The Body in Pain

The Making and Unmaking of the World

De: Elaine Scarry

Narrado por: Joyce Bean

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.

©1985 Oxford University Press, Inc. (P)2021 Tantor

It changed my life but it’s not for everyone

I think the negative reviews come from people who were expecting something else. If you’re looking for an easy-to-understand book about your body and your pain, this ain’t it. If you want a deep, wide-ranging, academic book of philosophy and cultural criticism, this pays off. For me, this is one of the few books that really transformed my understanding of the world. Other books in that category are The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, Ulysses by James Joyce, Moby-Dick by Melville, and The Order of Things by Foucault. All of these books changed my life.

The Body in Pain starts with a simple observation: people in pain have difficulty conveying their pain so that others understand. It is difficult to “voice” our pain so that others feel it. To be in pain is in a sense to be aware of our body. This disconnect makes it easier for people can become torturers. But also, this disconnect makes it easier for people to become surgeons. Through close readings of Amnesty International torture documents and the metaphors of war, Scarry examines how bodies are “unmade” by injuring. Then, through stunning analyses of Marx and the Bible, she examines how acts of creation and labor can heal.


I first read The Body in Pain in 1987, and it has stuck with me for almost forty years now. It’s difficult, it’s dense, but it pays off for the right reader. (Having a strong background in philosophy or cultural criticism helps. I’m a PhD professor in English, though I was in my first year of grad school when I read this book the first time. )

The body In pain; Reviewed by someone in pain

This book is highly academic - I having a BA in communication find it a fairly difficult read — so i purchased the audio book and IT IS VERY ROBOTIC sounding which is fairly upsetting but hopefully I will get over that

This book does have a great layout to help those in chronic pain to understand their pain

Not really a book on pain

This is really not a book on pain as only about 5% is on pain. This is more an anti-war book dealing with ridding the world of war and torture as a means to an end. I was very disappointed. I do not recommend.

Long on words short on thesis

A lot of saying the obvious and predicting the subject of other chapters. Even listening becomes tedious.