Foucault News

Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira, CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry, Minor Compositions, 2026

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.

[…]
Despite the acclaim that CERFI enjoyed during its existence, having published 46 issues of the journal Recherches and relying on a wide network of contributors to its research and publication, the work of CERFI is little known today. In scholarship, references to CERFI tend to occur as notes to the biographical itineraries of prominent individual figures associated with it, such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, who occasionally collaborated with the group, and to its founder, Félix Guattari. (p.20)
[…]
See also Liane Mozère, « Foucault et le CERFI : instantanés et actualité », Le Portique, 13-14 | 2004.
https://doi.org/10.4000/leportique.642

Reviews
“‘Only Desire Can Read Desire,’ wrote Félix Guattari, and this quote, which Caló and Pereira use as the title of their introduction, expresses the precious specificity of this book. Caló and Pereira’s desire to revive the passionate adventure of CERFI testifies to the fact that this adventure has become contemporary again, something like a resurgence, the reappearance of what had been eradicated and which is returning, transformed but alive.” – Isabelle Stengers

“Very important work has been done by Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira on the historical and visual reconstruction of a cultural experiment whose practical and theoretical effects have not yet been fully evaluated. – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Bios:
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.

Frédéric Chauvaud, Irène Le Roy Ladurie, Jean-Luc Terradillos,
Henri-Paul Fruchaud (préface), Benoît Hamet (illustration-photographie), Les trois maisons de Michel Foucault, Presses Universitaires de Rennes (2026)

Né à Poitiers, Michel Foucault, philosophe de la folie, de l’archéologie des sciences humaines, du crime, du pouvoir, de la sexualité et de bien d’autres domaines, est l’auteur d’une oeuvre foisonnante qui ne cesse de résonner aussi bien au Brésil qu’en Corée ou au Maroc. Ses livres sont diffusés dans le monde entier. S’il s’est intéressé aux lieux utopiques, il a porté une grande attention aux lieux réels et aux dispositifs spatiaux. Très attaché aux espaces où il est né, où il a rédigé la dernière version de ses livres et écrits, où il a fait l’acquisition, à la fin de sa vie, d’une maison, il a toujours cherché à maintenir un fort ancrage territorial dans le Poitou où se trouvent, à Poitiers, à Vendeuvre et à Verrue, les trois maisons de Michel Foucault.