Michael McIntyre
Department of International Studies
By most measures, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in
Pain (1985) has been a stunning academic success story. Continuously in print
for nearly thirty years, it still ranks among Amazon’s (2015) top ten sellers
in literary theory and counts over six thousand academic citations (Google
Scholar 2015). Reviewed upon its release by prominent public intellectuals in
New Republic (Ignatieff 1985), Commonweal (Wyschogrod 1986), TLS (Byatt 1986),
New York Times Book Review (Suleiman 1986), New York Review of Books (Singer 1986),
and London Review of Books (Shklar 1986), it has nonetheless not been until now
the subject of systematic retrospective. While it has proved unusually fertile
as a source of fresh thinking, few have extensively engaged its philosophical
argument, Moyn (2013) being one notable exception.
This brief paper can hardly make claim to
such an extended engagement, but within its brief compass it will attempt to
come to grips with the philosophical core of Scarry’s argument and critique it
on home ground. That core, to recap with utmost brevity, is that the self is
constructed through the linguistic cathexis between body and world. Pain
destroys that cathexis and therefore destroys the self. There is a great deal
to be said in favor of this core argument; no attempt will be made here to
overturn it. It will be suggested, however, that Scarry makes a signal error at
the very beginning of her argument when she suggests that pain is sheerly
aversive (1985, p. 52). A more complicated phenomenology of pain will be suggested
in its place, and some of its consequences explored.
The Argument Restated