Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. <<

aus: elaine scarry: the body in pain. the making and unmaking of the world. oxford university press, 1985.

sehr kursorisch zusammengefasst, einleitung und erstes kapitel:

Thus when one speaks about "one's own physical pain" and "about another person's physical pain", one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct orders of event. (..) Für "the person in pain" .. having pain .. may come to be thought of what it is to "have certainty", während "hearing about pain" dem primären Modell von "to have doubts" nahe kommt.

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.

der ausnahmecharakter des schmerzes im vergleich zu allen anderen interior states: nicht gefühle, sondern gefühle für X, furcht vor - , liebe für - , ambivalenz gegenüber von - . objekte - alles beispiele für die menschliche fähigkeit sich über grenzen des eigenen körpers hinauszubewegen, into the external, sharable world. (..) pain (..) has no referential content. It is not OF or FOR anything.

It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectivation in language.

(..)

wie also linguistische strukturen finden, die in diese region hinausreichen?

.. to witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the the destruction of language ..

(..) Amnesty International's ability to bring about the cessation of torture depends centrally on its ability to communicate the reality of physical pain to those who are not themselves in pain. Verpflichtet zu taktvollem Umgang - und gleichermaßen zur Herstellung einer Unmittelbarkeit, die der Tatsache entspricht, dass torture is happening - während Takt und Unmittelbarkeit gemeinhin gegeneinander agieren.

(..) Folter beschrieben als eine form of information-gathering or (in its even more remarkable formulation) intelligence-gathering - und diese misdescription zu enthüllen setzt Elaine Scarrys erstes Kapitel an: >>The Structure of Torture - the Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power. <<

Similarly (though by no means identical), while the central activity of war is injuring and the central goal in war is to out-injure the opponent, the fact of injuring tends to be absent from strategic and political descriptions of war.

(..) .. pain has its etymological home in "poena" or "punishment", was daran erinnert, dass selbst der elementare Akt des Benennens dieses most interior of events, dass der Schmerz ist, entails an immediate mental somersault out of the body into the external social circumstances that can be pictured as having caused the hurt. (..)

nirgends ist das sadistische potential der sprache so deutlich verknüpft mit agency wie in der folter. folter als eigene sprache, objektivierung, acting out. (..) What assists the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self conscious display of agency. (..)

(Moral stupidity, then, here as in its less savage and obscene forms, has an unconscious structure.) (..)

(..) Die Verbindung zwischen körperlichem und sprachlichem Akt, zwischen Körper und Stimme in der Befragung: the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act: the interrogation.

However near the prisoner the torturer stands, the distance between their physical realities is colossal (..) Trotz jener größtmöglichen Distanz, handelt es sich um eine unsichtbare, since the physical realities it lies between are each invisible. (..) Als presence and absence of annihilitating negation. (..)

In order to experience his distance from the prisoner in terms of "having", their physical difference is translated into a verbal difference: the absence of pain is a presence of world, the presence of pain is the absence of world. Across this set of inversions pain becomes power.

(..)

Deobjectivatifying of the objects, the unmaking of the made - the appropriation of the world into the torturers arsenal of weapon.

Räume, als Erweiterungen des Körpers, warm keeping shelter, die in der folter zu einem einzigen Raum zusammenschrumpfen, ein raum als waffe, an agent of pain. Alles im Raum Befindliche wird Waffe, deconverted, undone.

(..)

Zugefügter Schmerz, pure aversiveness, jedoch gleichermaßen extrem innerlich und extrem äußerlich, Zusammenbruch der Grenzen zwischen Innen und Außen, was einen weiteren Aspekt des körperlichen Schmerzes aufruft: an almost obscene conflation of private and public.

"It brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience."