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Pain and Language

Lucy Bending

in The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth–Century English Culture

It has become a commonplace that pain defies language and, as such, that it is unique as a sensation that cannot be described or shared: sufferers ... More

It has become a commonplace that pain defies language and, as such, that it is unique as a sensation that cannot be described or shared: sufferers suffer alone, unable to translate their physical pains into words. This chapter looks into the arguments of those who promote this line of reasoning, most notably Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry, and refutes their claims both theoretically and by arguing from the rhetorical strategies of Victorian writers. The flaw in such arguments is that their proponents refuse to accept that pain can enter into language and be accommodated by its structures — whether descriptive or metaphorical — in the face of a paucity of directly expressive words for painful sensations. In response, the chapter schematizes the conventional attitudes towards physical pain, outside the realms of medicine and Christianity, that were open to the Victorian sufferer and writer.Less

Reconnaissance: Violence, Representation, and Britain's Second World War

Mark Rawlinson

in British Writing of the Second World War

This chapter addresses questions about war and representation, and assesses the assumptions that underpin extant literary critical appraisal of writing about war. It challenges the coherence of the ... More

This chapter addresses questions about war and representation, and assesses the assumptions that underpin extant literary critical appraisal of writing about war. It challenges the coherence of the opposition of war literature to discourses identified with the prosecution of war, and it proposes a reading of wartime culture whose fundamental premise is that the material events of military conflict, notably lethal wounding, require symbolization and discursive mediation if war is to function as an instrument of political policy. Following Elaine Scarry, manifold verbal representations of violence are interpreted as redescriptions: the destruction of human flesh and consciousness is rationalized and occluded by a logic that substitutes ends for means. This model makes possible a less stratified understanding of the function of representations of violence in a society at war, and permits an analysis which is responsive to the contradictory values invested in state-legitimated killing.Less

Closures: Three Examples in Search of a Conclusion

Eric Hayot

in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, modernity, and Chinese Pain

This chapter argues the conclusion begins by considering, in order, the following three examples: (1) Der Chinese des Schmerzes (The Chinaman of Pain, 1983), a novel by Peter Handke; (2) the famous ... More

This chapter argues the conclusion begins by considering, in order, the following three examples: (1) Der Chinese des Schmerzes (The Chinaman of Pain, 1983), a novel by Peter Handke; (2) the famous opening to Lu Xun's collection of short stories, Nahan (A Call to Arms, 1922); (3) The recent rise in exhibitions of plasticized human bodies, which appear under the names Body Worlds and Bodies: The Exhibition. Each of these, this chapter argues, could form an endpoint to this book: the Handke philosophical, the Lu Xun geographic, and the Body Worlds material. But each of these indicates, I argue, the complex dimensionality of the history of Chinese suffering, and none of them makes for an adequate closure to a story that has not yet concluded. The chapter concludes, therefore, with a section called “Toward Sympaesthetics,” which is the book's most intense engagement with the work of Elaine Scarry. This section ultimately argues that the point is not only that sympathetic exchange and representational exchange are “like” each other (which they are), but that the set of mimetic strategies through which we read representations should be turned to the reading of sympathies as well, partly because it is the nature of sympathies to be complex and intertwined with history, and partly because this kind of sustained attention to the making of sympathy will tend to undermine the normalizing assumptions about its naturalness.Less

Feeling Pre-columbian: Chicana Feminists' Imaginative Historiography

Suzanne Bost

in Encarnacion: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

The “Feeling Pre-Columbian” serves as a respond to Elaine Scarry's often quoted assertion that pain is world-destroying, where an argument has been made to say that pain opens up new perceptions of ... More

The “Feeling Pre-Columbian” serves as a respond to Elaine Scarry's often quoted assertion that pain is world-destroying, where an argument has been made to say that pain opens up new perceptions of the relationships between one's body and the world around it. Different insights from different people concerned with literature were used to defend this argument that gave multiple historical references that enables today's dominant culture to move outside. In particular, the indigenous Mesoamerican traditions invoke center on public displays of body manipulation. Unlike their predecessors of the Chicano movimiento, who adopted the Aztec warrior as an icon to strengthen Chicano nationalism, Anzaldúa, Moraga, and Castillo worship goddesses, saints, artists, and AIDS victims who represent shape-shifting and openness rather than defended bodily boundaries.Less

Anecdotal Theory: Edmund Scott, Exact Discourse (1606); Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (1990)

Eric Hayot

in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, modernity, and Chinese Pain

This chapter presents a lengthy reading of an account of the torture of a Chinese goldsmith recorded in Edmund Scott's 1606 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties… of the East Indians, and Stephen ... More

This chapter presents a lengthy reading of an account of the torture of a Chinese goldsmith recorded in Edmund Scott's 1606 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties… of the East Indians, and Stephen Greenblatt's reproduction of that account in the introduction to his 1990 collection, Learning to Curse. By moving back and forth between Scott's original account of the torture and Greenblatt's reading of it, the chapter extends Greenblatt's theorization of the anecdote as the emblem of new historicist literary work beyond the limits he himself finds there. A comparison of the edited version of the text Greenblatt cites and the original manuscript allows the chapter to make the case for an anecdotal theory whose treatment of what Greenblatt calls “real bodies” and “real people” nonetheless retains a strong connection to the literary.Less

Be Here Now: Mimesis and the History of Representation

Vincent P. Pecora

in Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century

This chapter focuses on the work of art, poetry, and the place of aesthetics in understanding the relation of presence and representation. By engaging with the works of Gumbrecht and Elaine Scarry, ... More

This chapter focuses on the work of art, poetry, and the place of aesthetics in understanding the relation of presence and representation. By engaging with the works of Gumbrecht and Elaine Scarry, this chapter considers whether the turn to presence is a return to the modernist agon of mimesis versus representation in which the “discovery” of the viability of concepts such as beauty and “presence” are primarily a rediscovery of the lure of a redemptive mimesis in the face of a fallen world of representation. In the end, the underlying recourse in Scarry and Gumbrecht to archaic mimesis as an antidote to representation implies the persistence within the modern humanities of a deeper discontent with the humanistic enterprise itself. For both, it is the apparent loss of the untutored (childlike) innocence of human perception that should matter most of all.Less

Introduction

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

in The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited

This book reexamines Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, along with his other writings, to see if his ideas are still relevant today. First published in 1970, Aesthetic Theory raises a number of ... More

This book reexamines Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, along with his other writings, to see if his ideas are still relevant today. First published in 1970, Aesthetic Theory raises a number of questions, such as the emphasis on the special status of the artwork for which Adorno uses the term “autonomy.” The new impulses in the contemporary discussion, readily associated with names such as Elaine Scarry and Peter de Bolla, require a rereading of Aesthetic Theory. This book focuses on the challenge to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory that comes today from different directions. It explores how the concept of aesthetic experience in Aesthetic Theory compares to the ideas of Scarry and de Bolla, and whether one can argue for the universal nature of aesthetic experience or universal aesthetic values and include Adorno in such an argument. Part I considers theoretical questions and approaches Aesthetic Theory from different perspectives. Part II discusses Adorno's literary criticism, and especially his engagement with specific works, authors, and historical periods.Less

Describing the Problem

Rebecca Gordon

in Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States

Institutionalized state torture is defined as “the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical suffering by an official or agent of a political entity, which results in dismantling the ... More

Institutionalized state torture is defined as “the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical suffering by an official or agent of a political entity, which results in dismantling the victim’s sensory, psychological, and social worlds, with the purpose of establishing or maintaining that entity’s power.” The legal definition of torture covers the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, and relevant U.S. federal law. Memos from the George W. Bush administration (e.g., by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Donald Rumsfeld) demonstrate efforts to prevent possible prosecution for actions undertaken in the “war on terror.” A phenomenological treatment, drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, shows how torture destroys its victims’ sensory, psychological, and social worlds. Finally, a political description of torture demonstrates that, rather than providing accurate “actionable intelligence,” institutionalized torture’s political purpose is the destruction of organized resistance to the power of the torturing entity.Less

Introduction

Jami Bartlett

in Object Lessons: The Novel As a Theory of Reference

Opening with an analysis of the first chapter of Dickens’s Great Expectations, this introduction presents the case for a reading of the realist novel informed by analyses of reference in the ... More

Opening with an analysis of the first chapter of Dickens’s Great Expectations, this introduction presents the case for a reading of the realist novel informed by analyses of reference in the philosophy of language. Theories of the novel by Van Ghent, Brooks, Scarry, Woloch, and Lynch are depicted as grounded in a Millian theory of reference, and are developed alongside a spectrum of theories of reference in the philosophy of language, from philosophers Anscombe and Kelly, who are oriented phenomenologically, to Russell, Searle, Strawson, and Quine, who are oriented analytically. It is argued that an attention to the syntax of descriptions like that we see in the philosophy of language reveals that the logic of referring terms in Dickens has gone unread by literary critics of the novel, who, in missing the significance of Russell’s insights on proper names, misconstrue the grammatical order of Dickens’s language, which is explicitly problematizing the act of referring, as positing an easy equivalence of words and objects.Less

The Solipsist

Marta Figlerowicz

in Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character

Chapter four examines Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) in the context of the modernist novel’s preoccupation with representing consciousness. Proust’s aesthetic philosophy explores ... More

Chapter four examines Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) in the context of the modernist novel’s preoccupation with representing consciousness. Proust’s aesthetic philosophy explores both the capacities and the limits of any person’s affective and sensory receptivity and expressiveness. Contrasting Proust’s representations of his narrator against Elaine Scarry’s notion of literature as a means of creating and sharing experiences of beauty, the chapter shows that Proust seeks not simply to validate his narrator’s sensitivity, but to stress the temporariness of the moments when this sensitivity becomes meaningful and important to others. Proust’s narrator must ultimately come to terms with how much less others care about his thoughts and feelings than he does. The difficulty of this task is represented both in comic terms and as a serious challenge to an understanding of the novel as a genre that claims to validate an individual’s experience of her world.Less

Hostile Environments in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest

Daniel M. Gross

in Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities

Chapter 3 continues to make the case for a literary mode—the sentimental—while explaining what sort of things happen when the genre shifts from literary nonfiction—that is, the slave narrative, to ... More

Chapter 3 continues to make the case for a literary mode—the sentimental—while explaining what sort of things happen when the genre shifts from literary nonfiction—that is, the slave narrative, to the Gothic novel. The chapter provides the next case study where this time the environments, technically understood with the help of perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson, make people terribly uncomfortable to the point of becoming unhinged. This chapter on the environment serves as a particular kind of ecocriticism, while at the same time energetically distinguishing itself from "literary Darwinism" and related versions of literary criticism where the ancient environment of evolutionary psychology exerts undue pressure on the scene. Here instead of evolutionary psychology, the perceptual psychology of Gibson provides the basic definition of an environment. The chapter also shows how some literary criticism that falls under the heading of Cognitive Approaches—including work by Elaine Scarry, cognitive rhetoric à la George Lakoff, and David Herman who practices Umwelt research—already benefits from an environmental approach referencing Gibson.Less

The Cinematic Language of Dying

Michele Aaron

in Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I

This chapter presents and evaluates a cinematic language of dying through surveying a selection of the principle mainstream films about terminal illness from Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) to ... More

This chapter presents and evaluates a cinematic language of dying through surveying a selection of the principle mainstream films about terminal illness from Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) to The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005). Though Elaine Scarry declared pain's inexpressibility in Western culture, mainstream cinema is shown in this chapter to provide a rich language for illness, injury and bodily decline. It is a language rife with displacement, distortion and conservatism however. Sensationalism and sentimentality and the mythic proportions of the good death are privileged on-screen but, more than this, all the films discussed in the chapter share and promote the common emphases upon triumph, betterment and futurity. The cinematic language does express dying, however, and is even capable, especially outside of mainstream North American cinema, of doing this extrasensorially and without prohibiting the truths of the body. These latter examples are shown to privilege embodied and mundane dying more reflective of the physical, economic and demographic realities of the contemporary deathbed.Less

On Pain and the Origin of Language

Ilit Ferber

in Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language

The first chapter raises objections to two commonplace paradigms about the relationship between language and pain: first, the idea that the radically isolating character of pain makes it ... More

The first chapter raises objections to two commonplace paradigms about the relationship between language and pain: first, the idea that the radically isolating character of pain makes it uncommunicable—and thus unsharable with others; and second, that because pain has such an effect on humans’ capacity for communicating it, it also shatters language altogether and becomes destructive to their linguistic capacities. Language Pangs challenges these conceptions and proposes a reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness rather than the common exclusive opposition. The twofold premise of the chapter is that the experience of pain cannot be penetrated without consideration of its inherent relation to language, and that the nature of language essentially depends on an understanding of its inherent relationship with pain. The chapter presents two of the book’s two main figures, Herder and Philoctetes, showing how they are relevant to one another and to the book’s overall argument.Less

Minimum Use of Force (B): Peacekeeper Violence

Daniel H. Levine

in The Morality of Peacekeeping

Even when peacekeepers are justified in resorting to force, we must recognize the serious impact that violence can have on individuals and the social fabric of a community – especially a community ... More

Even when peacekeepers are justified in resorting to force, we must recognize the serious impact that violence can have on individuals and the social fabric of a community – especially a community that has already been traumatized by the kind of violence peacekeepers are deployed to address. This chapter draws on philosophical work on death, violence, and mourning, as well as on psychological research on the impacts of violence on individuals and society. It argues that peacekeepers must not only seek to limit their use of violence, but take serious steps to publicly recognize the tragic and destructive nature of violence, even when they may have had no better options.Less

The Invention of Sympathy

in Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that pain is the best incentive to memory, and memory (of pain) to morality. An extraordinary scene in Thomas Mann's novel, Joseph and His Brothers, is the scene of Yusuf ... More

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that pain is the best incentive to memory, and memory (of pain) to morality. An extraordinary scene in Thomas Mann's novel, Joseph and His Brothers, is the scene of Yusuf and Mut. In the middle of the turbulence caused by Mut's desperate love for Yusuf, the closed circle of the harrowing house of Genesis is broken. The text proves Elaine Scarry's analysis right: pain cannot be shared. Or, more precisely, Mann specifies pain cannot be shared in words. This difficulty brings to the heart of art's social function and its limitations. Because it is such an extraordinary scene, the author felt that Mann could not have invented it out of the blue, so he started to search, and the closest he came to a possible antecedent was in the Qur'an. This chapter discusses sympathy, solidarity, as the basis of the formation of sociocultural groups. The scene of Yusuf and Mut is a scene of pain and bloodshed, a parody of civil war, a drama of women. Against the backdrop of solidarity as a social problem of the time, the scene has the kind of resonance that preoccupies.Less

Scene 1 Into the Hollow

Simon Palfrey

in Poor Tom: Living "King Lear"

This section looks at Edgar’s first two scenes, first when he is tricked by his brother Edmond, then when he goes into internal exile disguised as a mad beggar. It considers the implications of ... More

This section looks at Edgar’s first two scenes, first when he is tricked by his brother Edmond, then when he goes into internal exile disguised as a mad beggar. It considers the implications of Edgar’s self-mortification. The principle of the role is an emptiness open to experimenting abuse—an emptiness that can take on many other forms, or can be open to all kinds of constructions, but which will not finally be filled. The “happy hollow” in which Edgar reports himself hiding encapsulates this mutating, nascent potential, at once inside and outside time and society. The section goes on to consider Edgar in relation to certain salient archetypes or models: Agamben’s “state of exception”; Scarry’s phenomenology of torture; Christ; artistic pseudomorphosis, or fraudulent imitation. All these things are suggestive, but none can quite claim his radical existential susceptibility.Less

Remembering, Forgetting, Curating, and Re-Curating War

Christine Sylvester

in Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

The final chapter reviews the main conclusions of the book and raises one more pathway, by Elaine Scarry, into understanding war through people’s experiences and curations Those who die in war can be ... More

The final chapter reviews the main conclusions of the book and raises one more pathway, by Elaine Scarry, into understanding war through people’s experiences and curations Those who die in war can be interpreted and revivified by many people, groups, and institutions, each curating loss in its own terms. That there are many contenders for war memory and authority reflects a social institution that is highly decentralized in its sites, experiences and effects. To grasp this institution and the wars of our time requires gathering knowledge from locations ordinary and official, expert and everyday, profound and prosaic, literary, journalistic, and artistic—and on all sides of a war.Less

Living—with—Torture—Together

Elisabeth Weber

in Living Together: Jacques Derrida's Communities of Violence and Peace

Derrida describes compassion as a “fundamental mode of living together”. In this essay it is contrasted with “stealth torture”, which leaves no visible traces and succeeds in systematically ... More

Derrida describes compassion as a “fundamental mode of living together”. In this essay it is contrasted with “stealth torture”, which leaves no visible traces and succeeds in systematically undermining compassion with the victim, in both the community of the perpetrator and of the victim. In Derrida's text, the Hebrew concept of Rachamim plays a decisive role in combination with “perhaps”. On the one hand “rachamim”, “compassion”, forms the plural of “rechem”, “womb”, while being attributed to male figures (including in Judaism and Islam, to God himself); on the other, the word “perhaps” determines Derrida's thought of the future. Torture assaults the “strangeness to oneself” that the “self” is by forcing the victim to betray what could be called compassion for oneself. Derrida's argument resonates with a powerful voice against torture of the early Enlightenment, Christian Thomasius, who identifies such self-betrayal as constitutive of torture. With the iconic image from Abu Ghraib which in intelligence circles is called “crucifixion”, we might be facing a return of the repressed foundation of the United States in a symbol of which a key aspect has been forgotten: That crucifixion was abhorred by the peoples of Antiquity and by Islam as the worst of executions.Less