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
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... Attention to the legal contexts of pain first became possible when a 1979 University of Pennsylvania Summer Grant enabled me to devote an extended period to reading the trial transcripts of personal injury cases . Because such ...
... attention one successfully apprehends it . the aversiveness of the " it " one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual " it " ) . So . for the person in pain , so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ...
... attention on the nature and treatment of pain . The extent to which medical research on the physical problem of pain is simultaneously bound up with the problem of language creation is best illustrated by what may at first appear to be ...
... attention away from the living sister or uncle who can be helped by our compassion in a way that the fictional character cannot be ; there is also the danger that because artists so successfully express suffering , they may themselves ...
... attention . But the sentient fact of physical pain is not simply somewhat less easy to express than some second ... attention from it . Indeed , even where it is virtually the only content in a given environment , it will be possible to ...
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 |