The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Scarry, Elaine 1985 Oxford University Press，385p.
Last Update:20101011
■Scarry, Elaine 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World，Oxford University Press，385p. ISBN-10:0195049969 ISBN-13:978-0195049961 $19.95 [amazon]／[kinokuniya]
■内容
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, this profoundly original 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.
Book 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.
■目次
Introduction
(The Inexpressibility of Physical Pain,
The Political Consequences of Pain's Inexpressibility,
The Nature of Human Creation)
Part One: Unmaking
Chapter1 The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power
(1. Pain and Interrogation,
2. The Objectification of the Prisoner's World Dissolution,
3. The Transformation of Body into Voice,
4. Three Simultaneous Phenomena in the Structure of Torture)
Chapter2 The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injred Bodies and Unanchored Issues
(1. War Is Injuring,
2. War Is a Contest,
3. What Differentiates Injuring from Other Acts or Attributes on Which a Contest Can Be Based,
4. The End of War: The Laying Edge to Edge of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues,
5. Torture and War: A Difference Between Them)
Par Two: Making
Chapter 3 Pain and Imagining
Chapter 4 The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making: Body and Voice in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx
(1. Behold Rebekah: the Human Body and God's Voice in Pregnancy, Reproduction, and Multiplication,
2. Scenes fo Wounding and the Problem of Doubt,
3. The Interior Structure of Made Objects,
4. The Construction and Deconstruction of Making within the Material Realm)
Chapter 5 The Interior Structure of the Artifact
(1. Articacts: the Making Sentient of the External World,
2. The Articat as Lever: Reciprocation Exceeds Projection)
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■言及
＊作成：八木 慎一