Curing the Institutions with François Tosquelles
A Politics of Madness

The humanization of madness was the emancipatory experience explored by the Franco-Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles at the rural hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in France. His project of humanization was shaped by radical politics in Catalonia during the 1930s and his own emancipation practices during the Spanish Civil War, when he resolved to treat the therapeutic community rather than the patients themselves. Tosquelles also worked with people outside the medical profession: musicians, writers, lawyers and even prostitutes. Both in his therapeutic work during the 1940s and in his contemporary writings, Tosquelles developed a sustained critique of psychiatric and literary approaches that pathologized, fetishized, exoticized, or sublimated madness. This seminar will study Tosquelles’ readings of romantic and surrealist madness in Gérard de Nerval’s and Paul Éluard’s works, like Éluard’s Souvenirs de la maison des fous written in Saint-Alban during the World War II.

Joana Masó is a professor of French literature at the University of Barcelona. She is a researcher with the UNESCO Chair on Women, Development and Cultures, and works at the intersection of literature, critical thinking, contemporary art, and curating exhibitions. She has co-edited Jacques Derrida’s text on aesthetics, Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Art of the Visible (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and on architecture, Les arts de l’espace: Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture (La Différence, 2015). She has also coedited Hélène Cixous’s essays dedicated to art, Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Since 2017, she has led the research project “The Forgotten Legacy of Tosquelles” at the University of Barcelona, under the ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality. She has published François Tosquelles. Soigner les institutions (2021), forthcoming in English, Tosquelles: Curing the Institutions (Semiotext(e), 2025) and Tosquelles. Avant-garde psychiatry, Radical Politics and Art (2024), the American Folk Art Museum in New York exhibition catalogue.

Friday 13th of December 2024
13h at Museum Dr. Guislain
Free admission / Register here

Intrigued? Check out the lecture on François Tosquelles’ and Jean Dubuffet
A critique of the outsider art