Doctoral seminar "Hospitals and places of care

This doctoral seminar, which will take place over 4 sessions, proposes to collectively question the place and role of the hospital (and other places of care) in our societies, both current and older. 
As an experience that is at once social, physical, psychological and ontological, hospitalization gives rise to an individual vertigo that places the patient in a situation of varying degrees of vulnerability. This vertigo, as we shall see, has inspired poets, novelists, playwrights and directors, who have drawn on the uncertain diagnosis and vague prognosis, announced or only suggested between walls that are too white, as a creative force that we shall analyze. Hospital architecture (and yet sometimes not very hospital-like) literally contains a disciplinary system (notoriously theorized by Michel Foucault) in which the patient can feel reduced to the status of a clinical case (a case that occupies a bed that does not belong to him), reduced to his illness noted and annotated in the permanent register of files that circulate from department to department. Lastly, this institutional operation will be considered in its political and biopolitical, social and historical dimensions.