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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... once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed . Whatever pain achieves , it achieves in part through its unsharability , and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language . " English , " writes ...
... once more differing importantly in their intensity , are alike in registering the existence of a " thermal dimension " to pain . Again , the words " pinching , " " pressing . " " gnawing , " " cramping , " and " crushing , " together ...
... once be characterized by the greatest possible tact ( for the most intimate realm of another human being's body is the implicit or explicit subject ) and by the greatest possible immediacy ( for the most crucial fact about pain is its ...
... once again requires that the impediments to expressing pain be overcome . Under the pressure of this requirement , the lawyer , too , becomes an inventor of language , one who speaks on behalf of another person ( the plaintiff ) and ...
... 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 physical pain , at every moment lingering nearby was ...
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 |