Séance: Technology of Disalienation

How can a séance be reimagined as a collective technology of healing and disalienation? Before becoming a key concept in Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s political economy, the notion of “alienation” (from Latin alienatio) held two meanings: a juridical one, referring to dispossession of land and a medical one, denoting madness or the loss of reason. My lecture revisits the mid-20th century psychiatric reform and resistance movement of Institutional Psychotherapy, which used media as a technology of disalienation—conceived both as mental repair and a transformation of social and environmental conditions. Initiated during World War II at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban in southern France, the movement was shaped by an international constellation of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and activists, including Francesc Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Ginette Michaud, and Félix Guattari. By tracing the interplay between its clinical theory and experimental media practices, the lecture proposes an expanded understanding of séance as a transformative practice at the intersection of psychoanalysis and cinema—ranging from patient-run ciné-clubs to the influence on avant-garde filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Mario Ruspoli.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is principal investigator of the research project Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe at Bauhaus University WEimar and a visiting fellow at ICI Berlin.

Venue: Seoul Museum of Art, B1 SeMA hall