Elaine Scarry Research Articles

Shoe: Towards a promiscuous politics of emergency evacuation mobility

The paper works against the articulation of emergency politics within an Agambenian framework of a ‘state of exception’ which has heretofore dominated writing about emergencies. Instead it develops a more hopeful albeit agonistic politics of emergency evacuation mobilities. By way of Elaine Scarry, Bonnie Honig, Ben Anderson and the writings of gay rights and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp, the paper explores the promise of a ‘politics of promiscuity’, alighting on the role of shoes in emergency evacuation mobilities in two cases. Through detailed analysis of the evacuation of the World Trade Centre during 9/11, and the debacle of the evacuation of Australian PM Julia Gillard during ‘Australia Day’ protests in 2012, the paper teases out the concept of promiscuity through feminist and queer reworkings of emergency politics.

Death Styles

Malina demonstrates the paradoxical struggle that characterizes any attempt at reflecting on the uncanny relationship between the embodiment of language and the expression of pain. As Elaine Scarry (1985) notes, pain can be used to both make and unmake an identity; pain’s destructuring force can be complemented by the reconstructive potential of the imagination. Yet what happens when the identity to be reconstructed leads only to a fragmentary regeneration; what if the only whole that can be constructed remains incomplete and internally divided? This article focuses on reading Malina as an allegory of the process of writing itself: that is, a means of exploring the attempted expression of the pain and fragmentation of the embodied subject that resulted from the atrocities of World War II. Using Blanchot’s reflections on anguish and language, I argue that the novel—part love story, part horror story, part detective story—is a riddle that the reader must solve, but that in doing so the reader becomes infected with the same fragmentary force that disembodies the protagonist. As such, the heuristic consequence of the novel is to instruct the reader on the influence of language and imagining on the attempted reembodiment or, in this case, eventual disembodiment, of the body in pain.

Embodied nations: Masculinities, nationhood and (homo)sexual desire. From Borstal Boy (2000) to God’s Own Country (2017)

This article proposes a comparison between Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (UK, 2017) and Peter Sheridan’s Borstal Boy (Ireland, 2000) to examine the role that masculinities and sexual desire play in the construction, (re)configuration and (re)affirmation of nation-ness. These films depict bodies and their sensations as being able to break down and re-shape a strict and embodied notion of nationhood strongly tied by patriarchal norms. However, they also rely on rigid representations of masculinities and do not attempt to dissolve nation-ness as a corporeal entity, but to re-shape it and re-install it as a valid form of existence. Notions by Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages provide the theoretical approach to observe possible changes and continuities regarding the domestication of male bodies in twenty-first-century Irish and British cinema.

Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

Husserl, the Differend and Kafka's the Trial

Kafka’s The Trial is remarkable, amongst other reasons, for the description of the dissolution of K’s confused and painful life-world.1 Not unlike Elaine Scarry’s account of the phenomenon of torture in The Body in Pain,2 K slowly loses his familiar language through which he speaks and writes in his daily social relations with others. K still speaks the words which represent the concepts with which he is familiar. And yet, his relationships with others become monologic. There seems to be no other who, unlike in his past private and professional life, can respond to his words in a manner with which K can understand. The others do respond. But they respond by emplanting meanings into K’s words, meanings which only possess value within the discourses of self-styled legal experts and officials who act in K’s name. The experts and officials take their own meanings as authoritative. K fails to gain access to their meanings. The question, posed by Husserl’s phenomenology of language, is “why?”.

A literatura da Shoah no Brasil: o frágil corpo humano em A morte de um carrasco, de Joseph Nichthauser

No século XX, com a Primeira e Segunda Guerras Mundiais, viu-se o surgimento de um novo homem. Trata-se de um homem não mais dotado de forças heroicas capazes de resistir à violência dos novos tempos, mas de um homem fragilizado, vulnerável e debilitado. Esse sentimento de impotência tomou conta principalmente daqueles que foram vítimas dos regimes autoritários e totalitários. No contexto internacional, particularmente, após a Segunda Guerra, muitos judeus, devido à dizimação por que passaram e à violência que sofreram, saíram da Europa em busca de uma vida menos indigna em outros países do mundo. O judeu brasileiro Joseph Nichthauser é um exemplo de sobrevivente da Shoah nazista. Vítima da fome, das perdas irreparáveis, das doenças e dos trabalhos forçados, viu na escrita um meio para encontrar e atribuir um sentido para sua vida. Em 1972, publica Quero viver... memórias de um ex-morto, e, em 2003, lança A morte de um carrasco. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a violência e a opressão exercidas sobre os corpos dos judeus nos campos de concentração, a animalização a que eram submetidos, a desautorização de suas crenças religiosas e o próprio processo de imigração por que passaram, tendo como base o segundo livro publicado pelo autor. A reflexão sobre esses itens é importante porque permite a construção de uma nova ética, um novo ponto de vista para se pensar a humanidade, as relações humanas e as minorias. Para o embasamento desta proposta, buscou-se respaldo em autores como Elaine Scarry e Walter Benjamin.

The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts by Peter Quigley

Reviewed by: The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts by Peter Quigley David Copland Morris Peter Quigley, The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts. Cambridgeshire, UK: White Horse P, 2019. 260 pp. Cloth, $85. This book examines the reasons that the notion of beauty has come under such intense suspicion in the eyes of literary and cultural critics during the past several decades. Quigley sees these critics as taking up three outwardly disparate perspectives—modernism, Marxism, and postmodernism—which are nonetheless similar in their embrace of what he calls oppositional aesthetics, one constant of which "is hostility to beauty" (99). Quigley also observes, however, that in the last twenty years or so there has been a limited countermovement against this hostility, led by critics such as Wendy Steiner and Elaine Scarry, who seek to restore beauty as an important element to consider in the analysis and evaluation of art. Quigley's book is a lively and provocative contribution to this nascent effort. Quigley does not seek to reestablish an unproblematic or politically naive notion of beauty but to help rehabilitate it as a useful and enriching tool in our engagement with the arts. He vigorously challenges the commonly asserted idea that everything is political, a notion he sees as incongruent with actual experience, as in fact a product of totalizing ideology. He asks tellingly: "How has it come about that the first lens dropped in front of the eye of the beholder when looking at the world is assumed to be political?" (40). He does not contest the undeniable and at times all-consuming power of the political but argues for what he sees as the equally undeniable importance of the aesthetic. The book is, in a way, an oxymoron—a passionate polemic on behalf of moderation and balance: "What if beauty, despite the assaults, is finally foundational for our very existence, our being, and for much of what has propelled us forward?" (210). In his second and third chapters (out of five) Quigley traces the allure of Marx's call for a "ruthless criticism of everything existing" not only for Marxists but for modernists and postmodernists as well. While not denying the profound grotesqueries of history, which called both Marxism and Modernism into being, Quigley [End Page 198] argues that the bitter antagonistic gestures generated by these movements have often become compulsive and self-destructive. In chapter 4 he takes up the impact of this pervasive negative stance on a movement, ecocriticism, that will be of special interest to readers of Western American Literature, since this journal provided an early home to ecocriticism's first wave. As ecocriticism has broadened its focus from concern with natural beauty, sense of place, and individual engagement with the wild to include environmental justice and global issues of sustainability, there have been losses, as well as gains: "Our critical focus must always include issues of justice and fairness where appropriate, but if we are deploying critical processes that make discussing beauty impossible, what have we accomplished?" (128). If one thinks, as Quigley does, that an appreciation of beauty is foundational to a meaningful life, that it is more than just what the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (cited by Quigley) calls "gush about sunsets," then a great deal is at stake in debates about aesthetics. While Quigley's book critiques oppositional aesthetics vigorously and in extensive detail, a reader might wonder what form of aesthetics he suggests in its place, or at least alongside it. Here the book turns toward four western writers of particular interest to Western American Literature's readers: Gretel Ehrlich, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and especially Robinson Jeffers. Quigley sees their work as conveying a sense of beauty not compromised by political myopia, romantic delusion, or historical blindness. Furthermore, their notions of beauty are strongly connected to "place," a heavily contested term that interestingly finds itself in the subtitle of this journal. Quigley notes the powerful influence today of a new wave of ecocritics typified by Ursula Heise, whom he says see concern with place as a "quaint, naïve perspective" that mistakenly emphasizes the personal, the local, and...

The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy by Yi-Ping Ong

Reviewed by: The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy by Yi-Ping Ong Marta Figlerowicz ONG, YI-PING. The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 304 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $45.00 e-book. Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book (1999), now twenty years old, has had a considerable afterlife as a looming critical spirit. Or, rather, as a looming uncritical spirit: for the great risk of Scarry's book, which won it as many detractors as proponents, was what the detractors described as its 'wide-eyed' quality. We know that characters are not real people, and books are not real worlds. But good novels—Scarry insisted—nevertheless feel real, more like an actual dream than like a daydream, even to people who read and analyze them as a profession. Instead of dispelling these experiences of credulousness, we ought better to understand them. Yi-Ping Ong, a former graduate student of Scarry's, is one of the scholars to take up this challenge. Where Scarry focused on the sensory, Ong focuses on the ontological. In what ways, she wonders, do novels give us the impression, however fleeting, that its characters actually exist? Some answer to this question, she argues, is foundational to any definition of the novel that values it as something more than a social commentary or symptom: "in order for a novel to attain the condition of a work of art—to be a novel, as opposed to a theoretical analysis, a psychological portrait, a sociological account, or a subjective series of reflections—it must represent lives in such a compelling way that the reader may accept them as actually existing" (22). The stakes are high; Ong raises them further by offering her reader a two-pronged answer. Through close readings of major novels from across the European realist canon, she establishes the formal features that contribute to this impression: an incompletely objective narrative viewpoint, character unpredictability, plot open-endedness. From these formal features, many of which will seem intuitive to a narratologist, Ong makes a daring philosophical leap. The ontology that underpins this collection of mimetic axioms, she claims, is an implicit but clear precursor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century existentialism. Before Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger theorized this philosophical standpoint, the realist novel as a genre embodied it as a necessary condition for its powerful aesthetic effects. Many existentialists wrote novels of their own. These novels have conventionally been taken as illustrations of their principles; Ong sees them as these principles' enactments. She also argues, more broadly, that "[a]n existentialist poetics of realism makes it possible to discern and ascribe critical importance to various strategies for portraying characterological freedom, worldhood, and detotalized aesthetic form" (236). To recognize the novel as a fundamentally existentialist project—a form of art that immerses its reader in (and because of) its existentialist view of humanity—allows one better to appreciate both the ways in which it moves us, and the depth and complexity of the worldview into which we are thereby inducted. Sartre made a passing appearance in Dreaming by the Book as a theorist of the flimsiness of our untrained, undirected imaginations. Ong elevates him—with Beauvoir, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger—to the status of a theorist, at once, of persuasive novelistic character construction and human life itself. The readings through which Ong establishes these parallels between literary realism and philosophical existentialism are masterful, wide-ranging, and compelling. To her great credit, she considers not only predictable examples—such as the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky—but also counterintuitive ones. In an extended reading of Emma, she turns on its head the familiar dictum about the supposed detachment of Jane [End Page 103] Austen's narrators, showing us that "in [Emma's] overt comparison between its own matchmaking plot and the machinations of Emma, what emerges is neither the mere erasure of authority nor its deflation, but rather its deliberate invocation for the purpose of parody" (212). In a spellbinding introductory chapter on Anna Karenina, she shows that Leo Tolstoy's theory of reading presumes...

Never Let Me Finish: Ishiguro's Interruptions

In this article, I argue that Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go forces us to consider how the condition of interruption shapes the subject's ability to "read" (interpret) people, situations, and larger structures of meaning. I couple existing criticism of Ishiguro's self-consciously flat lexical style—prose meant to mimic a corresponding and tedious flatness in the perspective of the clones, filled with equivocation, fuzzy descriptors, and syntactic repetition—to the novel's use of interruption, both in terms of representation and reader response. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book, I put the question of cognitive imagemaking (as readers) into dialog with phenomenon of interruption. Interruption, I argue, is the binding agent for the novel's deadened lexicon, the mechanism by which imagination and critical meaning are systematically crushed into what Scarry refers to as the inert, evanescent, and ineffectual shape of daydreaming. In this way, Ishiguro asks readers to consider the conditions that interrupt and thereby foreclose the act of social critique.

Afterword

Afterword Elizabeth A. Povinelli It's rare that a volume of academic articles moves me; it's not that academic writings can't be harrowing. I can find theory devastating. Freud's The Ego and the Id (1961 [1923]) kills me every time I read it, so powerfully does he portray the pathos of the ego's attempt to survive the cruel space of its birth between the id and superego. Nor do I think my feelings flow from the topic of this special section of Anthropology Quarterly. Discussions of corporeal entanglements can be as dry as deserts and concepts as dull as can be. But in each of these articles are moments of profound commentaries of new forms of intimate proximity as they stretch the concept of love across regimes of governance. I was considering how to cluster these four articles, in the way one does when trying to contain and direct the endless possible directions a comment can take. I was musing, for instance, of dividing them according to a focus on sexuality and late liberal governance of intimacy, on the one hand (Weiss and Obadia), and intimate epistemologies of others, on the other (Rutherford and Crosson). But this way of sorting the texts is overwhelmed by the complex and multivalent settings in which the authors place their discussion. At stake in all of them is a question for our times—How do we become together differently when, as Lauren Berlant once said to me, nothing is more generic than our most intimate expressions, gestures, and languages? So, let me begin with Weiss. Any thought that her article would wind up proximate to Elaine Scarry's classic discussion of the body in pain was deeply misguided. The echoes of Scarry's work can be found in Berlant [End Page 1483] and Edelman's work on the unmaking of subjectivity in sex; or in a previous text of Candace Vogler published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry; and in the work of Leo Bersani. As Weiss notes, these theorists show that we do not come to know ourselves more deeply or profoundly in sexual encounters, rather they open us to the incoherency of self and identity. Weiss is, however, far less interested in understanding the self in sex, whether vanilla or rough, than in, quoting Eve Sedgwick, all the "loose ends and crossed ends" not contained in sex per se, or in the identities that have clustered around its acts. What about forms of intimacy outside sex, scientia sexualis as modernity's governing regime of subjectivity and truth? Did this science of sexuality overwhelm not a previous ars erotica nor even what Foucault called alliance, but something akin to kinship? If we turned away from sexuality and toward kinship and alliance, would we find coherence there, some clear algebra of human forms of relatedness and their obligated affects, albeit culturally defined? The center of Weiss's article might wind up in a BDSM dungeon, but it does not center on the dungeon. Fearing her sister's assault by a previous male partner in a BDSM bar, Weiss leads her sister into the dungeon. Once entering, Weiss conveys the stubborn threat of violence from a currently contained—but, the reader imagines, terrifying—stalker; the sounds a specific play of sexuality; its smells of "leather, latex, bleach, rubber, sex." What Weiss wants us to look at, feel, is not these smells, not "the naked man hung on a St. Andrews Cross, being flogged by a woman in a black corset and thigh high leather boots" (though, as if anticipating Rutherford, she is not asking us to look away from these either). Instead, the aspect of overwhelming proximity she wants us to consider is not in, what for some would be, overwhelming sexual altering, but in the supervalent thought—or forms of relatedness—that creates an intensity beyond the given elements in the actual scene. The boyfriend, the sister, the lover, the trans bouncer, the dungeon: each of these "thoughts" express a given ordering of the social field ("a field of enmeshment and imbrication") and release potentialities for a different ordering. Like Chandra Mohanty, Weiss comes to worry whether "through identitarian...

Institutionalized Violence in the History of Mind/Body Dualism and the Contemporary Reality of Slavery and Torture: Reflections on Elaine Scarry and The Body in Pain

Wendy Lynne Lee argues that the dualistic impulse Bibi Bakare-Yusef identifies in Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the experience of pain has its roots at least as far back as Aristotle’s hylomorphism, and that a clear view of contemporary structural inequality requires a grasp of how “mind” and “body” continue to inform even anti-dualist social theory. Lee argues that insofar as this impulse informs Scarry’s The Body in Pain, it distorts Scarry’s analysis of the experience of pain in ways that elide important aspects of that experience. Understanding the nature of this distortion, however, sheds light on some forms of violence that Scarry doesn’t discuss, namely, the vital role institutionalized violence plays in the maintenance of the social order. Lee’s analysis thus offers insight towards analyses of the experience of pain that avoid the pitfalls of mind/body dualism and make better conceptual and historical sense of institutions like slavery and sex-trafficking.

The house of pain and the insect politician: Surveillance and the body in The Fly and The Island of Dr. Moreau

Abstract David Cronenberg's , the definitive film of the body horror genre, poses political questions regarding the limits of human recognition and the disciplinary surveillance techniques employed over the body by ideology. This article reads The Fly alongside novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, arguing that both texts are allegorical explorations of the foundation of human politics, through surveillance and control of both individuals and populations. Brundle's transformation leads him to a Hobbesian 'state of nature', in which he asserts his natural right of self-preservation. The vivisected animals that Dr Moreau creates, however, exist in a highly ritualized political system predicated on the human capacity to experience, understand and remember pain. It is a political system that exemplifies Foucauldean notions of self-control through disciplinarian surveillance. The two texts serve as inverted reflections of one another: in The Island of Dr. Moreau, animals are humanized by the fear of pain, and in The Fly a human is animalized by the experience of pain. Both texts are reminders that, as Elaine Scarry has pointed out, pain has the capacity to eradicate individual humanity. They also remind us that empathy for the pain of others is essentially humanizing.

Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Naming Thy Name is another attempt to decipher the identity of the unnamed “beautiful youth” present in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). Without much ado, Elaine Scarry gives her reader a name: Henry ...

Valuing the dead: death, burial, and the body in Second World War Britain

ABSTRACT In her work The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry discusses what she has termed ‘the referential instability‘ of the human body in death. The dead of war, she argues, have a particular, historically specific, instability, in that their bodies can be of immense emotional value to their nation, but can also be fought over and disputed; the subject of competing claims from nation, family and enemy. In Second World War Britain the bodies of dead combatants, for long the subject of state regulation and familial and comradely grief, were joined by the bodies of dead civilians. This article examines the ways in which the British state attempted to regulate the disposal of the bodies of both civilians and combatants in a manner which conferred the sense of honour and sacrifice, largely successfully attached to the dead of the battlefield since the First World War, to the bodies of civilians killed in the new form of warfare, aerial bombardment. It sets this against a discussion of the treatment of the combatant dead and examines expressions of grief, and the regulation of these in both civilian and combatant contexts, arguing that in ’total war’ the state struggled to ensure the stability of both the civilian and combatant corpse.

Introduction: The Legacies and Limits ofThe Body in Pain

Since its publication in 1985, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain has become a seminal text in the study of embodiment. In its foregrounding of the body in war and torture, it critiques the minimising of the body in questions of politics, offering a compelling account of the structure and phenomenology of violent domination. However, at the same time the text can be seen to shore up a mind/body dualism that has been associated with oppressive forms of gendering, racialisation and disablement. Divisive, powerful and elegant, the text has been central in the shaping of approaches to embodiment over the past 30 years. This special issue revisits Scarry's text in the light of 30 years of scholarship on embodiment and the body. Its legacies and limits are exemplified through a series of articles that mobilise the arguments of The Body in Pain even as they push at the limits of the text.

Elaine Scarry, Michael Haneke’sFunny Gamesand the Structure of Cruelty

Haneke’s film Funny Games is a reflection on the nature of pain and representation. I argue that the film closely follows Elaine Scarry’s arguments about the structure of torture. Further, by refusing to appeal to categories of generalization such as ‘sadism’ and ‘psychopathy’, Haneke undermines the process of finding meaning in violence. Haneke positions his audiences as more than just witnesses to torture, but active participants in cruelty.

Labour Pain, ‘Natal Politics’ and Reproductive Justice for Black Birth Givers

The reception of Elaine Scarry’s landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualizations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry’s description of pain as ‘unshareable’. Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the legibility of pain in labour. Feminist and natural childbirth activists have developed an understanding of pain at birth as central to maternal subjectivity, where pain is a biopolitical force and its management a means of self-transformation. Alongside calls for reproductive justice, the essay considers how the visibility and expressivity of labour pain could contribute to what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser term a new ‘natal politics’ that addresses concerns for the disproportionate injury and death experienced by Black birth givers.

Affective War: Wounded Bodies as Political Technologies

This article argues that wounded military bodies are affective technologies in the production of supportive publics in war. It builds on Elaine Scarry’s concept of substantiation, suggesting that the damaged or altered body functions in war as a vehicle for the making material of immaterial beliefs, values and ideas. Scarry’s focus on the affective force of the wounded body is elaborated and pushed further, by asserting that the concept of substantiation needs to be supplemented by an analysis of the work that wounded bodies do as political technologies. These arguments are mobilised through two examples of the public staging of wounded military bodies in the United Kingdom during and after recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These examples provide an analysis of the political processes of substantiation: the specific mechanisms through which wounded bodies are rendered visible and through which their affective capacities to compel and grip are mediated.

An Interview with ELAINE SCARRY

In this interview, Elaine Scarry elaborates on her writing and activism in relation to the threat of nuclear war.

Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences

Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences