...prolonged pain that may occur unaccompanied by any nameable disease. Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned. Though Woolf frames her observation in terms of one particular language, the essential problem...

...(New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), Elaine Scarry says: "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (p. 4). What is useful about her observation for the present discussion is the implicitly...

...(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), Elaine Scarry says: "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (p. 4). What is useful about her observation for the present discussion is the implicitly...

...another's pain, and of the resistance to language inherent in pain: "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is ever learned." Precisely because those in intense distress often cannot speak and verbalize their pain,...

...unshareability in part through its resistance to language. . . . Prolonged pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.3 The deliberate infliction of pain in order to destroy the victim's normative world and capacity...

...Scarry (1985: 4) says of the relationship of pain to language: "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." In so far as the aesthetic is concerned with the sensory, or rather with throbbing percepts,...

...in language." 6 But pain can also empty linguistic behavior: "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." 7 These two dynamics of physical pain are closely related to one another. By taking away...

...maddening screams & the soft strains of death 57 Pain "does not simply resist language," Scarry writes, "but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." 58 Pain lacks "referential content," yet as Scarry has demonstrated, expressing pain is the...

...in Pain, Scarry says of the relationship of pain to language, "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (1985:4). Insofar as the aesthetic is concerned with the sensory, or rather with throbbing...

...that "physical pain is languagedestroying."32 She explains that "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about...sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned."33 "The purpose of [torture]," she wants us to understand, "is not to elicit needed information...