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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... Structure of Torture : The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power 27 Chapter 2 The Structure of War : The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues 60 Part Two : Making Chapter 3 Pain and Imagining 161 Chapter 4 ...
... structure of larger events where it achieves the full extremity of its sadistic potential . In torture , it is in ... structures of culture are centrally devoted to stabilizing this sign . The discussion of civilization's ongoing ...
... structure that is as narrow and consistent as its geographical incidence is widespread . That structure entails the simultaneous and inseparable occurrence of three events which if described sequentially would occur in the following ...
... structure of unmaking . The import of this will be returned to after summarizing Chapter 2 . War , too , has a structure . As might be expected when one moves from what is essentially a two - person event to one involving hundreds of ...
... structure of war " and " the structure of unmaking " are not two subjects but one . If as the intricacies of this conflation emerge before us they have the defect of sometimes seeming astonishing , they will also at every moment have ...
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 |