ABSTRACT

The rapid shift between order and disorder of a society offers a great opportunity to observe the public’s re-identification with their imagined community – one of those critical moments unveiling the structural cause of identity crisis and the state’s strategy of “self-healing.” By reviewing the strategies of the disturbed community to restore its law and order, this essay’s interpretation of Gillian Slovo’s Ten Days and J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come aims to argue that moralist narratives of contemporary riots have largely inherited the Foucauldian conception of “governmentality and madness.” In such grand narratives, rioters’ performance is defined as immoral and insane, but in the meantime the source of madness and its miraculous disappearance after upheavals are often understated. The endings of both novels suggest that the temporarily restored order results from the expelling of madness and its violence, rather than a serious tackling with the essential problem of the society. In this sense, the literary representations of social turmoils have exposed a paradoxical yet significant fact: while the state criticizes the disorder caused by madness, it has in effect systematically produced mad men to justify the legitimacy of the state’s political framework.

摘要

社会有序与无序之间的快速转变提供了一个很好的机会来观察公众对他们想象中的社区的重新认同——这是揭示身份危机的结构性原因和国家“自我修复”战略的关键时刻之一。通过回顾被扰乱的社区恢复其法律和秩序的策略，本文解读了吉莉安·斯洛沃的《十日》和 JG 巴拉德的《王国来临》旨在论证当代骚乱的道德主义叙事在很大程度上继承了福柯的“治理与疯狂”概念。在这样的宏大叙事中，暴乱者的表现被定义为不道德和疯狂，但与此同时，疯狂的根源及其在动荡后奇迹般的消失往往被低估了。两部小说的结局都表明，暂时恢复的秩序是驱逐疯狂及其暴力的结果，而不是认真解决社会的根本问题。从这个意义上说，文学对社会动荡的描写揭示了一个矛盾而又重要的事实：国家在批判疯狂造成的混乱的同时，实际上却在系统地制造疯子来为国家政治框架的合法性辩护。