Front cover image for The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world

The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, this work explores the nature of physical suffering. 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 Henry Kissinger. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain difficult to describe in words, it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme cases to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry goes on to analyse the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of warfare and torture, and she demonstrates how political regimes use the power of physical pain to attack and break down the sufferer's sense of self. Finally she turns to examples of artistic and cultural activity; actions achieved in the face of pain and difficulty
Print Book, English, 1987, ©1985
1st pbk. ed View all formats and editions
Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, ©1985
vii, 385 pages ; 25 cm
9780195049961, 0195049969
1010742826
Unmaking
The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power
The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues
Making
Pain and Imagining
The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making: Body and Voice in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx
The Interior Structure of the Artifact