جسد متألم: صنع العالم وتفكيكه

by Elaine Scarry, حسام نايل (Translator)

يُعد الكتاب تأملا فلسفيًا أصيلًا وعميقًا في قابلية الجسد البشري للانجراح، وتحليلًا للمفردات الأدبية والسياسية والفلسفية والطبية والدينية المستعملة في وصف هذه القابلية. هكذا بدأ المترجم حديثه عن الكتاب في مقدمته.
ويُضيف "نايل": "وتؤسس إلين سكاري تحليلها على مجموعة واسعة من المصادر، تشمل الأدب والفن وتواريخ الحالة الطبية، ووثائق التعذيب، سواء شهادات مسجونين سياسيين أو سجلات محاكمة الجلادين، وكتابات شخصيات من امثال كلاوزفيتر وليدل هارت وتشرشل وكيسنجر عن الحرب، بالإضافة إلى سجلات محاكمات مدنية معاصرة.
يواصل المترجم: "تبدأ المؤلفة من حقيقة أن الألم الجسدي غير قابل للتعبير عنه، ملاحظة قدرته على هدم اللغة وشبه استحالة وصفه. كما تحلل العواقب السياسية الناتجة عن تعمد إلحاق الألم والإصابة، ولا سيما في حالات التعذيب والحرب، موضحة كيف "تُفَّككُ" الأنظمةُ الحاكمة العالم الفردي عند ممارستها السلطة. ثم تنتقل سكاري من تحليل النشاطات التي "تهدم" العالم إلى مناقشة النشاطات التي "تصنع" العالم، انطلاقًا من الكتاب المقدس بعهديه، وأعمال ماركس: أفعال الخلق التي تظهر في اللغة وأشياء الحضارة المصنوعة".
ويُشير المترجم إلى أن "ميزة هذا الكتاب – وهي ميزة مستمدة من المنهج الفلسفي بعامة – أن تحليلات المؤلفة للجسد المتألَّم التي خصصتها بحال الألم في بنيتي التعذيب والحرب، ثم بأصوله القديمة في الكتاب المقدس وبأصوله الحديثة في كتابات ماركس (من حيث علاقته الجوهرية بالتخيل والصنع وبنية الإسقاط والتبادل)، من الممكن تعميمها على أي حال من احوال الألم يتعرض لها الجسد البشري.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Theory, Disability, History, Anthropology

664 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 1985

Reviews

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much to say about this utterly bad ass piece of critical scholarship. But the one thing that jumps off the page is the pre 911, pre Guantánamo treatment of torture as beyond the pale of moral conduct.

Yes absolutely (as should go without saying, but ironically and unfortunately, in 2022 must be said).

And after the normalization and reification of torture post 911, into “enhanced rendering”, and entertainment via shows like 24. I feel a sense of shame in the contrast between then and now.

This book is about pain.

But pain considered in such a multivariate, creative, rigorous and relentlessly curious way, as to render the previous statement (this book is about pain) as banal in the truest sense.

In the same way Emanuel Kant took doubt to its ultimate terminus, and arrived at the irrefutable truth ‘something exists’ even if that something is only a disembodied thought.

Scarry arrives at a similar dual terminus, that suffering, is for the suffer, the very definition of certainty, while conversely, it is for the observer, the very definition of doubt.

To suffer is to be alone.

As a therapist, I understand that the best one can do as a witness of another’s suffering, is lean into your own senses of empathy, and to loan the other your earnest belief in their account.

This is akin to the faith of the religious.

Because the clients self report is frequently the only instrument of measure that we have, and faith in the process of therapy is frequently the only container we have for the groundless complexity of the impossible profession we purvey.

But given all that, there is still a chasm of doubt between the therapist and the client.

As the science of psychology plainly demonstrates.

Sometimes (many times) people are distorted or even blind to the objective reality represented in their subjective experiences.

For the therpaist, challenging or even deconstructing and destroying someone’s maladaptive beliefs is frequently the most important part of the gig.

The act of validating another’s pain as absolutely real, and simultaneously empowering the client to deconstruct it, and supplant it with a more effective, less miserable, and equally real experience is not as easy as it sounds.

Physicians treating pain have an infinitely more fraught dilemma, in that they prescribe addictive opioid medications, often based purely on the clients self reported levels of pain, which is most commonly the result of the lesser but still real harm of the interventions that they themselves administer.

The chasm of doubt between the physician and the client (particularly given the ever looming prospect of drug seeking and opioid addiction) is so vast that the humanity of each participant is partially, or totally lost in the transaction.

Now consider (as Scarry does) pain in the context of the relationship between the tortured and the torture, the slave and the master, opponents in war, or the victims (everyone) of a nuclear conflict.

This book was published in 1987. From the perspective of 2022, it is easy to forget how terrifying it was to be in the grip of the Cold War.

It was almost impossible to be carefree without the aid of drugs and alcohol. The nearest equivalent today is the ever looming reality of the creeping death of our planet.

But for those of you who didn’t live through the Cold War, imagine if you will, the omnipresent threat of being thrust into the absolute nightmare of the end stage of climate catastrophe, with the additional problem of exposure to nuclear radiation, occurring in the blink of an eye, at the push of a button, by vengeful, deeply flawed leaders (Reagan v. Khrushchev), in an atmosphere of total hostility, paranoia and fear, only three or four decades out from the brutal horror and trauma of WWII.

This is the psychic environment that the Body In Pain was conceived and birthed in. It is much less of a finished statement, than a grasping, scratching, clawing, writhing meditation on the uniquely central role that pain, vulnerability and destruction plays in the human experience.

I think this writing is unparalleled in many respects.

When I read the negative reviews of this book, I am baffled.

How fucking good does a woman have to be to get even a modicum of acknowledgment and respect?

This book is brilliant. Scarry is (yes, I’ll say it) scary brilliant. Most of the reviews focus on the content, and then criticize it for being passé, or lightweight.

That perspective bypasses the absolute genius and revelatory quality of the writing.

Her passages on the Bible are both generous and scathing. They bravely and apparently lovingly process, deconstruct and reframe the Old and New Testament in to embodied mythic structures.

The skeleton of the western cannon.

Her perspective on the Bible had enough critical facility and distance to (temporarily) assuage my enormous aversion to Christianity and religion. And her deep understanding and obvious love for the beautiful language, images and metaphors in the Bible, legitimately drew me in and actually got me interested in and even considering reading and engaging with “that text” (a first for me).

NOTE: I’m not actually going to read the Bible, but I thought about it, and that’s HUGE.

Anyway…

If I had met a priest or theologian like Elaine Scarry in my more impressionable youth, I might have joined the clergy.

Thank God I waited to read this book 🤪.

Her reflections on Marx, specifically embodiment, labor and capitalism, are rich and warm and dimensional. The mode of production (labor) is the body extended. The laborer feels the earth through the handle of the instrument, which becomes an extension of their body. The knife that cuts a person is a weapon, the knife that kills the livestock animal is a tool. The commodity is to capitalism as the cell is to biology.

Any one of the countless revelations in this book are worthy of extended contemplation and study.

Finally, Scarry’s welding of everything (pain, torture, war, religion, capitalism, physical mutilation, economic subjugation, environmental degradation) is too prescient of 2022 to ignore.

The capitalist and their beneficiaries suffer at the cold alter of their dead mammon, while the laborer suffers in the relentless grip and grind of self/world commodification that typifies their very existence.

If that sentiment doesn’t feel urgent today.

I wonder what does.

This book isn’t a treatise.

It’s an extended meditation.

It’s a flowing, rigorous, grounded improvisation.

It’s a work of art.

Criticizing it on the viability of one or two of the philosophical arguments posited, is like criticizing Joyce’s Ulysses for being an inaccurate travel guide to Dublin.

In other words.

The Body In Pain is so full of insight, and terror, and intellect, and beauty, that it can be enjoyed and even revered on that level alone.

Holding Scarry’s ideas to the standard of ordinary argument, almost 40 years after it was written, without appreciation for the context it was written in, and the very viable function a text like this still provides, and without acknowledging the utterly brilliant writing it’s self, is truly fucking absurd.

Rating it on a 1/5 scale is also a HUGE reminder of the absurdly dark shadow of social media. But here we go. 5/5 stars for this utterly heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Scarry is an intellectual monster (in the best way).

[ally]

i was too small brained for this

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm giving this 4 stars, but that's purely on the strength of the first section of the book. I'll get my key complaint out of the way here--- the final section seems largely an afterthought, and could be a separate book. The middle section--- on warfare ---isn't as tightly reasoned as the first, key section on torture. But that section taken alone is powerful and cogent and a key text for understanding what torture does.

So much of the debate over "enhanced interrogation" in the last nine years has been over whether torture works at extracting information. Well, as the Gestapo in France and the French in Algiers showed, it does 'work' at that, albeit with a huge amount of inefficiency and wastage. Scarry makes the very clear point that in the 1960s-80s, in the era of the Colonels in Greece or the Dirty War in Argentina or the days of Joan Didion's Salvador, 'work' had a very different meaning. The torturers in Buenos Aires or Athens made no effort to justify themselves with Ticking Time Bomb scenarios. They did not, Scarry argues, ultimately care about answers. What they sought was to silence the prisoners, to break down their worlds through the application of physical pain, to convince them that nothing they could say could effect the world, and that nothing they thought or believed ever deserved to be said.

Scarry begins with a fine account of what physical pain is, and of how language is a poor instrument for describing or passing along accounts of the most personal and powerful of sensations. She argues that pain breaks down the world, that it reduces the body-in-the-world to what is purely and solely an isolated body. Torture, she argues, takes away the voice--- inflicts pain that breaks down any connection between the sufferer and the world.

"The Body in Pain" was first released in 1987--- in a very different political world. But its account of the body and the ways in which pain isolates and silences remains vivid and far-too-pertinent. Very much worth reading.

[hayatem · Rating 4 out of 5]

قراءة تفكيكية للألم الجسدي في تجسداته وتحولاته في عالم الأشياء ( المادية واللفظية والذهنية) عبر اللغة بمختلف مثالبها الأدبية والدينية والسياسية ( ك التعذيب و الحرب: الفرق بينهما) والاجتماعية والثقافية والتخيلية، بين الوعي بالشيء ونقيضه بمنظور تحليلي تأملي. من خلال اليقظة الذاتية، في عرف هذا الجسد السائل في عالم الأشياء الهجين من الألم الجوانيّ الظاهر والمتخفي عن العين.

[Andrew]

Let's start with that first section, the one about torture. Essential reading, absolutely essential, thought-provoking reading, and a piece of critical theory in its best, most provocative, and most lucid tradition, that of Foucault, Adorno, and Barthes.

Then we get into the section on war. Not as interesting, but still serviceable.

Then there's some biblical stuff. Same.

Then there's a truly appalling discourse on Marx, which is the worst sort of Marxist writing, in that it completely abandons Marx's materialist grounding and shoots off into this awful, floaty Hegelian idealism that almost reads like parody.

From the good to the awful, that's The Body in Pain. The good definitely outweighed the bad, as I'll simply forget the bad, but I'll remember the good for being solid gold.

[Alina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to learn from and appreciate this book, and gave it many charitable attempts. The premise laid out in the first chapter was gripping and promising: Scarry will examine how expressing and representing physical pain (e.g., putting words to our pain so others can understand) is a complicated, difficult process, laden with political implications. Then, Scarry will show how her account of pain sheds light on the broader phenomenon of human creation as a whole -- how we create material and verbal objects. Unfortunately, Scarry does not succeed at this.

She fails on several points. First, her writing is extremely rambling and transacts in technical, highly abstract terms. It is as if these terms govern how she formulates her thoughts; the result is that it is difficult to know what she is really claiming, and she fails to provide support for her claims. Second, the different sub-topics involved in her thesis (i.e., political implications of pain, creating material tools and artifacts) do not cohere. Scarry fails to show how her scattered discussions relate to one another, let alone show how they amount to an overall argument for the thesis she promises to deliver in the intro. Third, Scarry's writing is extremely repetitive and rambling. For example, to make the single point that when perceiving manmade artifacts, we recognize that people made them, Scarry takes 25 pages, full of what appears to be free-association in her mind, regarding different kinds of artifacts, and different kinds of contexts in which we might encounter them.

Moreover, some of the foundational premises of Scarry's thesis are simply incorrect. Her starting premise is that physical pain is resistant to our verbally representing it. That is, while we can let talk about all sorts of experiences we have, and let others thereby understand them, physical pain is unique in that we face tremendous difficulty finding words for it, and so others cannot understand our pain. This is false. All experiences, when we directly have them, are qualitative and particular in character; for all experiences, verbal representations will generalize and fail to capture features of this distinctive character. Pain is not unique with regards to this.

Scarry's argument also relies on the premise that when we make material objects (e.g., sew a dress), we always experience this object to be an extension of our own bodies. She refers to J.J. Gibson's example that a blind man's cane is proprioceptively experienced by that man to be an extension of his hand; he can feel the objects that the cane's tip touches, as one would feel objects that one's fingertips touch. But it is simply not the case that all objects we make function as bodily extensions in this manner. Only objects that are properly tools (i.e., we use them to get a particular activity done) and that are used very frequently will have this function. The majority of objects we make (e.g., a drawing on a piece of paper, a tie of one's shoelaces, a makeshift umbrella out of a newspaper) do not fulfill these criteria, and thus we do not experience them as extensions of our bodies.

I want to say that the one redeeming feature of this book is that Scarry identifies and attempts to deal with very meaningful, fascinating questions. She does do that, but I wouldn't call this redeeming as a whole, because she so fails at articulating these questions coherently, or answering them. These questions include that when we are in great physical pain, this is a very isolating experience. No one will know or feel our pain, if we fail to express it. So it is of great urgency to make this pain public, so other's can understand. This procedure, of pain to creation, is supposed to be analogous to procedures of creating anything in general, whether material objects or linguistic utterances. These are commonsensical ideas, and it'd be wonderful if someone could say something substantial about it, such as point out there are more nuances in these claims, or find some deeper psychological or existential conditions that make it the case. Scarry does not say anything substantial.

I usually stop reading a book when I am very dissatisfied with it after the fist couple of chapters. I made myself read through this entire thing because the premise was formulated in such an interesting, promising way, and it has many, positive reviews. I don't know what others see in it. I should've put it down earlier.

For readers interested in the topic of the relation between material artifacts and our bodies, I'd recommend them to go to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, or J.J. Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. For readers interested in the topic of making our private sensations and experiences public, I'd recommend Hutto's Folk Psychological Narratives, or Tomasello's Origins of Human Communication. Don't waste your time with this book.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking treatise on Pain - on physical pain through the spectrum of vocabulary, war, medicine, torture, literature.

I only give this 4 stars as it went forward with this notion that Virginia Woolf made fashionable in On Being Ill by complaining there isn't much written on Illness and Pain but here we must simply agree to disagree as I too brandish The Magic Mountain's Settembrini to remind us there is virtually no piece of literature that is not about suffering, indeed.

I think of Pain in the very traditional written sense and I think of Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain, a direct account of ideas that are echoed in this book: physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, before language is even learnt.

Pain comes into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed. Joris-Karl Huysmans writes of "the useless, unjust, incomprehensible,
inept abomination that is physical pain."

The effort to understand, already very old, will always be ongoing. Like the work of making, it keeps itself going. The carpenter encourages the goldsmith, and he who wields the hammer cheers him who strikes the anvil, saying of the welding, “It is good.” - can't take credit, this came straight from Heaven by fax - Isaiah 41:7.

"I have given a name to my pain and call it 'dog,' " announces Nietzsche in The Joyous Science in a brilliantly magisterial pretence of having at last gained the upper hand; "It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog—and I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives."
That's right folks, in the isolation of pain, even the most uncompromising advocate of individualism might suddenly prefer a realm populated by companions, however imaginary and safely subordinate.

To return to the point and the general question about the relation between expressing pain and eliminating pain through the context of verbalization; on a personal note, I remind the reader that Pain and Language are created in and by the same organ, thus I have found the magic word Fuck! to be the greatest of verbal palliatives. But, as all words of power, it only works if spoken with conviction - and on principle - as an act of poetic faith (in what, you ask? to each his own. ) - as Ethic, dogma and creed.

[Elijah · Rating 3 out of 5]

My main observation when reading this book was the self-awareness of the prose. Even the length and construction of the sentences is self-conscience, full of explainitory clauses and careful definitions of things that do not need to be defined. The style befits the subject matter, of course, but detracts from "The Body in Pain" as a critical synthesis. Instead, it becomes a "surviviour's text". Further, for a book that is explicitly about the body, descriptions bodily experiences are very thin. If the argument is that language can never fully portray the experiences of the body, it seems that a good way to illustrate this is to show the reader history's best attempts. By not doing so, the reader wonders why Scarry withholds these descriptions.

This book is an interesting exercise, but it didn't work for me, as it did not accomplish the things I expected it to.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I would never finish this book. Instead, it took me 20 years. I bought it and first tried to read it in the 1990s--I made it through the first section about torture but it was so taxing and distressing that I needed to take a break before reading any more, so I set it aside and didn't pick it up back.

The same thing happened in the 2000s. But then someone told me that the first section is the hardest section in terms of arousing distress at the plight of others, that the other sections were much easier.

And they were right, in certain ways.

I was irritated at myself for not making it through the section on warfare. I'm really interested in military history and have taught courses on war literature and combat memoir; the second section was squarely within my scholarly interests, and I would have benefited from reading it sooner.

But then I got to the section on the Bible and was like, "What the fuck is going on?" I've read every single word of the KJV of the Bible; I've studied the bible as literature and as theology in a variety of classes. And I still did not find the points Scarry was trying to make especially relevant or persuasive. The section on Marx seemed like utter nonsense--and very tedious nonsense at that.

And then there was Chapter 5, "The Interior Structure of the Artifact," which was nuts. Its basic point--that human beings make things both because those things (clothes, houses, food, textbooks, letters and email) allow us to be more human in that they spare us from cold, exposure, hunger, stupidity, and isolation, and because we just like making stuff--along with the point that some human creations retain the names of their creators (some works of art, some buildings, some clothing designs) and some don't (the god of the bible), so that they are "self-announcing" (and therefore more resistant to certain types of criticism)--are worth making, but good grief, they didn't require 50 tedious pages to be made. And when she starts talking about how we imbue the things we create with sentience, so that a child-protective cap knows the size of a hand that tries to open it...? N0. Just no. Has she never heard of accidents? If only a knife really knew to stop slicing when it was no longer cutting an apple and was instead cutting human flesh.

I was also really bugged that Scarry made no mention of rape as an element of torture. I get that in 1985 when this was published, discourse about rape was somewhat different. "Date rape" wasn't that well known, either the term or the concept, even if the phenomenon we now call by that name was as common as ever. Photos from Abu Ghraib hadn't forced us to confront, quite graphically, the fact that the US government ran a prison where sodomy and sexual humiliation were used to torture our enemies. But rape has still historically been one of the weapons of warfare, a way of hurting, humiliating, subduing a defeated population and undoing their identity--plus one of the rewards for the victors, because hey! Raping is super fun!

Even though there's a section in Chapter 3 titled "Behold Rebekah: the Human Body and God's Voice in Pregnancy, Reproduction, and Multiplication," there's little attention to something the book's title led me, at least, to hope for if not expect: consideration of the female body in the pain of giving birth. Instead, there's stuff like this insane sentence about how "belief in the scriptures is literally the act of turning one's own body inside out" (190).... I mean, what? Belief = literally turning your body inside out? What?

From that sentence forward, the book's arguments were so tortured that reading was painful, and as Scarry herself points out, pain can make us inarticulate, so I'll just let my silence about other failures in the book convey how much they elicited feelings that, once felt, I wished were unfelt.

[راضي النماصي · Rating 5 out of 5]

يحكي لك شخص ما أنه "يتألم" ولكنك لا تحس بألمه. بالنسبة له، فهو يمثل الحقيقة المطلقة، أما أنت فـ"اخترت" أن تصدقه لثقتك به.
بناء على هذا النموذج الإدراكي، تطوف سكاري في التاريخ والطب والحروب واصفة ما قام به العقل الغربي حتى الآن في "صنع العالم" مستخدمة مبادئ التفكيك في النقد وصولًا حتى المفردة.

كتاب عظيم، لكنه شاق وعسير القراءة، واجتهد فيه الأستاذ حسام اجتهادًا كبيرًا، إلا أن غربة المعجم النقدي بالعربية عن القارئ العادي مثلي تجعل من قراءته بالإنجليزية أسهل.

[Julia]

some might say listening to the audiobook while running midday in texas in july/august is the only way to read this one.

[Isabelle reads a book a day because she has no friends · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so good yet so boring, you know?

[Simon Robs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a highly philosophical book. I was seeking something on a more personal aspect as with one's own pain spectrum and how objectively it may be communicated to clinicians for treatment. So, my three-star rating does not reflect the actual level of sophistication this book details. Just sayin.'

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 1 out of 5]

The invention of anaesthesia was one of the great watersheds of the modern world. From being an essential, primal part of human existence, pain became optional and preventable. To encounter it today - accidentally touching a hot pan, or under the touch of an unsympathetic doctor - feels like an affront. With the prospect of gene-level editing of the brain's pain sensitivity, David Pearce predicts that "the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event".

This is a strange book, which begins with some reflections on the universality of physical pain and our inability to describe it with language - at least in English. The hero of Sophocles' Philoctetes (whose suffering is taught to first-year students at Cornell Medical School)

utters a cascade of changing cries and shrieks that in the original Greek are accommodated by an array of formal words (some of them twelve syllables long), but that at least one translator found could only be rendered in English by the uniform syllable "Ah" followed by variations in punctuation (Ah! Ah!!!!)

Pain is lonely, solipsistic, something which, despite our proliferation of pain scales, can never be accurately conveyed to someone else.

To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.

Although Scarry approvingly cites the psychologist Ronald Melzack's more descriptive pain questionnaire, which recognises

that the conventional medical vocabulary ("moderate pain," "severe pain") described only one limited aspect of pain, its intensity; and that describing pain only in terms of this solitary dimension was equivalent to describing the complex realm of visual experience exclusively in terms of light flux. Thus…after gathering the apparently random words most often spoken by patients, he began to arrange those words into coherent groups which, by making visible the consistency interior to any one set of words, worked to bestow visibility on the characteristics of pain. When heard in isolation, any one adjective such as "throbbing pain" or "burning pain" may appear to convey very little precise information beyond the general fact that the speaker is in distress. But when "throbbing" is placed in the company of certain other commonly occurring words ("flickering," "quivering," "pulsing," "throbbing," and "beating"), it is clear that all five of them express, with varying degrees of intensity, a rhythmic on-off sensation, and thus it is also clear that one coherent dimension of the felt-experience of pain is this "temporal dimension." Similarly, when "burning" is placed in the context of three other words ("hot pain," "burning pain," "scalding pain," "searing pain"), it is apparent that these words, though once more differing importantly in their intensity, are alike in registering the existence of a "thermal dimension" to pain. Again, the words "pinching," "pressing," "gnawing," "cramping," and "crushing," together express what Melzack designated as "constrictive pressure." Out of these categories larger categories are formed; for the "temporal," "thermal," and "constrictive" groups are among those that together express the sensory content of pain, while certain other word groupings express pain’s affective content, and still others its evaluative or cognitive content.

I have dwelt at some length on the beginning of the book because the rest is, unfortunately, an incoherent mess. Scarry uses the tools of literary close reading to analyse graphically detailed accounts of torture (mostly from the Greek and Chilean military juntas), and then books on war strategy by authors like Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, to extract vague and dubious conclusions (e.g. that the true purpose of torture is to symbolically destroy the subject's home).

However, the book then gets much worse, departing from the somewhat grounded world of war strategy or testimonies of suffering and moving to an account of how pain involves "making and unmaking the world", in a vaguely Hegelian description of objects having existence as reifications of human action, or extensions of the human body, liberally salted with exegesis of Marx and Freud. I have little energy or motivation for trying to decipher the intentional obscurantism of this kind of Continental free association: very rarely is there any kind of insight worth salvaging. Occasionally one will bob to the surface: (the invention of the crossbow in medieval Europe, or the entry of gunpowder into Japan, ended the need for specialised warrior classes, democratising conflict: they are weapons anyone can use. In the nuclear age, war is once again the province of a small specialised cadre, and in fact the weapon operates itself.) More often, like when describing an incident along the Korean DMZ where two US soldiers were shot and killed while pruning a tree, the book spirals into total incoherence.

The tree in Korea was inappropriately unsusceptible to "pruning," to being domesticated, civilized, remade. Had it been a proper tree, it would have heard the North Korean planes approaching, seen the men beneath its branches, and sent up some form of protective shield. At the very least, it would have given a signal ("They are coming: leave, run, hurry") as civilized trees, with their radar branches, routinely do. This expectation is as old as the human imagination. The "tree of knowledge," the "tree of life," is the "tree of artifice." The tree in Eve’s garden never said to her, "I see how frightened, overwhelmed, you are by believing yourself to be nakedly exposed to One who has no body, and advise you to cover yourself as you are when you stand hidden here within my branches." But when she remade the tree into an apron of leaves, she restructured the grove into a structure of materialized compassion.

It is not hard to see the path from this to propounding conspiracy theories about plane crashes in the New York Review of Books. This is a book filled with beginnings of intriguing ideas, but ruined by wooly thinking, piles of jargon, and an abject terror of making a clear point.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there was a lot to learn in this book--many great ideas--those ideas were drowned out by the excessive philosophizing of the author. Wow, I guess I didn't understand at all the book this was going to be when I picked it up.

It talked of war, torture, god, marxism, etc. I took a lot of notes, and maybe I'll update this with some of the ideas present in the reading, but for now, I must close out the year with my final review.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completely reoriented my understandings of torture, war, and the material world. Dense, but rewarding -- one of the books I will be thinking about for the rest of my life. Hugely influential to me!

[Mohamed Karaly · Rating 4 out of 5]

يختلف الألم الجسدي البشري عن أي شعور آخر في إنه لا يحمل أي دلالة إشارية. فهو ليس كالجوع ولا الحب ولا الشوق. فهو بلا موضوع. من الناحية الأخري، يوجد عنصر "التخيل" في الطرف المقابل للألم، والتخيل منحسر في موضوعه بمعني إنه غير واقعي، او غير متحقق بعد. والألم والتخيل هما إطاران حديان في عملية صنع العالم وتفكيكه، بمعني أن عملية الصنع والخلق والاختراع تتم بإحالة متبادلة بين الألم والتخيل. الألم لا يوجد له موضوع ولا يمكن التخفيف عنه إلا بتخيل موضوعات غير متحققة بعد. والموضوعات المتخيلة الغير متحققة بعد تحتاج للألم لتستمد واقعيته.٠
نصف الكتاب الأول يدور حول بنية تفكيك العالم في التعذيب والحرب. وهي بنية واحدة ثلاثية تتكون من : (١) إحداث الألم أو الإصابة الجسدية، (٢) إبراز سمات الألم من خلالة إبراز سمات السلاح، وأخيرا (٣) نزع واقعية الألم وخلعها علي السلطة.٠
ويناقش الكتاب هذه البنيةمن خلال تحليل لغوي للسرديات السياسية والاستراتيجية والأدبية لوصف الحرب او التعذيب والالم، علي سبيل المثال هناك ثمان أنماط لاستخدامات لغوية يتم بها التعتيم علي واقعية الإصابة الجسدية في الحرب، من خلال تهميش الإصابة واعتبارها عنصرا ثانويا في الحرب، او باعتبارها شرا لابد منه من أجل قضية حميدة، أو باللجوء لإحالات ومجازات أخري، ويحدث هذا التعتيم والتلاعب اللغوي في إطار خلع واقعية الإصابة علي السلطة، علي القضايا الخلافية والتصورات الغير متحققة بعد. فالإصابة الجسدية، فتح النسيج البشري، هي السمة الجوهرية في الحرب كما التعذيب، لأنها العنصر الوحيد الذي يميز الحرب عن اي نشاط تنافسي آخر قد يستخدم كبديل للحرب، ويجعل نتائجها تضمن تطبيقها بدون رجوع الأطراف المهزومة عن اتفاقها. ولا يرجع هذا إلي أن الطرف المهزوم في الحرب لا يستطيع إعادة الدخول فيها، ولكن لأن واقعية الإصابة الجسدية يتم خلعها علي شكل العالم الجديد الذي يناسب تخيل وتصور الطرف المنتصر، والذي لم يكن قبل الحرب قد تحقق بعد أو اكتسب أي واقعية. فالواقعية الصادمة للإصابة الجسدية ولفتح ونزيف النسيج البشري تحمل ذكراها أجساد أجيال عديدة بعد الحرب، وتدعم بواقعيتها العالم الجديد الذي شكلته الحرب.٠
كذلك في التعذيب، إحداث الألم هو السمة الجوهرية، والاستجواب هو مجرد تعتيم علي عنصر إحداث الألم. فهدف التعذيب هو خلع واقعية ألم الضحية علي سلطة الجلاد الغير متحققة بعد. وتتم إعادة الصنع المتمثلة في تأكيد السلطة، أو تأكيد قضايا إيديولوجية للأطراف التي تخوض الحرب، من خلال تفكيك عالم الضخية والمهزوم. فالألم البشري يحسر الجسد البشري في دائرة ضيقة، ويفكك معاني عناصر الحضارة في عينيه باعتبارها وسائل مريحة لتمدده وتوسيع دائرته، حتي أن هذا يحدث بشكل منظم في التعذيب من خلال استخدام وسائل هي في الطبيعي عناصر حضارية مهمتها الأساسية راحة الجسد، في عملية التعذيب نفسها، كمثال: استخدام وسائل طبية في التعذيب لهدم المعني الحضاري لمؤسسة الطب، أو استخدام الكرسي والمنضدة والثلاجة والبانيو في عمليات التعذيب.٠
.
في النصف الثاني من الكتاب، يتم تناول عملية صنع العالم، باعتباره عملية تتم بين الإطارين الحديين: الألم والتخيل. وذلك من خلال تحليل كتابين هما الكتاب المقدس وكتاب رأس المال لماركس. في الكتابين هناك بنية لشريطين، شريط علوي وشريط سفلي، ويتم فيها دعم الشريط العلوي بالسفلي، ففي العهد القديم، هناك شريط علوي ممثل في "الله" المصنوع، موضوع التخيل، وهناك شريط سفلي ممثل في فعل حميد، هو التكاثر البشري والذي تم التركيز في سرده علي مشاهد فتح، وقلب للنسيج الداخلي الدموي للرحم، وتركيز علي قطاع الحوض المفتوح. وممثل في فعل آخر غير حميد هو القتل والحروب والكوارث، وتقوم البنية السردية في العهد القديم علي توافق هذين الشريطين، واعتماد الشريط العلوي علي استمرارية الشريط السفلي. فواقعية الموضوع المتخيل الذي هو الله، تستمد من الألم البشري في التكاثر والقتل. وكأن التكرار الإيقاعي للتكاثر، والقتل، هو الشحنات التي تجدد طاقة الله.٠
.
تتمثل عملية الصنع المكتملة والناتجة، في نشاطي "الإسقاط" و "التبادل". ففي مثال الله في العهد القديم، يُسقط الإنسان "الصانع" إحساسه علي الله، ويمثل الله "الشئ المصنوع" مرحلة متوسطة، أو نقطة ارتكاز، أو رافعة، تعيد للإنسان خلقه، وكأن الإنسان هو نسل الله، وناتج صنع الله وليس العكس. فعملية التغيير التي يبدأها نشاط الصنع الذي يباشره الإنسان تعود عليه هو بالتغيير فيما يسمي بعملية" التبادل".٠
ويتمثل إخفاق عملية الصنع، في التركيز فقط علي الجزء الثاني من العملية، التركيز فقط علي أن الإنسان هو مجرد ناتج لنظام قبلي هو الله أو النظام الرأسمالي، وبالتالي الانفصال عن الجذوة الحيوية الأولي لنشاط الإنسان كصانع لهذه الأشياء. ففي كتاب رأس المال، يتمثل إخفاق الصنع، في تحويل الإنسان من صانع ومخترع للنظام الرأسمالي، إلا مجرد سلعة أنتجها هذا النظام، وبالتالي بدلا من عودة فوايد النظام الرأسمالي علي الإنسان الصانع "العامل"، يتم تغريب العامل عن ناتج صنعه، وبالتالي زياده إحساسه بالكثافة الجسمانية والألم. في حين أن غرض الصنع في البداية كان تخفيف هذه الكثافة الجسمانية، بتغيير جسدي يتم في عملية إسقاط وتبادل نشطة.٠

[heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am only a few chapters in and I already find this book utterly revelatory. The chapters on the medical, legal and political discourse on pain in re: torture feel far more contemporary than when the book was written, in 1985. I feel this is a necessary book, for me as a pain sufferer, and for understanding, for lack of better term, the human condition.

[madi]

still not picking this up until my brain is more back (technical term) but i’m leaving this note for myself. i just read a genius excerpt where scarry characterizes pain as destructive to language because it monopolizes the experience, and by extension, the words, of the person in pain. genius genius genius. cannot wait for the day i read this from that sweet elusive middle slice in the venn diagram of light brain fog and well managed depression.

[Jo]

At what point does one admit that the giant, barely comprehensible book they picked up to help write their thesis will not, in fact, help them write said thesis? At the very last page, apparently.

[MAIDENFED · Rating 4 out of 5]

first half incredible, second not as much

[Melissa Stacy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The beginning of Elaine Scarry's 1985 classic, "The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World," focuses on torture, and how torture is used in warfare and other situations.

At first, I was engaged by the text. I also kept expecting the author to mention rape. With each page I turned, I thought: "Okay, surely this page will at least *mention* rape, even if Scarry doesn't want to analyze it in depth." That assumption turned out to be false.

The author never mentions rape. Not once. Despite the fact that rape is often the first act torturers use to subjugate their victims. Scarry's complete silence regarding rape is a glaring and unforgivable omission.

In fact, the "establishment of dominance" through torture is also mentioned NOWHERE in the first part of the book.

The prose is so overwritten -- and unnecessarily confusing -- that it's almost comedic. These sentences are penned with a "Baffle The Reader with Bullsh*t" mentality. It's aggravating to read.

This book has severe limitations. After reading four books by Andrea Dworkin this summer (2019), it's clear to me that Dworkin's prose and analysis just blows Elaine Scarry out of the water.

I'm DNF'ing "The Body in Pain" at page 65. I know I'll return to finish this book one day. But for now, I just don't want to see this book on my 'currently reading' shelf. Bye, book. Back to the TBR pile with you.

[Andrew Pemberton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part one: Gold. Wordy, but is an excellent discussion of how torture breaks down not just language, but our perception of civilization all together. While her views on war are very theoretical, they still make for an interesting read.

The book should have stopped there.

Part two: No, thank you. Not only is it incredibly difficult to read, but the author jumps from discussions of the likes of Churchill to Moses and Marx. Scarry has failed in creating a work that is accessible to anyone without a background in philosophy, abstract theory, and religion.

[Evan Chethik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit


My one thing is that it does feel like she fetishizes the whole “artifact” thing as a bastion for human connection. It kind of necessitates a sub-stratum that underwrites erotogeniety, and then arrives on the surface in the form of a physical object. This feels a little too religious for me at this point in my life. But I can’t say that it’s like… wrong or anything. We simply cannot know.

But it was such a harrowing read and at the end so much fun and hope… Such an amazing book. 10/10 great writer beautiful mind.

[Rosalind · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has taken me MONTHS to read because it is so densely packed with profound thought, I had to split it into bite-size chunks (and I studied Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge; go figure). It's an incredible treatise on the phenomenology of pain and the external world, and how that relates to our understanding of our experience. Not for the academically faint-hearted, but if thinking about how we think about things is your bag, you should definitely give this a try.

[Moustafa Mounir · Rating 5 out of 5]

بالنّسبة لي، قرّرت أقرأ الكتاب ده على فترات، كل فترة جزء كبير منه، وده لأنه من وجهة نظري محتاجك أنت نفسك تعمل تفكيك وتفصيص للمحتوى، وكمان هو مصدر إلهام هايل لشخصيات درامية تطلع منه بعقليات سادية محترمة، فمينفعش أبدًا الواحد يقرأ ويخلص منه ويشوف الكتاب إللي بعده.
دي تاني مرّة أعملها مع كتاب في حياتي، بعد كتاب ذئب ونفرش طريقه بالفخاخ، وإللي هو عبارة عن أنطولوجيا النص الشعري المصري الجديد، لمّا أحب أتعرف على شاعر عظيم مكنتش أعرف عنه حاجة.

[K]

An academic and not workbooky look at pain. As my pain returns after some healing from the surgery, I am discouraged and need some framework for pain that is not just a series of to do lists for self improvement.

This will live in bathroom, where I sit and steam to distract myself. It starts with torture... not exactly the usual bathroom book. It's no Calvin & Hobbes!

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y’all haven’t seen much from me in the past months on here...it’s bc I’ve mostly just been reading this book. So brilliant. Sort of book that one almost wants to keep to themself and just hijack it’s insights for a competitive edge, mine it’s precise and creative prose...oh man. Five huge stars. Made me love the world so much more.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

mixed bag but when it's good it is

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to write, talk, or think clearly about pain, in part because, as Scarry notes, physical pain seems to repel language, to involve a regression to a pre-linguistic state for those experiencing it. Our descriptions of pain are (and will always be) suffused with metaphors. However, Scarry dissects the different metaphors we use to describe pain and the different uses to which they are put, making a case for the appropriateness of some of these metaphors over others. Scarry is brilliant at weaving together the psychological and the political aspects of pain, mediated in this way by the language we use to express it. It is amazing that a discussion that is at times so abstract and philosophical is at the same time so sensitive and moving. The material on torture is especially impactful. I would highly recommend this book. Here's what Susan Sontag thought about it, in case you need more convincing: "Elain Scarry has written an extratrordinary book: large-spirited, heroically truthful. A *necessary* book."