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The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World By Elaine Scarry ( Oxford University Press, USA )
Release Date: 1987-04-23
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Product Description
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.
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Phenomenal, eye-opening work of amazing diligence
This is a masterful work of philosophy that explores a too often neglected force in our lives. So much has been written about the mechanics and the physiology of pain, but so little -- at least in terms of accessible literature -- has been written about its psychological ramifications. With unbelievable dedication and insight, Scarry looks at the role pain plays in culture and identity, spending half of the book on its destructive dynamic in war and torture and half of it on the constructive dynamics in just about every other situation. My only complaint about the book is the disconnect between the two halves and the intriguing but too specific focus on the Bible for the second half. Scarry makes some excellent points here, but ultimately it would have been more educational to hear what she has to say about constructive aspects of pain in non-literary contexts. She talks a lot about the body and creation without relying on her analysis of pain in the Bible, but then it ends up not being enough about pain.
Regardless, an astounding work of philosophy that feels like a critical stepping stone in understanding the ways our imagination, culture, and pain interrelate.
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 Fascinating and Flawed ( boots177 )
The Body in Pain includes many interesting ideas and theories that could be made into engrossing analyses, yet Elaine Scarry manages to even make torture boring. Her frankly very intelligent observations would be much better suited to a 20 page scholarly essay than a 300 plus page repetitive rant that seems to care more about displaying her verbal acuity than proving a point, let alone attracting readers. I have counted the number of times she uses the word "sentient" and "sentience": some pages include these terms more than 8 times. One would think that an author so obviously bent on proving her intelligence would deign to consult a thesaurus. Perhaps "feeling" is too plebeian a term for her....
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 Helpful in Working With Torture Victims ( bannon-t-ma )
I have worked with several individuals who suffered extreme physical torture sometime during their lives. Scarry's work helped me to understand the internal world of the sufferer in ways I would never have even begun to approach. Each one of these individuals lacked the language to discuss their experiences. What they were left with was inarticulatable images, physical sensations, emotions, profound helplessness and alienation. Scarry's book helped me find language to give to my patients -- language that helped to normalize their reaction to, and experience of inexplicable events. Her exploration of the abyss of human destruction is accomplished such original, humane, and thoughtful detail. Her book is an ingenius work of art.
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Densely written but rewarding treatise ( nietzschecaesar )
Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain", an influential study on the relationship between pain, torture, warfare and creativity is a stunning achievement, from the standpoint of Marxism. I confess that I have not read the sections on the structure of warfare, but I was extremely impressed with the passages on torture. Scarry's central premise is that pain, a radically subjective, hence inexpressible and incommunicable experience, results, during the process of torture, in destroying, or deconstructing the victim's voice (his or her power of articulation) and by extension, the victim's world. It is the prisoner's pain, incommunicable because unsharable, which is denied by the torturer as pain but translated as the wholly illusory phenomenon of power, that of the torturer and the regime he represents. These parts of the book are expounded with considerable insight and sophistication, in dense and convoluted prose. The second part, dealing with how pain is converted to creativity, explains how the radical subjectivity and inexpressibility of the sufferer's pain is mitigated into the objective (hence sharable and communicable) activity of work, which is a self-imposed, milder and socially more profitable form of pain. This treatise is absolutely vital reading for any one who aspires to seriously dabble in literature, psychology or philosophy. A tour de force.
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Good but limited insights ( schakwin )
What an odd and wonderful book! It attempts to address three topics -- pain/torture, warfare, and creativity. On the subject of pain/torture it is remarkably acute. The description of what pain is and what it does to consciousness and life's enjoyment is terrific and, in my experience, unprecedented. Similarly, its description of torture and what torture means is stunning in its immediacy. However, when it goes from torture to warfare, the book goes off the rails. It is clear that Ms Scarry has a limited knowledge of warfare and a very limited understanding of what it means and how it is carried out. Warfare is usually a last resort and often involves activity by those who are free against those who are trying to create and perpetuate some form of slavery. (see the work of Victor Davis Hanson, e.g., The Soul of Battle.) This applies whether the war is conventional or nuclear. Her idea that taking the process of war to the civilian population is somehow a function of nuclear war is simply wrong. This approach to war is thousands of years old and, as Hanson points out, important and -- in some contexts -- virtuous. War is a horror, but it is better than slavery, torture, or conquest plus annihilation. Scarry doesn't address this. This book makes the experience of pain clear, but offers a wooly and uncertain explanation of war. Its Marxist approach to creativity is shallow and forgettable.
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Addiction
