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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... human body and a profound respeci for the human voice ) , it has become es- pecially true of the present era of medicine , which has begun to focus increasing attention on the nature and treatment of pain . The extent to which medical ...
... human body , the wound in that body , the pain in that wound . Bergman's Cries and Whispers opens with a woman's diary entry , " It is Monday morning and I am in pain , " and becomes throughout its duration ( a duration that required ...
... human body . That is , the felt - characteristics of pain — one of which is its compelling vibrancy or its incontestable reality or simply its " certainty " — can be appropriated away from the body and presented as the attributes of ...
... human body will be borrowed to lend thai cultural construct the aura of " realness " and " certainty . " Part One , the first half of this book , will show how centrally those periods during which there is a breakdown in the framing ...
... human body in torture and in war in order to account for the moral distance that separates their respective procedures of analogical verification . The basis of the distinction is " consent " : in war , the persons whose bodies are used ...
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 |