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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... external world , that we do not simply " have feelings " but have feelings for somebody or something , that love is love of x . fear is fear of v , ambivalence is ambivalence about z . If one were to move through all the emotional ...
... external sign of the felt - experience of pain ( for which there is no alteration in the blood count , no shadow on the X ray , no pattern on the CAT scan ) is the patient's verbal report ( however itself in- adequate ) , then to bypass ...
... external image of interior events . Melzack and Torgerson have not discovered new words but have instead un- covered a structure residing in the narrow , already - existing vocabulary , the vocabulary originated by patients themselves ...
... external agent of the pain , a weapon that is pictured as producing the pain ; and the second specifies bodily damage that is pictured as accompanying the pain . Thus a person may say , " It feels as though a hammer is coming down on my ...
... external social circumstances that can be pictured as having caused the hurt . Given the expressive potential of the language of agency , it is not surprising that it reappears continually in the words of those working to objectify and ...
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 |