Benoît Loiseau (New York University / Université Paris 8) presents new research reconstructing an encounter between Michel Foucault and a female physician and aspiring writer who, after unsuccessfully seeking his feedback on a manuscript in the late 1960s, began stalking him, leading to her institutionalization. Drawing on archival materials, this talk highlights the gendered dynamics underpinning her diagnosis of “erotomania” and the disciplinary apparatus that recast her as a deviant subject. It also situates her writings on schizophrenia and her critique of psychiatric authority within the intellectual context of postwar France, considering her as a spectral presence in Foucault’s subsequent lectures on psychiatric power.
Moderated by Jamieson Webster. Respondent: Elias Dakwar.
Please note: This is an in-person event.
Loiseau’s forthcoming book, "The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine" (Yale University Press, September 2026), will be previewed in the talk.
The Wolff Conference Room is wheelchair-accessible. There are wheelchair-accessible and all-gender bathrooms on the same floor as the conference room. Seating in the space can be changed as needed. Virtual attendance is not available for this event. ASL interpretation is available with advance notice.
Benoît Loiseau is a writer, critic and scholar of French and comparative literature. He is currently a Marie Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU and Université Paris 8, where his research focuses on gender and sexuality, contemporary philosophy and the medical humanities. His first book, The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine, will be published in September 2026 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Yale University Press (US). His next book, provisionally titled The Queer Art of Autofabulation: Disobedient Self-Fictions After HIV/AIDS, is forthcoming with NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series.
Elias Dakwar, MD is based in New York City. He was formerly at Columbia University and held a position as Associate Professor, where he received several NIH grants to investigate novel treatments for addiction, with a focus on combining contemplative practices, medicines, and psychotherapy. He has written numerous scholarly articles, as well as a recent book of non-fiction: The Captive Imagination (2024, Harper, Penguin Allen Lane).
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and is on the board and faculty of Pulsion Institute. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis( Routledge, 2011), Stay, Illusion! with Simon Critchley (Vintage, 2013), Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018), Disorganisation and Sex (Divided, 2022) and On Breathing (catapult, 2025). She writes regularly for Artforum, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and has a column at Cultured Magazine.
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