Desire, Institutions, and the Left: Susana Caló & Godofredo Pereira on CERFI Analysis Beyond Guattari
Acid Horizon
Institution as process, not capital-I institution
Hosts and guests discuss French notions of institution versus establishment and the idea of instituting recurring collective practices.
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Between the radical energies of the 1960s and the shifting terrains of the 1980s, a group in France quietly detonated the boundaries of politics, psychiatry, and collective life. CERFI – the Centre for Institutional Study, Research, and Training – wasn’t your typical think tank. Co-founded by Félix Guattari, it set out to bring the disruptive insights of institutional psychotherapy into the heart of militant and professional organizing. Their wager? That every collective needs a form of analytic militancy: a way to navigate the unconscious forces that shape power, desire, and resistance from within.
This was the birth of schizoanalysis outside of the clinical setting: a practice that shifts focus from the individual psyche to the collective assemblages that compose our lives. What are the deeper machinic drives shaping our actions? What forms of desire power our institutions? CERFI’s work took these questions seriously, designing communal infrastructures, building popular research teams, and launching Recherches, a journal that amplified voices from revolutionary struggles, childcare centres, classrooms, psychiatric wards, and beyond. Analysis Everywhere dives into the rich archive of CERFI’s radical experiments: conceptual, editorial, and lived. It invites us to imagine a practice where the unconscious isn’t repressed but mobilized. Where analysis isn’t an afterthought but a vital tool for political transformation.
Susana Caló is an independent researcher and lecturer at the Open University. Her research focuses on neglected radical histories of psychiatry, exploring their intersections with wider social, political and urban struggles, as well concepts’ social and political lives.
Godofredo Enes Pereira is an architect, theorist and environmental activist. He is a senior researcher at the Royal College of Art. His work investigates architecture’s role in the composition of existential territories.
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