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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... wholly distinct orders of events . For the person whose pain it is , it is " effort- lessly " grasped ( that is , even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped ) ; while for the person outside the sufferer's body , what is ...
... wholly unaware of the first person's pain . But the implicit question that is being asked here , " How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it ?, " leads inevitably to a second question ...
... wholly distinct set of perceptual complications ; and these complications , as well as the ways in which they get sorted out by culture , will require a separate treatment and be dealt with in a later work . As an actual physical fact ...
... wholly ignoring Philoctetes's pain is subverted by the intervening sign of the weapon , for he eventually " sees " Philoctetes's pain only because circumstances arise that re- quire him to attend to — what else ? —Philoctetes's bow ...
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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 |