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

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 has also been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He lives in Paris.
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and nonfiction writer. Her books include the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Maggie Terry, the Lambda Literary Award-winning nonfiction book Conflict Is Not Desire: Joyful Resistance and the Path to Peace, and the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel The Cosmopolitans. She is a professor of English at City University of New York College of Staten Island and a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.