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 82
... example of what it is to " have certainty , " while for the other person it is so elusive that " hearing about pain " may exist as the primary model of what it is " to have doubt . " Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once ...
... example , the tendency of one pop- ulation to vocalize cries ; the tendency of another to suppress them — is well ... examples , such cultural differences , taken collectively , would themselves con- stitute only a very narrow margin of ...
... example , one receives a letter from Amnesty in the mail , the words of that letter must somehow convey to the reader the aversiveness being experienced inside the body of someone whose country may be far away , whose name can barely be ...
... example , it were easier to express intellectual aspiration than bodily hunger , one would expect to find that the problem of education had a greater degree of social recognition than the problem of mal- nutrition or famine ; or again ...
... example of conviction , or alternatively as an example of scepticism ) . To have pain is to have certainty ; to hear about pain is to have doubt . But we will see that the relation between pain and belief is even more problematic than ...
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 |