Jim Keenan SJ & Elaine Scarry
I came across an article in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine today by Professor of Moral Theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, James F. Keenan SJ - Suffering and the Christian Tradition.
I was interested partly because I've been thinking about suffering and theodicy. The first part of the article, A Christian Stance toward Suffering, mentioned works by Edward Schillebeeckx and Dr. Mary Catherine Hilkert. The second part, Listening and the Voice of the One who Suffers, mentioned the work of M. Shawn Copeland, and I was especially interested when it touched on the subject of torture and a book by Elaine Scarry (I've posted a little about Scarry before).
That subject has been in the news a lot lately, and just reading the word "torture" starts my heart thudding with something between disgust and fear. I also hate how the current administration has made torture a US staple ....
IN HALF a century of reporting around the world, I have found that there was usually a feeling that the United States stood for standards of liberty, human rights, and the dignity of mankind. The Bush administration has taken us off that gold standard and drained away much of that reservoir of respect. The horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have eaten away at America's credibility and moral standing, dismaying our friends and empowering our enemies.
Washington shuddered last week when The New York Times revealed that the Justice Department, under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, had undermined the will of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as hard-won national and international standards with secret legal opinions supporting torture. "Shocking" was the word Republican Senator Arlen Specter used, and well he should.
Men and women of good will may differ on how much power the executive branch should have, and how much of our privacy and civil liberties need to be curtailed in an age of terrorism. As the former deputy attorney general, James Comey, who tried to stem the tide of the administration's malfeasance, said: there are "agonizing collisions" between the law and the desire to protect Americans. But no good will can be ascribed to those who secretly sought to undermine the republic by their underhanded advocacy of torture ..... - H.D.S. Greenway, October 9, 2007, The Boston Globe
But back to the article by James F. Keenan SJ .... here below is the part that mentions Scarry and torture and suffering ....
************************************
[...] the act of listening encourages the sufferer to speak. Encouraging the sufferer to speak is a very biblical stance. In a rather brilliant article, J. David Pleins addresses the issue of the "Divine Silence" in Job. Pleins argues that unlike those so-called friends of Job who are horrified by how Job declares his innocence and who try to silence him, God allows Job to speak. Not God's absence but "God's silence dominates the discussions of Job with his friends." And God's silence is there to let Job speak so that God can listen .....
Allowing the sufferer to give voice to their suffering is a key response to suffering ..... in suffering, we face the loss of our own personal universe. In order to claim some hold on that universe, the suffering need to articulate the fears, hopes and concerns that they have.
Nowhere has the relationship between the voice and suffering been better captured than in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, where Elaine Scarry examines torture. She cogently argues that torturers derive their power from the voices of the tortured. She explains that the object of torture is not to exact a confession nor to learn information, but rather to force the tortured person to accuse her very self; the tortured voice betrays the body when, so broken with pain, the body is unable to keep the voice from submitting to the fictive power of the torturer. The aim of torture, then, is dualism: to tear the voice from its body: "The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it." The tortured body is left voiceless, once it acknowledges the torturer's power. Separating the voice from the body is the object of those who deliberately cause suffering. That is, those who want to make another suffer recognize that the unitive element for a person of purpose is the voice. They torture to the point that their victim's voice becomes the accuser.
Scarry notes that the tortured person's most difficult wound to heal is the voice. For this reason, Amnesty International assists the tortured, unable out of shame to tell their narratives, to read and understand their records so that they may articulate one day the truth of the atrocities. Scarry's work convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the human voice in attaining healing integration. Likewise, together with the other writers she highlights that silencing and other forms of exclusion are physically and personally destructive acts.
The call for the respondent to listen to one who is suffering is not necessarily an easy one ...... we might need to recognize that the voice of the suffer might not express what we want to hear .... But inevitably by trying to voice their own concerns, they invite us into the task of seeing the threat to their universe.
*************************************
I was interested partly because I've been thinking about suffering and theodicy. The first part of the article, A Christian Stance toward Suffering, mentioned works by Edward Schillebeeckx and Dr. Mary Catherine Hilkert. The second part, Listening and the Voice of the One who Suffers, mentioned the work of M. Shawn Copeland, and I was especially interested when it touched on the subject of torture and a book by Elaine Scarry (I've posted a little about Scarry before).
That subject has been in the news a lot lately, and just reading the word "torture" starts my heart thudding with something between disgust and fear. I also hate how the current administration has made torture a US staple ....
IN HALF a century of reporting around the world, I have found that there was usually a feeling that the United States stood for standards of liberty, human rights, and the dignity of mankind. The Bush administration has taken us off that gold standard and drained away much of that reservoir of respect. The horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have eaten away at America's credibility and moral standing, dismaying our friends and empowering our enemies.
Washington shuddered last week when The New York Times revealed that the Justice Department, under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, had undermined the will of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as hard-won national and international standards with secret legal opinions supporting torture. "Shocking" was the word Republican Senator Arlen Specter used, and well he should.
Men and women of good will may differ on how much power the executive branch should have, and how much of our privacy and civil liberties need to be curtailed in an age of terrorism. As the former deputy attorney general, James Comey, who tried to stem the tide of the administration's malfeasance, said: there are "agonizing collisions" between the law and the desire to protect Americans. But no good will can be ascribed to those who secretly sought to undermine the republic by their underhanded advocacy of torture ..... - H.D.S. Greenway, October 9, 2007, The Boston Globe
But back to the article by James F. Keenan SJ .... here below is the part that mentions Scarry and torture and suffering ....
************************************
[...] the act of listening encourages the sufferer to speak. Encouraging the sufferer to speak is a very biblical stance. In a rather brilliant article, J. David Pleins addresses the issue of the "Divine Silence" in Job. Pleins argues that unlike those so-called friends of Job who are horrified by how Job declares his innocence and who try to silence him, God allows Job to speak. Not God's absence but "God's silence dominates the discussions of Job with his friends." And God's silence is there to let Job speak so that God can listen .....
Allowing the sufferer to give voice to their suffering is a key response to suffering ..... in suffering, we face the loss of our own personal universe. In order to claim some hold on that universe, the suffering need to articulate the fears, hopes and concerns that they have.
Nowhere has the relationship between the voice and suffering been better captured than in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, where Elaine Scarry examines torture. She cogently argues that torturers derive their power from the voices of the tortured. She explains that the object of torture is not to exact a confession nor to learn information, but rather to force the tortured person to accuse her very self; the tortured voice betrays the body when, so broken with pain, the body is unable to keep the voice from submitting to the fictive power of the torturer. The aim of torture, then, is dualism: to tear the voice from its body: "The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it." The tortured body is left voiceless, once it acknowledges the torturer's power. Separating the voice from the body is the object of those who deliberately cause suffering. That is, those who want to make another suffer recognize that the unitive element for a person of purpose is the voice. They torture to the point that their victim's voice becomes the accuser.
Scarry notes that the tortured person's most difficult wound to heal is the voice. For this reason, Amnesty International assists the tortured, unable out of shame to tell their narratives, to read and understand their records so that they may articulate one day the truth of the atrocities. Scarry's work convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the human voice in attaining healing integration. Likewise, together with the other writers she highlights that silencing and other forms of exclusion are physically and personally destructive acts.
The call for the respondent to listen to one who is suffering is not necessarily an easy one ...... we might need to recognize that the voice of the suffer might not express what we want to hear .... But inevitably by trying to voice their own concerns, they invite us into the task of seeing the threat to their universe.
*************************************
posted by crystal | 7:27 PM
4 Comments:
I think that you might enjoy the poem, Vocalization, by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore. (I've no axe to grind here -- its not my poem. Reading your post reminded me of it.)
Thanks for the link. That's an interesting poem - vivid imagery :-)
I'd say the idea that the tragedy of torture is the destruction of a voice and getting the body to accuse itself happens in other forms of abuse, as well.
And i wonder if the US bishops' refusal to support Amnesty International is a defense mechanism because they failed to speak out against torture as strongly as they have other issues. (In other words, it's easy to dismiss what a person is saying, if you can find fault with something else they do.) I remember reading an article that Catholics overwhelmingly approve of torture, in sometimes higher numbers than protestants.
Hi Garpu,
Catholics were more for torture - yikes! I think Amnsty International is worth supporting - they do a lot of good work.
I think you're right about other forms of abuse .... in the first version of my post, I said that I saw some similarities between sexual abuse and torture and wondered if that's why it creeps me out so much.
Post a Comment
<< Home