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Reading 4 Pain and the Self Three Simultaneous Phenomena in the Structure of Torture (1) the infliction of pain (2) the objectification of the subjective attributes of pain (3) the translation of the objectified attributes ofpain into the insignia of power The first of the three steps is the infliction of great physical pain on a human being. Although this is the most heinous part of the process, it alone would never accomplish the torturer's goal. One aspect of great pain-as acknowledged by those who have suffered it in diverse political and private contexts, and as asserted by those who have studied it from the perspective ofpsychology, philosophy, and physiology, and, finally, as becomes obvious to common sense alone-is that it is to the individual experiencing it overwhelmingly present, more emphatically real than any other human experience, and yet is almost invisible to anyone else, unfelt, and unknown. Even prolonged, agonized human screams, which press on the hearer's consciousness of the person hurt, convey only a limited dimension of the sufferer's experience. [...] For the torturer, it is not enough that the prisoner experience pain. Its reality, already incontestable to the sufferer, must be made equally incontestable to those outside the sufferer. Pain is therefore made visible in the multiple and elaborate processes that evolve in producing it. In, then, the second step of torture, the subjective characteristics of pain are objectified. Although the prisoner's internal experience may be close to or identical with that of a person suffering severe pain from burns or a stroke or cancer or phantom limb, it is, unlike this other person 's, simultaneously being externalized. The following attributes belong equally to the felt-experience of patient and prisoner -The first, the most essential, aspect of pain is its sheer aversiveness. While other sensations have content that may be positive, neutral, or negative , the very content of pain is itself negation. If to the person in pain it does not feel averse, and ifit does not in turn elicit in that person aversive feelings toward it, it is not in either philosophical discussions or psychological definitions of it called pain. Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of "against," of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as "not oneself," "not me," as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of. This internal Scarry, The Body in Pain 173 physical experience is in torture accompanied by its external political equivalent, the presence in the space outside the body ofa self-proclaimed "enemy," someone who in becoming the enemy becomes the human embodiment of aversiveness; he ceases to have any psychological characteristics or content other than that he is, like physical pain, "not me," "against me."[...] -A second and third aspect ofpain, closely related to the first, are the double experience of agency.8 While pain is in part a profound sensory rendering of "against," it is also a rendering of the "something" that is against, a something at once internal and external. Even when there is an actual weapon present, the sufferer may be dominated by a sense of internal agency: it has often been observed that when a knife or a nail or pin enters the body, one feels not the knife, nail or pin but one's own body, one's own body hurting one. Conversely, in the utter absence of any actual external cause, there often arises a vivid sense of external agency, a sense apparent in our elementary, everydayvocabulary for pain: knifelike pains, stabbing, boring, searing pains. In physical pain, then, suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike. The sense ofself-agency, visible in many dimensions of torture, is primarily dramatized there in the ritualized selfbetrayal ofconfession and forced exercise. The sense ofexternal agency is objectified in the systematic assimilation of shelter and civilization into the torturer's collection ofweapons. But inside and outside and the two forms of agency ultimately give way to and merge with one another: confession and exercises are a form of external as well as internal agency since one's own body and voice now no longer belong to oneself; and the conversion of the physical and cultural setting into torture instruments is internal as well as external since it acts as an image of the impact of pain...

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