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 84
... become evident that the particular array of words chosen by the patient may help to indicate the presence or absence of a ... becomes visible , however , when one recognizes that he has found in language not only the record of the felt ...
... becomes an inventor of language , one who speaks on behalf of another person ( the plaintiff ) and attempts to communicate the reality of that person's physical pain to people who are not themselves in pain ( the jurors ) . A fifth and ...
... become visible here ) . Very occasionally it becomes necessary to introduce into the argument a some- what formal lerm in order to make it clear that a particular phenomenon en- countered in an earlier chapter is now being reencounicred ...
... 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 ( e.g. , the elaborate mental labor of disso- ciating " wounding " from " creating " in ...
... becomes as well a story about the expansive nature of human sentience , the felt - fact of aliveness that is often ... become visible to us , or cease to be visible to us . It is about the way we make ourselves ( and the originally ...
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 |