Three Billion Perverts: Tosquelles and the Politics of the Body

In his research on ‘extensive psychiatry’ and myokinesis with Mira i Lopez in Catalonia, and then on his flight from the Franco regime to France via the concentration camp Septfonds, Tosquelles conceived of the human body as perpetually moving— ‘always a migrant’. Displacement, foreignness, madness became for him essential features of being human. They constituted the point of departure not only for the geo-psychiatric, aesthetic, and environmental approach to psychiatric care at Saint-Alban, but also for ‘the politics of the body’ advanced within the framework of ‘institutional analysis’ at La Borde clinic. This presentation focuses on the censored issue of the journal Recherches, founded by CERFI and directed by Félix Guattari, with the title ‘Three Billion Perverts. The Big Encyclopedia of Homosexualities’ (1973). Following Foucault, the talk analyses in the anonymous and collective contributions to this issue the political and aesthetic means of regaining ‘possession of [one’s] own body, and of the bodies of others […] for purposes other than [their] use as a workforce’.