The Body Within

The Body Within poses a very strong argument to help all of us understand that we have the ability to heal ourselves. This book can help teach you how life is not only to be lived, but also who we are and what we are capable of. The Body Within shows us all that when you become the observer of yourself, you are limitless in what you can accomplish.Nowhere else has anyone written about how the way we live affects how and when we cross over in death. This book is very bold and inspiring for anyone who wants to change the course of his or her life. You may learn that there really is no emptiness inside; it's just you that are missing.

The central question of this interdisciplinary volume is, whether present day medical visualisation techniques like ultrasound, endoscopy, CT, MRI and PET-scans mark a significant shift in the historical and cultural construction and experience of bodily interiority.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

With Salammbo, Flaubert turned to the old Orient and Carthage's civil war with its mecenaries to relive his travels in the Levant and indulge in erotic and heroic reveries. Yet his alluring heroine gives way to political and military matter

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