The Body in Pain Quotes

“to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“The larger the prisoner's pain (the smaller the prisoner's world and therefore by comparison) the larger the torturer's world... pain becomes power... the torturer uses the prisoner's aliveness to crush the things that he lives for.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“He cannot will his entry into and exit from the activity on a daily basis. There is not, as there is for most workers, a brief interval of exemption at the end of the day when he is permitted to enact a wholly different set of gestures; the timing of his eventual exit will by determined not by his own will but by the end of the war, whether that comes in days, months, or years, and there is of course a very high probability that even when the war ends he will never exit from it. Although in all forms of work the worker mixes himself with and eventually becomes inseparable from the materials of his labor (an inseparability that has only its most immediate sign the residues which coat his body, the coal beneath the skin of his arm, the spray of grain in his hair, the ink on his fingers), the boy in war is, to an extent, found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor: he will learn to perceive himself as he will be perceived by others, as indistinguishable from the men of his unit, regiment, division, and above all national group (all of whom will share the same name: he is German) as he is also inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions – berry laden or snow laden - of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification, as in the camouflage postures he adopts, now running bent over parallel with the ground it is his work to mime, now arching forward conforming the curve of his back to the curve of a companion boulder, now standing as upright and still and narrow as the slender tree behind which he hides; he is the elms and the mud, he is the one hundred and sixth, he is a small piece of German terrain broken off and floating dangerously through the woods of France. He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. He is dark blue like the sea. He is light grey like the air through which he flies. He is sodden in the green shadows of earth. He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“The chapter ends by showing that nuclear war more closely approximates the model of torture than the model of conventional war because it is a structural impossibility that the populations whose bodies are used in the confirmation process can have exercised any consent over this use of their bodies.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor. … He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. … He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World