ABSTRACT

This article explores Anna Kavan's critique of psychiatry in Asylum Piece (1940), a collection of stories which draws from her struggle with mental illness and her internment in a psychiatric clinic in the late 1930s. In this work, an aestheticization of vulnerability and a perplexing model of empathy are established. Kavan's conception of mental illness as a state of powerlessness leaves society – and by extension humanity – complicit with the psychiatric regime of oppression, and so she turns to non-human and “subhuman” subjectivities for safety and compassion. Unlike Derrida, then, for whom the gaze of the non-human other precipitates the deconstruction of one's identity, for Kavan the gaze of the non-human is restorative. The article examines the ethical implications of this gesture and proposes that Kavan's mentally ill be read as an other whose radical alterity demands to be acknowledged empathetically and unconditionally.

摘要

本文探讨了 Anna Kavan 在Asylum Piece中对精神病学的批评（1940 年），一系列故事取材于她与精神疾病的斗争以及她在 1930 年代后期在精神病诊所的拘留。在这项工作中，建立了一个脆弱的审美化和一个令人费解的移情模型。卡文将精神疾病视为一种无能为力的状态，这让社会——进而延伸到人类——与精神病学制度的压迫共谋，因此她转向非人类和“非人类”的主观性来寻求安全和同情。因此，与德里达不同，非人类他人的凝视促成了一个人身份的解构，而对于卡万来说，非人类的凝视具有恢复性。这篇文章研究了这种姿态的伦理含义，并提出卡万'