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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... nature of both material and verbal expressibility or , more simply , the nature of human creation . It might be best to picture these three subjects as three concentric circles , for when we enter into the innermost space of the first ...
... nature occur from time to time . " 2 Vaguely alarming yet unreal , laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation , unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates , Seyfert ...
... nature and treatment of pain . The extent to which medical research on the physical problem of pain is simultaneously bound up with the problem of language creation is best illustrated by what may at first appear to be only a ...
... nature of bodily pain . In Sophocles's Philoctetes . the fate of an entire civilization is suspended in order to allow the ambassadors of that civilization to stop and take account of the nature of the human body , the wound in that ...
... nature of analogical verification as it occurs in torture , and Chapter 2 makes visible the crucial place it has in the structural logic of war . Part Two returns to the subject and shows thai it is part of the original and ongoing ...
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 |