Status Updates From The Death of the Clinic

‘—Haire & Russell—extremely well connected—rallied support from the finest of London’s medical, artistic & progressive circles. H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley & his brother,—evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley,—among a long list of supporters. Many figures associated with—Bloomsbury Group,—Clive Bell—Vita Sackville-West—Leonard Woolf (Virginia Woolf’s husband)—publicly endorsed the congress—backdrop to—transformations—’

‘—stories worth telling,—give us a glimpse into what cannot be known or remembered—Saidiya Hartman notes in her writing on the violent silences—‘to displace the received / authorised account—to imagine what might have happened / might have been said / might have been done’—archives are shaped by history as much as by erasure. One must learn to run their fingers along the craters & write ‘with & against the archive’.’

‘Kropotkin deplored—Darwin’s theory—Hobbesian notion of a violent—competitive state of nature in which species, including humans, were locked in constant struggle for survival—Kropotkin laid the groundwork for—an autopoietic impetus—resists pre-determined hierarchies in favour of self-regulated equilibrium. Hirschfeld was always interested in bridging—medicine x art—to bring them into dialogue &—infect one another.’

‘You only ever spoke Flemish—in a fury—This is how I remember your hunger strike—You see, I write this book to ask—questions I never did—to better understand you—My writing : a continuation—a deterritorialisation of language—to pay homage—dialogue & resistance—anti-heroes of medical history, dissecting the Clinic—searching, in the depths of death, the anatomy of a life worth living. Spanning a century—six countries—’

‘The mines always attracted workers from outside, lured by industrialists in need of cheap—docile labour—fleeing rural precarity—treated as foreigners. ‘—place ravaged by the greed—short-sightedness of—generations of businessmen—,’ Marguerite Yourcenar,—you understood too well the marginalising effects of a dominant language—‘Words,’ Anne Carson—‘if you let them, will do what they want to do & what they have to do.’’

‘—I don’t know which is the greater obstacle: language or death. Writing is my experiment—where resistance is the norm—you spoke three languages: Hals, the local dialect; Standard Dutch, the regional tongue; and French, the language of the bourgeoisie—At 14, you chose to study Latin and Greek—Colonial medicine was an ideological tool of empire—who builds it, who benefits from it, and who, in the end, is left behind.’