Book Launch + Talk: The Death of the Clinic by Benoît Loiseau

Join Benoît Loiseau and Amelia Abraham to celebrate the launch of Loiseau's new book The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, the book explores five radical clinics, tracing how experiments in care, resistance and collective imagination have challenged and reimagined medicine.

The Death of the Clinic is a group biography, with a twist. Instead of people, the five subjects are experimental health clinics that radically transformed medicine, even if just for the users: a HIV research facility in New York City, a psychiatric clinic in France, a feminist-led health centre in Geneva, a sex clinic in Berlin and a preventive health centre in Peckham.

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. At once deeply personal and sharply analytical, Benoît 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.

Amelia Abraham is a journalist and author from London. Her books include Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture and she writes regularly for The Guardian, The Observer, Dazed and many other titles on queer arts, culture and politics. Her most recent book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, is the first visual survey of queer nightlife photography, featuring over 85 photographers. Benoît Loiseau is a Belgian-born, Franco-British writer, critic and scholar based in Brooklyn and Paris. 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 read philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (PSL) and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in French and Comparative Literature at New York University and Paris 8 University. The Death of the Clinic is his first book.