The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [Paperback]

Elaine Scarry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 1987 | ISBN-10: 0195049969 | ISBN-13: 978-0195049961 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I believe this project to be perhaps one of the most significant books on language, philosophy, and literature of the coming years."--Emory Elliott, Princeton University

"Stunningly original, enormously important, powerfully written....The beauty of her writing is that she can make us see torture and war as we have never seen them before, read the Bible and Marx as we have never read them before--indeed, see our day-to-day world in a usefully new manner."--Eric J. Cassell, M.D., Cornell Medical Center

"One of the most important books I have read this year [1987]."--Judith Fryer, University of Massachusetts

"Not for some time have we read a more original book on an announced subject than this review of pain's locations in torture, war and wherever people would do violence to others."--The Christian Century

"An extraordinary book: large-spirited, heroically truthful. A necessary book."--Susan Sontag

"A richly original, provocative book which makes one reconsider torture, war, and creativity from a new perspective."--Anthony Storr, Washington Post Book World

"Brilliant, ambitious and controversial...an all-encompassing discourse on creativity, imagination and the distribution of power."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In its breadth and humaneness of vision, in the density and richness of its prose, above all in the compelling nature of its argument, this is indeed an extraordinary book."--Susan Rubin Suleiman, The New York Times Book Review

"A brilliant and difficult book...Scarry's compassionate linguistics documents how [the] bridge between torturer and victim is cut."--Michael Ignatieff, The New Republic

"One of the most important books I have read this year."--Judith Fryer, University of Massachusetts

"Only by following Scarry step by step may a reader gradually discern the daringly encompassing scope of Scarry's vision on body and pain, making and unmaking. [Her] style of writing is at once profoundly personal and succinctly scholarly."--Religious Studies Review

"Scarry has written a dramatic and provocative discourse on the power of pain and man's reaction to it....The flow of the text is fluid and creative; the book is a well-disciplined example of literary thinking."--he Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine

"The book is large, ambitious, intricate and alternately illuminating, baffling and irritating....[It] is a brave book, and worth persevering with."--The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"An absolutely astonishing achievement...I believe it will change many lives, not by persuasion, but by widening the scope of consciousness. The book itself is a great act of courage, intelligence, and style."--Allen Grossman, Brandeis University

About the Author

Elaine Scarry is at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (April 23, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195049969
• ISBN-13: 978-0195049961
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #71 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Movements > Humanism

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 63 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Densely written but rewarding treatise July 11, 2000

By TheIrrationalMan

Format:Paperback

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.

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful in Working With Torture Victims March 5, 2001

By Rosemary Bannon Tyksinski

Format:Paperback

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.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Greatest Book on the Question: "Why do we create?" October 31, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Few works of contemporary philosophy are so underrated (not to mention mis-shelved) as this sweeping study of the relationship between human pain and human creation. I frequently recommend the book to people who have been intimidated by "phenomenology", and who need to return to the roots of this term: the study of raw sense perceptions.

To Scarry, pain not only feels negative but actually IS negation. Pain erases all other perceptions of the world, and it also kills language -- the root our ability to reach out to others and build a world together.

The book begins by considering the obvious fact that "intense pain is indescribable," then moves outward into the political consequences of this inexpressibility. Pain survives in the culture, and can be used as a political tool, precisely because of its muteness. This first half of the book, entitled "Unmaking", corresponds well to Dante's Inferno. Through a study of torture and (less helpfully) war, Scarry details the process by which the human ability to create, and thus to be, is destroyed for political purposes.

The book's second part, corresponding to Dante's Purgatorio, describes how humans move out of pain by creating the world of made objects. The reading of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that begins this section deserves much wider attention. Scarry reads these texts as an archetypical story of how pain led to creation. Scarry presents this story with a warm, generous, jargon-free style that is welcoming to the intelligent layman.

Parts of this book are, perhaps, more dated than others. The latter sections in each of the two halves (the first on war, the latter on the texts of Marx) seem to step down from the pinnacles of each half's beginning.... The reader can be forgiven for setting down the book at the end of the section on the scriptures, feeling that Scarry's powerful effect is complete.

In a world where contemporary philosophy and theory are too easily hijacked by political trends, Scarry's book is a welcome reminder that we are all bodies, and that beneath our divisions of race, class, and gender, we all share a pain that drives us to create our world. Read more ›

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Scarry's book is brilliant, wholly original, and moving. February 2, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Elaine Scarry's central argument is that pain is a state which defies reduction to language, and her remarkable book defies summation outside its own terms. Like all profoundly original works, the book creates its own idiom (making, unmaking) to discuss and compicate the issues it raises -- first, in a brilliant and moving phenomenological analysis of torture and its relation to language, ultimately moving on to a profound and unforgiving commentary on the Judeo-Christian scriptures and those writings' subtle (though, as Scarry explains it, it seems remarkable that one did not notice before) inversions of the given circumstances of human embodiment and the subject's relation to made-things in both in the material world and the imagined one. There is no literary critic (and indeed few novelists) who have provided such goosebump-inducing insights on why human beings should make things (books, statues, laws, gods) at all; and then unmake them just as fervently in acts of unmaking (war, torture). This is an extraordinary book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Phenomenal, eye-opening work of amazing diligence January 15, 2008

By Jed Verity

Format:Paperback

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.