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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 culturalforces--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 aninarticulate 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 ofartistic 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.… (more)
User reviews
As a sidenote, the notes in this book are carefully and expertly included--I don't know when I've read another work of nonfiction where the end notes have been not only thorough, but only included as actually of interest to casual readers and giving more than basic citations and/or unnecessary details. These endnotes are elaborations---any point of interest that has an endnote has an endnote of interest, in other words, and that seems a rarity.
Unfortunately, as engaged as I was with the first half of Scarry's book, the second half loses some of the drive from the first. There's some repetition, and much language that seems needlessly complex or academic, more in the line with what I expect of theory as opposed to the clear and direct language of the first portion of the book. The material is still integral to Scarry's points, and worth pursuing certainly, but it does become a progressively more difficult read. It may be to alleviate that difficulty and complexity that Scarry regularly repeats points and ideas from the first portion of the book, but those repetitions make the second half of the book more difficult to get through, nearly in the style of a collection of articles from a single author as opposed to a single composed argument.
In the end, though, I'd certainly recommend the full work to anyone interested, for there's no doubt that this work is smart and thought-provoking, both necessary and worthwhile for anyone willing to work through the ideas.