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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... problems posed by the legal materials , thanks to the research provisions that Harvard Law School so generously extends to its Visiting Scholars . I am fortunate to have been part of two working groups that brought together people from ...
... problem she describes , not limited to English , is characteristic of all languages . This is not to say that one ... problem , a problem that originates much less in the inflexibility of any one language or in the shyness of any one ...
... 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 coincidence : the person who discovered what is now considered the most compelling and ...
... problem of pain or the problem of expressing pain in medical contexts has been solved . But through the mediating structures of this diagnostic questionnaire , language ( " as if , " T. S. Eliot might say , " a magic lantern threw the ...
... - pressing physical pain , at every moment lingering nearby was another subject , the political complications that arise as a result of that difficulty . How intricately the problem of pain is bound up with the problem Introduction 11.
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 |