A LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW ESSAY
WARFARE SEEKS THE MAIMING AND DESTRUCTION OF HUMAN BODIES
By Richard A. Koenigsberg, Library of Social Science

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987. 400 pp. $19.95 U.S. (pb.) ISBN 0195049969.

THE BODY IN PAIN: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford University Press)

The Body in PainStunningly original, enormously important, powerfully written.”— Eric J. Cassell, M.D., Cornell Medical Center

“Brilliant, ambitious and controversial.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

In its breadth and humaneness of vision, the density and richness of its prose, above all in the compelling nature of its argument, this is indeed an extraordinary book.”—New York Times Book Review 

Elaine Scarry is Professor of English and American Literature—as well as the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value—at Harvard University.

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Scarry claims that “injuring” is the essence of warfare. If designating a winner or loser was paramount, then any other “contest” could be employed — since all contests can equally provide a “means for deciding a winner or a loser.” War, according to Scarry, revolves around producing dead and maimed bodies. Warfare constitutes a radical form of verification: that for which we kill and die must be true; that for which we die and kill must be real.

Wars begin, Scarry suggests, when there is a “crisis of belief” within a society: a central ideology or cultural construct is challenged. The dispute that leads to war involves a process whereby each side calls into question the legitimacy and thereby “erodes the reality” of the other country’s issues, beliefs, ideas and self-conception. Warfare is undertaken in order to establish the truth: killing, dying and maiming represent unique forms of verification.

The dispute that leads to war begins when a belief that had the status of a cultural reality begins to be exposed as a “cultural fiction:” as an invented structure rather than a naturally occurring “given” of the world. A process of “derealization” occurs. The danger for each society is that an idea beginning to be perceived as a social construct might erode into something unreal or untrue. The more the process of derealization continues, the more desperately will each side work to “rectify and reaffirm the legitimacy and reality of its own cultural construction.”

As each nation or group reasserts its description of reality, it denies the authenticity of its neighbor’s. In the dispute, each side claims that its own constructions are real and that the other side’s are only “creations” (and by extension fictions or lies). In seeking to certify the reality of its own construct, each side will “place before its opponent’s eyes and, more importantly, the eyes of its own population, all available sources of substantiation.”

There is no apparent advantage to settling an international dispute by means of war rather than by a song contest or chess match. If wars were undertaken in order to “resolve conflict,” certainly there are simpler ways to adjudicate differences. Societies choose warfare because what is required is the maiming and destruction of human bodies.

In war, the “sheer material factualness of the human body” will be borrowed to lend the cultural construct an aura of realness or certainty. Warfare functions to substantiate or establish the truth of an idea by producing—lining up—dead and maimed bodies—to “lend the aura of material reality” to a construct or ideology. In war, the “incontestable reality of the body”—the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of—is “conferred on an ideology or issue of instance of political authority” that has been deserted by benign sources of substantiation.

War, Scarry says, revolves around mining the ultimate source of substantiation: “extraction of the physical basis of reality from the dark hiding place in the body out into the light of day.” After an injury in battle, that which oozes out—the “interior content of human bodies, lungs, arteries and brains”—functions to prove that an ideology is true or real. That for which we die must be true. That for which we kill must be true. Surely, all the sound and fury could not be occurring in the name of nothing.

Warfare is undertaken in order to produce death, maiming, and suffering: opening human bodies to allow the “precious ore of confirmation” to appear. Indeed, it is not even a question of the truth of this ideology or that one. As long as people are dying somewhere for some thing, human beings are satisfied. Warfare suggests the presence of sacred ideals above and beyond ordinary, everyday existence. As long as wars occur, there is no end to history. A world without “something to kill and die for” is unbearable.

PS: Torture represents another method for proving the truth of a sacred ideology. The torturer screams out: “My belief-system is right and your belief-system is wrong.” “My ideology is true and yours is false.” Torture—like warfare—seeks to inflict pain in order to prove the truth.

About the author: Richard Koenigsberg received his PhD in Social Psychology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Nations have the Right to Kill and Hitler’s Ideology.