The Body in pain: the Making and unmaking of the World

Original meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the literay, political, philosophical, medical and religious vocabularies used to describe it. Elaine Scarry bases her analysis on a wide array of sources, including literature and art, medical case histories, documents and torture compiled by Amnesty International, and the writings of such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger. Contents: 1. The structure of Torture: The conversion of real pain into the fiction of power. 2. The structure of war: The juxtaposition of injured bodies and unanchored issues. 3. Pain and imagining. 4.The structure of believe and its modulation into material making:body and voice in the Judeo-christian scriptures and the writing of Marx. 5.The interior structure of the artifact