The Institution Negated?

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 6 The Institution Negated? In this episode we are joined by John Foot, Susana Caló, and Godofredo Enes Pereira for a wide-ranging conversation on the publication in English of The Negated Institution, and the radical milieus that shaped it, emerging from the turbulent political and intellectual landscape of the 1960s and 70s. The discussion traces the overlapping trajectories of Franco Basaglia’s movement in Italy – best known for its role in dismantling psychiatric hospitals – and the parallel work of CERFI (Centre d’Études, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles) in France. Rather than treating these as isolated histories, the conversation explores their shared concerns: the critique of institutional power, the rethinking of subjectivity, and the attempt to invent new forms of collective life beyond the confines of medicalized and bureaucratic control. Across the episode, we discuss how these projects navigated the fraught terrain between theory and practice, politics and care, organization and spontaneity. What did it mean to “open” the institution, and what forms of resistance or capture did this entail? How did these movements intersect with broader currents of 1968 and its aftermath? And what can their experiments teach us today, in a moment where questions of mental health, social reproduction, and institutional life have вновь become urgent? The Negated Institution: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-negated-institution-report-from-a-psychiatric-hospital/ CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1661 Intro / outro music: Ornette Coleman – Forgotten Children, from The Love Revolution 1968 (recorded at Teatro Lirico, Milan on February 5, 1968)