The Disalienist: Francesc Tosquelles' Permanent Revolution
“Institutional psychotherapy” was conceived in the wake of the geopolitical, biopolitical, and psychopolitical devastation of World War II as a form of therapy that Jean Oury described as “the act of setting up all kinds of mechanisms to fight, every day, against all that could turn the whole collective toward a concentrationist or segregationist structure.” The author of this “new practice” was Francesc Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist who was part Marxist organizer, part disciple of Freud, and part philosopher. By transforming the Saint Alban psychiatric hospital into a radically horizontal collective of patients, workers, and doctors that he referred to as a “transferential constellation,” Tosquelles pioneered a form of clinical practice that would lay the ground for sector psychiatry, schizoanalysis, and anti-psychiatry. Tosquelles’ “politics of madness” shaped the work of his friends, students, and successors, including Georges Canguilhem’s investigations into the history of science, Jean Dubuffet’s championing of art brut, Félix Guattari’s anti-Oedipalism, and most notably, Frantz Fanon’s decolonial psychotherapy. But despite the profound impact of Tosquelles’ insurgent psychotherapeutic method on a range of intellectual trajectories, his name usually appears as merely a footnote to the work of his adherents. This roundtable seeks to restore and illuminate Tosquelles’ impact on art history, psychiatry, and decolonialism, as well as to assess whether the “permanent revolution” of institutional psychotherapy is ongoing.
Date: Friday, April 28, 2023
Time: 5-7pm ET
Location: La Maison Française, 16 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
Speakers:
Edward Dioguardi is a PhD Student in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. His work has been published in European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Brooklyn Rail, and e-flux conversations.
Camille Robcis is Professor of History and French at Columbia University. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell University Press, 2013) and Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago University Press, 2021).
Robert J. C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), and Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001). With Jean Khalfa, he is the co-editor of Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric, political, and dramatic writings titled Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is now working on a book titled Fanon in his Own Time: Microhistories. He is the editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.