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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... fact , belonging to an invisible geography that , how- ever portentous , has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth . Or alternatively , it may seem as distant as the interstellar events ...
... facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself ... fact that many people's experience of the medical community would bear out the opposite conclusion , the conclusion ...
... fact about pain is its presentness and the most crucial fact about torture is that it is happening ) . Tact and immediacy ordinarily work against one another ; thus the difficulty of sustaining either tone is compounded by the ne ...
... fact of the pain . Furthermore , built into the very structure of the case is a dispute about the correspondence ... facts of bodily 10 THE BODY IN PAIN.
... facts of bodily sentience out of the inar- ticulate pre - language of " cries and whispers " into the realm of ... fact of how consistently art confers visibility on other forms of distress ( the thoughts of Hamlet , the tragedy of ...
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 |