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 45
... actual " it " ) . So . for the person in pain , so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that " having pain " may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to " have certainty , " while for the other person ...
... actual agent ( a nail sticking into the bottom of the foot ) and an imagined agent ( a person's statement . " It feels as if there's a nail sticking into the bottom of my foot " ) both convey something of the felt - experience of pain ...
... actual or imagined ) and wound ( whether actual or imagined ) may be used associatively to express pain . To some extent the inner workings of the two metaphors , as well as the perceptual complications that attend their use , overlap ...
... actual weapons ordinarily hurt rather than heal persons , it would be surprising if the iconography of weapons ordinarily worked to assist those in pain , and of course it does not . When , for example , the language of agency enters ...
... actual object ( e.g. , the modi- fications in the form of the weapon that allow it to become transformed into a tool or into an artifact ) , and at still other times is framed in terms of the human actions associated with such objects ...
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 |