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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... Making : Body and Voice in the Judeo - Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx 181 Chapter 5 The Interior Structure of the Artifact 278 Notes 327 Index 373 The Body in Pain INTRODUCTION LTHOUGH this book has only.
... interior of that person's body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact , belonging to an invisible geography that , how- ever portentous , has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the ...
... interior states . Contemporary philosophers have habituated us to the recognition that our interior states of consciousness are regularly accompanied by objects in the external world , that we do not simply " have feelings " but have ...
... interior to any one set of words , worked to bestow visibility on the characteristics of pain . When heard in isolation , any one adjective such as " throbbing pain " or " burning pain " may appear to convey very little precise ...
... " and becomes throughout its duration ( a duration that required that its cinematographer photograph two hundred different background shades of red ) a sustained attempt to lift the interior facts of bodily 10 THE BODY IN PAIN.
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 |