The Banquet

In 18th century France, Anton Mesmer’s banquet, filled with Animal Magnetism, healed the cultural elite by provoking hysterical fits, “crises,” which opened the patients up to the Flow circulating through all people, the materials of the banquet, and the moon and the stars. When Benjamin Franklin came to France and proved, with a distinguished group of scientists, that Animal Magnetism did not exist, banquets, which filled so many salons across France, suddenly lost their power to heal and their place in French culture. Today, there is only one banquet left, sitting unused in a museum in Lyon. That last banquet, in its two hundred year sleep, dreams, dreams the time when it is again a productive member of society, compelling people once more to lose themselves to the intersubjective flux.