The Death of the Clinic: Benoît Loiseau in conversation with Emily Apter

To mark the launch The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine (Fitzcarraldo Editions / Yale University Press), join author Benoît Loiseau in conversation with Emily Apter.

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 in a French château; a feminist health centre in 1970s Geneva; and a grassroots research initiative run by and for people with AIDS in New York. Each of these clinics emerged in response to seismic political shifts and era-defining global events. Yet at their heart lie the stories of extraordinary individuals who dared to reimagine how we care for one another. 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.

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‘Fifteen years ago, I called for The Death of the Clinic – a book that would ask what happens when the sick, the mad, the deviant, the unemployed and the undocumented take over the health system. Benoît Loiseau has written it: personal, rigorous, uncompromising. His political history of twentieth-century collective care is a landmark – and a future classic.’
— Paul B. Preciado, author of Dysphoria Mundi

‘…an urgent intervention into healthcare practice as well as a highly original historical examination of it.’
—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic

‘...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

‘An original and deeply moving work.’
—Catherine Malabou, author of Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy

‘…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

Benoît Loiseau is a writer, critic, and academic of French and Comparative Literature. He is currently 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. A founding editor of the queer anthology The BitterSweet Review, his art writing and criticism has appeared in Art Monthly, Art Review, Frieze, The Guardian and The New York Times, among others. With William W. Burton and Ilana Eloit, he is the co-editor of a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur dedicated to the lesbian feminist writer and theorist Monique Wittig (2025). He is the author of The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine Fitzcarraldo Editions / Yale University Press, 2026). His next book, The Queer of Autofabulation: Disobedient Self-Fictions After HIV/AIDS, is forthcoming with NYU Press.

Benoît Loiseau's portrait by Ottilie Landmark.

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She earned her BA from Harvard University and PhD from Princeton University. In 2012, she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor; she has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; UC Davis; Cornell University; and Williams College. Apter was president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2017-18. She is editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, Comparative Literature, October, Diacritics, Sites, and Signs. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Apter was awarded a two-year Mellon Grant (with Jacques Lezra) in 2011-12, for a seminar on “The Problem of Translation.” In fall 2014, she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.

Apter’s books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013), and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, 2006). She has also published extensively in Third Text, e-flux, October, boundary 2, New Literary History, Littérature, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Translation Studies, Cabinet, The Global South, Grey Room, Boston Review, differences, and Public Culture, among others.

This event is supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Grant number: 101154834).

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This event will be livestreamed for remote viewing (link coming soon).

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