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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... important to me as his own writings on behalf of his patients have been inspiring . Jack Davis has entered into the book's arguments with the unsparing intellectual rigor familiar to all who know him . Allen Grossman's vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
... 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 difficulty of ex- pressing ...
... important differences between the various versions can be talked about and assessed . There are four or five other terms ( e.g. , referential instability , intentional object ) that at certain points become similarly necessary ; but in ...
... important point stressed earlier , that in order to express pain one must both objectify its felt - characteristics and hold steadily visible the referent for those characteristics . That is , the image of the weapon only enables us to ...
... important question since if injuring has only the solitary function of allowing one side to out - injure the other and thus of des- ignating one of the disputants the winner , almost any other human activity could by now have been ...
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 |