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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... central problem , a problem that originates much less in the inflexibility of any one language or in the shyness of any one culture than in the utter rigidity of pain itself : its resistance to language is not simply one of its ...
... central concern in this book , each of the three will be extensively drawn on , at times appearing in the foreground and at other times in the background of the arguments being made . Amnesty International's ability to bring about the ...
... central observations that surfaced earlier and seeing how laden with political consequence each of the four is ... central activity of war is injuring and the central goal in war is to out - injure the opponent , the fact of injuring ...
... central content is bodily pain or injury . The third central point that emerged earlier was an extension of the second : though there is ordinarily no language for pain , under the pressure of the desire to eliminate pain , an at least ...
... central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population's belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation — the sheer ...
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 |