Osmundson, author of Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
‘Intimate and erudite, breathtaking in its historical analysis and philosophical range…’ — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl