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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... moment when this book was first passing into typescript . Barbara Schulman devoted many generous hours to proofreading . Eva Scarry has read the manuscript at every stage , pa- tiently tracing the vagaries of handwriting into type ...
... moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre - language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language : but conversely , to be present when a person moves up out of that pre - language and projects the facts of ...
... moment it is enough simply to notice that , whatever else is true , such litigation provides a situation that once again requires that the impediments to expressing pain be overcome . Under the pressure of this requirement , the lawyer ...
... moment in the book that a preliminary description and illustration may be helpful here . Because the existing vocabulary for pain contains only a small handful of adjectives , one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and ( as ...
... moment its single most familiar attribute — is language - destroying . Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language - destroying , but torture also mimes ( objectifies in the external environment ) this language Introduction 1 19.
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 |