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 76
... course , not several miles below our feet or many miles above our heads but within the bodies of persons who inhabit the world through which we each day make our way , and who may at any moment be separated from us by only a space of ...
... course of many pages ; but an approx- imation of the explanation may be partially apprehended by noticing the excep- tional character of pain when compared to all our other interior states . Contemporary philosophers have habituated us ...
... course , are individuals who have themselves been in great pain and whose words are later available either because they themselves remember them , because a friend remembers them , or because they have been recorded and memorialized in ...
... course , a self - evident one : there is always the danger that a fictional character's suffering ( whether physical or psychological ) will di- vert our attention away from the living sister or uncle who can be helped by our compassion ...
... course true that in any given instance of pain , there may actually be present a weapon ( the hammer may really be there ) or wound ( the bones may really be coming through the skin ) ; and the weapon or wound may immediately convey 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 |