Chaosophy - autonomous learning

meditate, so they say, in a monastery in Ceylon. However, his
books are quite present. Impossible to ignore them. They irritate,
and shake up the specialized communities. Commentators started
taking an interest, French translations followed one after the other:
The Politics of Experience and The Divided Self, a theoretical work,
The Self and the Others, a collection of eleven clinical monographs
in collaboration with Estertson, and then this disconcerting,
unclassifiable book, Knots, an unusual collection of logico-psychological
poems. How can one interpret this public fascination Since
May ' 68 a public has appeared that has shown a particularly strong
interest in everything concerning the problems of madness. More
than twenty years after Artaud's death, and to borrow a term from
Laing, the madman is about to become the hierophant of our
society. The order of things and institutions have received such a
jolt that one cannot refrain from questioning the future, with
apprehension one searches for any form of opposition, any exemplary
protest-the emotions stirred up around the Caro affair
would have been unthinkable just five years ago!
In this light one can expect that Laing's work will be received
by an even wider audience in the future. Is it not significant that a
protest movement led by a group of urbanists, the CRAAK,2 used
one of Laing's poems in childhood from Knots as their manifesto's
epigraph Laing, Cooper, Basaglia, Gentis, to name but a few,
have done more in several months to change our view on madness
than decades of patient and serious research, for instance those of
the French Institutional Psychotherapy current which remained
rigorously in the concrete territory of mental hygiene institutions.
To judge the root of the problems, it will still be necessary,
however, to come back to this massive reality of the alienation of the
psychiatric "populations," and to the inextricable problems the mental
health workers have to deal with on a daily basis. In the last resort it
is on this territory that the value of the antipsychiatric theories
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