The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Categories: Politics & Social Sciences
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World is a study by Harvard scholar Elaine Scarry, first published in 1985. Scarry argues that physical pain resists language and destroys the sufferer's world. She examines how torture and war turn pain into displays of power, and then shows how human creativity, from tools to art and imagined worlds, works in the opposite direction by making and sharing the world. The book draws on philosophy, literature, law and medicine.
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- John Green: “Like a few years ago, Mike Rugnetta gave me the book “The Body in Pain” by Elaine Scarry, which I never would have otherwise read, and which totally changed the way I think about pain and the relationship between pain and language, and if it hadn’t been for that gift, I might not have written “Turtles All the Way Down.” And then I might never have gotten that world on a turtle, plus there’s the whole Reddit secret Santa thing. So every year, I sign up for the Reddit secret Santa exchange, in which you are paired with two random people: one of whom you give a gift to and the other of whom gives a gift to you.”