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INSTITUTING THE COMMON AT LA BORDE CLINIC (2023)
La Borde Clinic in Cour-Cheverny,
France. Still from Nicolas
Philibert’s documentary film La moindre des choses, 1997.
A research paper on the radical social experimentation that took place at postwar psychiatric institution La Borde Clinic. Written as an undergraduate thesis in 2023 and published in the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Journal in Spring 2025.Founded by Jean Oury and later shaped by Félix Guattari, La Borde rejected the bureaucratic rigidity of traditional French asylums in favor of shared labor, non-hierarchical social structures, and patient participation. On the grounds of a crumbling castle, collective theater productions, patient-run newspapers, rotating task charts, and pink toilet paper formed what Guattari called “a clinic unlike any other.” Bringing La Borde into dialogue with contemporary theorizations of the common, I draw on the work of scholars Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval; Camille Robcis; and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, to interrogate how radical institutions mediate collective experience and structure power. Through close readings of La Borde’s narratives and practices, I examine the potentials of an “instituted” or “instituent” common. Can a psychiatric institution, however reflexive, sustain collectivity without reproducing hierarchy or succumbing to inertia? I argue that La Borde offers a compelling, if irreplicable, model of disalienated care that reveals the paradoxes of radical social formations and the possibilities of alternative institutional models.
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