Aerial Warfare and the Warlord's Ego

Given the aura of the capital cities of most countries, given the ways in which the capitals are made attractive and have high symbolic value, the warlord's ego is especially fixated on capturing/invading the capital cities, rather than the other cities, towns and villages of a enemy country. What has enabled the warlord to attack precisely the capitals of countries? The modern fighter airplane is an invention which makes the attacks on strategic points of a country possible, and hence, to satisfy the warlord's ego, aerial warfare is conducted to attack the capital, to enable the capture of the capital straight away. The traditional myth of the military-industrial complex posits that the technological gain dictates the warlord's capabilities in combat, but, the warlord's ego is very much still a force in determining what types of technology are made possible and what style of warfare can be conducted. The collective efforts of the industrial labor force that works on combat technology are not what causes war, neither is war perpetrated for "national interests," rather, war is still driven forward by the ego of the (often individual) warlord. The warlord pools together the vested interests, or may indeed fabricate the vested interests entirely, in order that his ego's war be possible. That the capital cities have been westernized at least in their outward appearance is a telling sign that what the warlord fights against is in a sense 'closer to home,' for his ego has been developed in rivalry with other western egos and he has no real knowledge of the realities of the non-western individuals on the ground where his war is conducted. His war is about directly attacking sentiments of peace and freedom at home via the attacks on an "other" abroad that happens to be the object of scrutiny of the western pacifists that he knows. 

Whereas the process of conducting war is left to the warlord's ego, the aftermath of the war demands a whole other kind of expertise entirely, an expertise which needs to somehow manage the gains of war and which needs to return the whole country back to a kind of stability. War has a strict fixed budget and a fixed plan. Often its most important moments are the capture of the capital and the other important cities, after that, war has to be considered over, partly over fears that the boosted ego of the warlord will not want to stop and will thus conduct war on other territories as well. After the successes, the country needs a different kind of external force to impact it, and it must be returned to peace, however short lived, to satisfy the vested interests that helped war go forward. The warlord has to be replaced as the authority over that territory by someone who can command and maintain peace at the same time.

There is a problem in the aftermath of an aerial warfare focused on capturing the capital of a country. The problem is that if the enemy country's government did not have a good handle on the tribal and/or rural regions of the country, then capturing just the capital will not translate to a real authority over the rest of the country.  Too often in modern conceptions of warfare, the capital is taken as the most strategically important point of a combat operation, but, the gains made in the capital may not indicate a command over the other regions of a country, given other leaders who may command these other regions. An airplane may fly one straight to the capital, but something about the logic of traditional war still endures: that the peripheral village/tribal regions must be attacked first, and only as strength and confidence is gathered, and the ego is boosted, should the warlord progress slowly, by making gains and conquering the rural, towards the capital, which is usually located at a central point of the territory. It is problematic that the warlord's ego is today boosted in training and education than it is in actual combat operations "on the ground." War has been conducted with sensation in mind: with spectacular gains made in the capital being more valuable than the slow invasion.  

Nepali Migrations, Neo-Tribes and Zones of Inferiority

Today we are faced with the issue of Nepali citizens going abroad to foreign countries in search of better employment opportunities, and companies are attracted to Nepali laborers because they can be paid lower wages than the locals. But this inequality in wages may not last long, as Nepali laborers may become politically active in these countries and demand higher wages, and so foreign companies must quickly devise new ways of keeping wages artificially low. To continue to keep wages low in the future, foreign companies need to resort to a new kind of racism, where they deem that foreign immigrants are “inferior” to the local populace and hence should get lower wages than the locals. This racism, and this drive to keep wages low through a specific organization of labor, will ultimately lead to unexpected scenarios in the conception and management of national territories.

The promotion of a kind of concentrated community of each nationality, where each national immigrant populace is kept separate from the rest, enables each national community to be so distinct and isolated from the rest of the populace that the community is compelled to locate in one place, meaning that a mass internal migration ensues where all Nepalis travel to one single region of the foreign nation to live together. For the foreign nation that brings about this mass internal migration event, this new region comprised solely of Nepalis will designate a “zone of inferiority” and the “tribe” of Nepalis will be so distinct from the rest of the locals that they will be given their own set of laws, their own jurisdiction, their own “reserve,” in the coming future. This national reserve results from an appropriation of the native American reserve, and also of the hippie commune, the hippie commune's unique cultural formations being taken even further in these national reserves because of the national territory granting to the neo-tribes their own jurisdiction. Culture will be of great importance, since it is cultural activities which differentiate the neo-tribe from the rest of the populace. Cultural activities that make the neo-tribe even more distinct from the rest will be promoted by the national level authorities.  

Simultaneously will take place a process whereby the big “post-national” companies, industrial estates and big factory complexes are located in the neighborhood of the neo-tribal areas. We use the term tribal precisely because the tribe lacks an organized form of capitalist enterprise and endeavor within its jurisdiction. It is a purely sociocultural sphere, where the leisure time and the time with one's family and community dominate any kind of economic activity to a great degree. Nothing is to be found within the neo-tribal territory except residence and the smallest and most basic of shops. Besides these shops, cultural organizations, such as museums and film studios, will be some of the few labor-demanding organizations to be established in these zones, but these cultural organizations will most likely be low-key and non-profit because any type of capitalist and wage-labor promoting activity is strictly discouraged within these zones, as much as these kinds of activities are very intensely encouraged just outside of the zones. Spending of the wages earned elsewhere is also confined to the enjoyment of the neo-tribal cultural products only in order to discourage resentment which could develop due to high prices outside the neo-tribal zone; consumer spending becomes localized and controlled. And so what appears from the outside to be a zone of "freedom from national law" is increasingly a zone submitted in a number of ways to a national law particularly conceived for that zone, and what appears as a neo-tribal zone composed upon a common sharing of cultural products and practices ultimately becomes a zone of the management of economic labor in which cultural production is a tactic for maintaining peace and control. Unlike the native American reserves running casinos, the neo-tribal territories will not be very economically active. They are like suburbs but comprising people solely of a common national identity, a national identity which is cowering away from the rest of the foreign nation in which they live, in great isolation and in a great communicative relationship with others of the same neo-tribe in order to counter the loneliness. 

A “Nepal-within-a-bigger-nation,” a “nation-within-a-nation” will help capitalists keep wages down for their enterprises. And they will not suffer backlash for "racism" because this type of racism is distinct from the racism we usually imagine. There is no “racial hatred” resulting in violence against the inferior race, meaning that this type of racism entails an appreciation of inferiority, because being inferior becomes a qualification for a job. Appreciation of inferiority is not the same as mobility towards a superior position, and this kind of upward mobility will be discouraged given that the only reason jurisdiction and a separate territory will be given to neo-tribes is because of their supposed inferiority, because they are inferior and hence weak and so they are not perceived as a threat to the bigger national identity. Immigration control will never take place unless there is an alluring economic incentive behind the management of immigrants.  

Macrobiology and “War on Disease”

We can name under 'Macrobiology' those sets of ideas, organizations and medical efforts that are meant to fight the medical conditions that spread: on the infectious diseases, the communicable virus and phenomenon such as “mass hysteria.” The diseases afflicting mass social settings and common social behavior became an issue of concern. It was problematic that even if man within his own activities and his own conduct was “normal,” he could be afflicted by an infectious disease if society was in a health-care crisis, if society was “abnormal.” The communicable diseases became articulated as an injustice not from one man on another, but an injustice of nature upon all of mankind, of exploitative nature which attacked human societies. We can ask here why do we destroy nature? The ruthless, war-like spirit with which deforestation occurs is inspired by the idea that nature contains the communicable diseases that could kill off the human race. Our engagement with nature is still driven by our anger at the communicable diseases nature develops.

Communicable diseases give medical science institutions such as big hospitals a permanent place within society; these hospitals are there to wage wars against communicable diseases. The communicable diseases allow medical science a busy and constant involvement within society, and enable doctors to obtain high stature, a high stature which is only so stark in places rife with communicable diseases like Nepal. And a question must rightly be addressed to the 'big hospital' when communicable diseases do indeed spread in some societies.

In the past, there was a tendency in society to watch the spectacle of disease as it engulfed another, and let the body wither and die under the disease's command. There was no guiding ethic in human society to save the diseased body, and it was thought that the disease died with the body. There was no widespread belief in a kind of unconscious transmission of diseases, it was impossible for these societies to think that communication between humans could also take place outside of language. The only thing that transmitted between people, it was thought, was language. 

In a Lacanian sense, there was too much faith on the symbolic order as the order of language-based communication, and not enough attention was paid to the Lacanian Real, which is where nature is located, nature as the source of parasites and parasitic agents (microbes and viruses). Before Lacan, in anthropological writings, nature was imagined as big animals that behaved like humans, but a whole other, microscopic level of nature animates Lacan's writings. The invisibility and ineffability of the Real in Lacan's formulation can be interpreted as deriving from the Real's microscopic, bacterial nature, in that, that which is difficult to see and know is the Real. In biology, the Real was a parasite or a virus living off of language-based societies to stamp its authority upon humans. Because it is so authoritative, the Real is traumatizing in Lacan. 

In psychological phenomenon such as 'mass hysteria,' which are also of concern to biology, the Real is that unspeakable element that pervades through all the people and causes their collective hysteria. It is because of the presence of the Real that phenomenon like mass hysteria remain unexplained. As such, any time there is an indication or hint that a symptom or a condition in Lacanian psychoanalysis is not being explained fully, then we can find the presence of the Real's effects on these conditions, and indeed, Lacan's whole discourse is founded on the invasion of the Real upon human attempts at understanding and psychoanalyzing. The Real is that which invades on the symbolic and attempts to stamp its authority therein. 

It was with the idea of diseases stamping authority upon human society that first encouraged humans to challenge diseases. The objective was not to save the human life, but to wipe out the disease, the wish to fight the disease dominated over the wish to preserve man. And here we find how the most painful methods used to be commonplace within medical science because it was always the disease they were after, even if the diseased body suffered more from the “curative method” than it did from the disease.

To import the Foucauldian “construct live” and the medical-science concepts of infection and communication, a “philosophy of humanity” had to emerge, where the chief articulation was the concept of a common vulnerability and a common susceptibility of all humans to diseases and infections. Also emerged the idea of a sustained threat, something which couldn't be challenged but which would always be there, and that it was the human which would have to change and adapt. The virus is still out there, it is indeed a red flare which we live in and breathe, but we have found today a way to protect ourselves from the threat rather than to destroy the threat itself.

In the new philosophy, nature contained permanent threats, permanently threatening situations and organisms, and the goal was not to isolate some high-stature humans from nature, but to enable all humans to resist what was found in nature. This resistance of all humans to nature sounds like a philosophy of medical science which believes in the equality of all men and women before medicine, but the ways of resisting nature were developed not based on the idealist-romantic idea that all humans were equal, but that despite humans being unequal there was the risk of communicability of dangerous diseases between humans. 

How Can the Freudian Slip Save Nepali Garments Industry Analysts?

Industrial analysts are alienated from the powerful giants on the top of a certain industry. Our main driving example is the garment industry of Nepal, where we do not hear of the professional industry analysts, but only know of the powerful giants, the factories that produce the garments, the international sellers etc. The first problem is the hierarchization of the industry, a hierarchy which was established because to accommodate the over-exuberant individuals and organizations who wanted to participate in the successful industry, there needed to be positions which were not only symbolic but also productive/functional. Secondly, it is precisely as each of the positions became too functional and therefore independent of other positions in the hierarchy that there developed a communication gap. All indications of sophistication when a financial organization defines itself and defines its work are signs that that particular organization suffers from a communication gap with other organizations in the hierarchy of its industry. Such “sophisticated organizations” believe themselves to be independent of giants but are in fact isolated/alienated due to over-specialization. Industry analysts have neither the power nor the will to shape the industry through their organizations.

In a Lacanian sense, the lowly analyst first occupies the position of the symbol (such as the intelligible and therefore productive word) but then becomes the impotent 'sign' at the margins, where the sign is an economic organization/company which, despite its sophistication, does not have much of an agency in determining the actions that take place in the wider economy, for the sign is like a discarded made-up word in the universe of legitimate language. Given this problem, the analyst's goal should be to articulate a sign which can function as a Freudian slip of the giant, or, to move one's analysis company to that place where the giant's system of expert production can be broken up into parts by the intervention of one's doing. The giant must be confronted, at its height/stature and during its most productive moments, by the lowly analyst displaying to it the mystery of the meaning/function of a made-up symbol, which is the Freudian slip, and this act of display will inspire in the giant productive curiosity about the workings of the lower places in the industrial hierarchy. As the unsettled giant then formulates knowledge on the lower placed companies in the industry in its attempt to understand the meaning of made-up "Freudian slip" positions, it becomes more familiar with the analysts and hence a communicative relationship can be developed for further work. 

The fortunes of the lower organizations, of which the analyst is an example here, rely on the unknown whims of the giant. The bottom makes gains and losses in its field because it does not know how the top will operate in its respective field, but these gains and losses are attributed to “complex markets” and “unpredictability” without asking if major changes in the communications between the different parts of the hierarchy could have made the industrial gains and losses more systematic. No actor directly involved in the industry seems to be ready to address the administrative difficulties of a communication gap, and the system seems to be left as it is. Of course, mathematical data on the performance of the giant is published, and so are media reports of the giant's announcements, but, the performance of the giant itself is not dependent on a communicative relationship with the organizations in the middle and the bottom, in other words, the productivity of the communications between the top and the bottom is too low. Communication is a side-effect of success rather than something leading to it. 

With the media in crisis, the communication problems between an industry giant and an industry analyst are aggravated. The media and the giant are unable to work together to deliver the right statement that answers the queries of all actors involved; the media does not ask the right questions and the giant does not reach a level of disclosure or generalization in its statement to be understood by all industry actors. In a Lacanian sense, the more shortened, prepared and performed a media statement by the giant's leader or board, the more likely that there will be no place for the Freudian slip to occur from the giant's side, which is a problematic development. The Freudian slip, if the giant allows to occur among its own human actors, would bring forth an informality in relations between the giant and the analyst, thereby allowing collective interests of both parties to overcome individual selfish interests.

Thamel and Lakeside: Nepal's Good 'Societies of Spectacle'

If we live in a 'spectacle society' as thinkers like Guy Debord believe, then we live in a society dominated by the need for cultural engagement, and we must be aware that cultural practices and products play important roles in managing society and economy. The division of labor force in society is a division of people between those who enjoy high culture and those who enjoy low culture; division of labor no longer has to do with socioeconomic stature, but we are divided as regards our tastes and preferences of various cultural products and practices.

The enjoyment of culture is possible today through an expending of labor and energy. Zizek writes that the super-ego's forced imperative to “Enjoy!” dominates today's subjects, and by enjoying, the laborer becomes productive, or, he/she expends labor in order to enjoy. What is needed, however, is the opposite: in both high-cultural and low-cultural activity in Nepal, there should be an enjoyment of laboring itself, there should be a 'making enjoyable' of the time one spends in one's office or factory floor. This enjoyment of work must be what culture facilitates, rather than culture standing as an escape or as the only point of enjoyment for the laborer.

Problematically in Nepali society, the wages that laborers earn are immediately and directly routed to cultural enjoyment; it is a frantic transfer of wages into consumption because only designated cultural practices, places and products can be enjoyed here. The laborer only thinks of cultural enjoyment when he/she earns money via expending his/her labor. Even though it has some psychological implications, this immediate enjoyment is not a genuine enjoyment of cultural objects, rather, it is a form of management of money within an economy, where money swiftly flows through the economy because of the rapid consumption of cultural objects; whereas in the Western societies consumption of industrially produced goods takes place, in Nepal it is (handcrafted) cultural objects that are the things causing consumerism. Engaging in culture turn out to be necessary for managerial purposes of the economy and society.

But there are some positives in Nepali society regarding cultural enjoyment. Tourist places of Nepal, Thamel and Lakeside, line up sophisticated jewelry in the public street in front of their stores to enable all people to enjoy these cultural products regardless of purchasing power and socioeconomic stature (all can enjoy the beauty of jewelry); these places are a part of Nepal's effort to erase the division of labor along culture lines, to erase the division between high-culture expats and the low-culture sweepers in these tourist places. Additionally, the lowly laborer's location within a cultural community enables his/her work to become enjoyable compared to a non-cultural workplace, because in a cultural community, a relaxed tourist occupies the gaze/place of power observing how work is being done.

Thamel and Lakeside foster true leisure for the lowly worker via the erasure of barriers between high and low cultures and also through the situating of the worker in a culture-centered workplace. Leisure is not an absence of work, rather leisure and work must operate at the same time, and ultimately leisure enables the investment in work of more energy developed due to the enjoyment of that work, in that, the true object of leisure is to make work better; a laborer's work-related energy and productivity are not constants, but change depending on leisure (work is dependent not just on leisure time, but also on the quality of leisure: the Marxist habit of equating the value of things with their time/duration must be countered because such a reduction to time does not give much substance to cultural activities which are important but of short duration, such as a fleeting look at a jewelry item). Leisure is possible for a laborer immersed in a community dismantling high culture-low culture divisions of a populace and if the dismantling of barriers makes possible a contact with diverse cultural objects.    

Private Police vs. Policing Communities in Kathmandu

We see private companies offer security services to elite interests in Kathmandu. One reason why the private policing companies are today more apparent and prominent is that the mobility of elites has increased; it is unknown where elites may find themselves in Kathmandu, and so the regular police is incapable of providing the same kinds of protection and necessary surveillance as a private unit in direct contact with the elites would. The mobility of elites in Kathmandu, their loss of direction, place and purpose, signals a weakened position of elites as they traverse the streets looking for opportunities to make money, or to re-kindle their desire for investment. But re-kindling desire may take very long, even though it is an integral part of a slow process of economic recovery. In Lacan we see plenty of writing on desire, but even he is unable to offer a quick, short-run solution as to how precisely desire may be born or re-kindled once it has been lost. It seems re-kindling desire is a long-term concern for the economy, which means that its loss becomes a major problem. 

Nevertheless, absent of desire, a 'scavenging attitude' in the weakened elites is in play (they become like vultures), the elites have become today more desperate, and so their encroachment is now into more riskier terrain, their constant look for opportunities leading them to more criminal places. The regular ways of making money cease to be reliable, and the elites are led towards criminal places and even participating in criminal activities, becoming the target of crime themselves and hence needing protection. The knowledge objects (reports, surveys, video files) formed in the surveillance of the community will be very valuable for elites who seek to invest into Kathmandu, meaning that the private police force is utilized as a research arm of an elite capitalist endeavor. The private police force is nothing other than a morphing of economic interests with security concerns. 

On the other hand, we also have in Kathmandu's communities the development of a 'policing community' of actors aware of the persistent threats in their communities; the 'community-turned-police' is evident in some Kathmandu communities today and could become a trend among more communities. The evidences of the policing community are the prominent message-posts on public walls that say that a certain community has a “safety siren” in place, meaning that the community is policing and protecting itself through multiple panopticons, that is, with all houses in a neighborhood becoming a panopticon with its own local area of monitoring. A policing community is a commendable step towards realizing that the state police's harsh punishments are not desired in close-knit communities. In a policing community, the punishment administered for an 'internal' deviant would not be imprisonment or fines, but cultural ostracizing and dialogue-based confrontation.

In a policing community, root social and psychological causes of crime are more easily addressed than in state police prisons, effort and funds are not expended on solving the crime but on the rehabilitating of the deviant who has quickly been discovered because his/her signature habits are known; the policing role utilizes psychology and sociology more than the state police in order to get a grasp of the deviant behaviors, habits and potential plans that can then be addressed. Indeed, even the study of 'micro-economics' of the community becomes important, as the study of the rise and fall of the fortunes of the small community can help identify when a criminal activity is likely to occur. In this way, a more complete knowledge of the community is developed, but such a knowledge is not centralized to one authority figure, there is no central male patriarch of the community in charge, but, in a very important revolution, housewives, the unemployed, the unwell have all become the most important members of a policing community, observing as they can from their windows and becoming important as witnesses to criminal activity. When a crime does occur, for the community police the crime becomes a signal that a lot of things in the entire community are amiss, and each particular feature of the community is brought up to evaluation in the aftermath of a crime, and so once again a type of 'maternal involvement' with the community is evident, with the key motive being concern and not suspicion. What is at stake for the community police is not just this or that minor law which the state police is concerned with, but Law as such, the combination of all laws (a murder reveals a frustrating littering problem which could be connected to the murder...), which is the combined 'Law' in the sense of the Lacanian "Name of the Father," the Law of the need to protect the whole symbolic order from all kinds of threats, in other words, the Law of having to submit to other lesser laws, to submit to castration in the name of law if one is to continue to live in society. 

But what is important to note, in conclusion, is that the private police of the elites and the community-level policing activities of the rest are not to be understood as a part of a single increase in police activity, inspired by the perception of a common threat, but rather, private police and community police can be in opposition to one another. The elites, desperate and scavenging for ways to do business, are on the offensive in the communities, where their striving for knowledge knows no bounds, their desire for investment once again slowly re-kindled by the empty neighborhoods signalling potential, emptied not by their own private police's presence but because of the community police. The communities, on the defensive, are ever alert towards any sign of disturbance to their independence. The investment process works precisely by the nullifying of threats over a certain territory, for it is clear in warfare that the standing army is only a concern for a limited period of time, after which the job of nullifying other criminal elements in the conquered territory takes effect so that the territory can become economically viable. But the problem is that elite investment, and the drive towards investment, disturbs the independence of the communities. 

The Nepali Madman: A Writer of Anti-Encyclopedia Nepali Texts

A look at Kathmandu's streets, and it becomes apparent that ways of treatment of mad people are not working. For the mad are there present in the street for years and years. Neither the criminal system nor psychiatry has worked to treat them, nor to confine them. The state does not treat all of them well, for they could be better clothed and given other adequate and basic materials. One of the places where the failure of treatment can be located is in the difficulty to account for the madman in normal writing. The mad elicit an abnormality not just in their behavior, but in the written material about them. How then does madness appear in writing? Madness is long descriptions in biographies in historical writing, madness is over-poetic language in the confessions and dialogue-remarks, madness is too lengthy and complex sentences...many forms of errors in writing are in fact also errors of madness; madness is what is "unsuitable" for serious and official writing, such as historical writing. An understanding of madness must be concerned with the formal writing on the mad and on those rare and special moments when the madman is asked to fill out a form, if that happens at all...madness, in other words, has a lot to do with writing, and this aspect of madness must be given attention. In illiterate Nepal, the madman can be considered, ironically, the hope to give Nepal the richness and substance in the written word where other normal writers may be lacking. But, on the other hand, in a place with illiteracy, including the madman's style of writing and brand of literature within the national narrative will indeed be difficult. In short, it is uncomfortable for us Nepalis not suited to the written word to digest the madman's writings. 

A quality of resistance to confinement is present in a madman's writing. It is testament to the fact that imprisonment or confinement is evident as much in the written word as in the confinement of the physical body. For the mad, the confinement via the text may be more disturbing than the confinement of the body, this may be precisely what differentiates the mad from other criminals. A constant worrying over the written word of a form/survey as an author would over his/her book: “How do I appear in that form I just filled?” over and above the concern with the body now being located within a ward. The mad does not mind surveillance of the location and distortions of the body, but is always concerned with the archive room, that one location in the ward which is in fact not surveyed as meticulously as everywhere else. Today, the ward's constant and obsessive awareness of the knowledge it produces, indeed, the very process of meticulous archiving, folder-ing, labeling, organizing, etc is a result of the interest shown by the potentially-dangerous madman towards the forms he/she had to fill. The madman converted the written forms into objects of interest and objects needing protection. (And indeed, the serious consultation of such forms by a warden rely on the very important question of what exactly a madman would see in them, so that the level of security to which these forms are submitted can be judged.) 

If Nepal is to treat madness in the right way, then it should consider major revisions to the way it writes official history, such as those found in government textbooks for school. The writing in these textbooks is inspired by the writing found in old encyclopedias, and this does practice will never include the madman, whose biography is full of minute details rather than major brush-strokes (“In 1984, the madman broke the smallest bone in his foot when he was trampled by a auto-rickshaw with the number 1882....”), whose social relations are too intricate to fit one sentence ("In 1988, the madman had an affair with a neighbor's sister, who happened to be a friend's cousin of his sister's husband, who happened to be a.....”), whose achievements are based on the conquest of micro-territories which are constantly in change rather than entire states, and so on. The madman's texts are anti-encyclopedia, and they are not fictional or made for more popular and leisurely consumption, and we are not speaking of those writers who write literature experimentally or "as a madman would write it," rather, we believe that it is in those protected forms of the psychiatric wards that the madman's literature is, his 'book' his and his whole oeuvre is. What must occur is a publication of the archives of the mad, if such archives are indeed written in Nepali wards, and if not, then the deliberate formalization of the ward's forms in the future, for it is in challenge of rigid formality that the madman can express. 

The Foucauldian notion of the 'death of the author' does not seem to apply to the madman, for the psychiatric forms which a madman fills out are of such a nature that they are precisely there to record the life of the author, to contain the evidence that the madman as author is alive and responsive: "What is your name?" "What is your date of birth?" "What happens to you?" and so on, the answers of all of which are signs of life. In a sense, the madman writes his autobiography through the help of the ward's form. Indeed, isn't the autobiography, that very important historical text, precisely the form of writing which would enable the madman to be most expressive in his/her own way? A study on how autobiography writing would help the mad should be conducted. And, the habit of including the madman in a biography or other types of historical texts, such as those on historical occurrences, must be discouraged.