The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the WorldOxford University Press, 1985 - 385 pages Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 75
... actions of those who use it in the second way . On the contrary : the two uses are not simply distinct but mutually exclusive ; in fact we will see that one of the central tasks of civilization is to stabilize this most elementary sign ...
... action that could plausibly be used in its place ) . As the language of agency has a central place in torture and war — the two events in which the ordinary assumptions of culture are suspended — so , con- versely , the basic structures ...
... actions associated with such objects ( e.g. , the elaborate mental labor of disso- ciating " wounding " from " creating " in the Hebrew scriptures ) . The idiom of this last sentence " tool , " " artifact , " " restructure ...
... action emerges before our eyes , we gradually begin to recognize what it is we are looking at ; and what we are looking at is the structure of unmaking . The import of this will be returned to after summarizing Chapter 2 . War , too ...
... action of creating itself . Once the structures of torture and war have been exposed and compared , it becomes clear that the human action of making entails two distinct phases — making - up ( mental imag- ining ) and making - real ...
Contents
The Structure of Torture The Conversion of Real Pain into Fiction of Power | 27 |
The Structure of War The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues | 60 |
Pain and Imagining | 161 |
The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making Body and Voice in the JudeoChristian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx | 181 |
The Interior Structure of the Artifact | 278 |
Notes | 327 |
Index | 371 |