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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... described only one limited aspect of pain , its intensity ; and that describing pain only in terms of this solitary dimension was equivalent to de- scribing the complex realm of visual experience exclusively in terms of light flux ...
... described earlier . The importance of this question will become more apparent once we move to our second subject . The Political Consequences of Pain's Inexpressibility Though the overt subject of the preceding discussion was the ...
... described — not only by regimes that torture but sometimes by people who stand outside those regimes — as a form of informor/on - gathering or ( in its even more remarkable formulation ) intelligence- gathering ; and uncovering the ...
... described earlier — Amnesty International , the law , art — also show this same awareness of the expressive potential of the sign of the weapon : thus Amnesty International realized they would be able to enlist the help of men and women ...
... described sequentially would occur in the following order : first , the infliction of physical pain ; second , the objectification of the eight central attributes of pain ; and third , the translation of those attributes into the ...
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 |