Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In "On Beauty and Being Just" Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark "The Body in Pain" and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

During his impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted, "I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead." Nixon was accurately describing not only his own power but also the power of every American president in the nuclear age.

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each contemplated using nuclear weapons Eisenhower twice, Kennedy three times, Johnson once, Nixon four times. Whether later presidents, from Ford to Obama, considered using them we will learn only once their national security papers are released.

In this incisive, masterfully argued new book, award-winning social theorist Elaine Scarry demonstrates that the power of one leader to obliterate millions of people with a nuclear weapon a possibility that remains very real even in the wake of the Cold War deeply violates our constitutional rights, undermines the social contract, and is fundamentally at odds with the deliberative principles of democracy.

According to the Constitution, the decision to go to war requires rigorous testing by both Congress and the citizenry; when a leader can single-handedly decide to deploy a nuclear weapon, we live in a state of thermonuclear monarchy, not democracy.

The danger of nuclear weapons comes from potential accidents or acquisition by terrorists, hackers, or rogue countries. But the gravest danger comes from the mistaken idea that there exists some case compatible with legitimate governance. There can be no such case. Thermonuclear Monarchy shows the deformation of governance that occurs when a country gains nuclear weapons.

In bold and lucid prose, Thermonuclear Monarchy identifies the tools that will enable us to eliminate nuclear weapons and bring the decision for war back into the hands of Congress and the people. Only by doing so can we secure the safety of home populations, foreign populations, and the earth itself."

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.

"Dreaming by the Book" explores the almost miraculous processes by which poets and writers teach us the work of imaginative creation. Writers from Homer to Heaney instruct us in the art of mental composition, even as their poems progress. Just as painters understand paint, composers musical instruments, and sculptors stone or metal, verbal artists understand the only material in which their creations will get made--the back-lit tissue of the human brain. In her brilliant synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, Elaine Scarry explores the principal practices by which writers bring things to life for their readers.

"Torture of Women," Spero's epic, 14 panels, 125-foot-long collage work, fuses startling imagery from ancient mythology with hand-printed and typewritten first-person testimonies of abuse--from ancient times through the present. This unique volume zooms in, translating the work into nearly 100 pages of detailed, legible reproductions.

Renowned scholar Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain, has been called by Susan Sontag "extraordinary...large-spirited, heroically truthful." The Los Angeles Times called it "brilliant, ambitious, and controversial." Now Oxford has collected some of Scarry's most provocative writing. This collection of essays deals with the complicated problems of representation in diverse literary and cultural genres--from her beloved sixth-century philosopher Boethius, through the nineteenth-century novel, to twentieth-century advertising.

qWe often assume that all areas of experience are equally available for representation. On the contrary, these essays present discussions of experiences and concepts that challenge, defeat, or block representation. Physical pain, physical labor, the hidden reflexes of cognition and its judgments about the coherence or incoherence of the world are all phenomena that test the resources of language. Using primarily literary sources (works by Hardy, Beckett, Boethius, Thackeray, and others), Scarry also draws on painting, medical advertising, and philosophic dialogue to probe the limitations of expression and representation.

Resisting Representation celebrates language. It looks at the problematic areas of expression not at the moment when representation is resisted, but at the moment when that resistance is at last overcome, thus suggesting a domain of plenitude and inclusion.

"Elaine Scarry's consistently radical way of posing essential questions redirects inquiry in the most valuable ways, a tribute to a disciplined and erudite imagination put almost exclusively at the service of democratic citizenship in American society."
--Richard Falk
Through a minute-by-minute analysis of the phone calls, official reports, responses, and reported actions of passengers on two hijacked flights, United Airlines 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania) and American Airlines 77 (which crashed into the Pentagon), Elaine Scarry offers a dramatic retelling of their fate and some startling conclusions. Leading off a provocative debate, she asks if the difficulty we had as a country in defending ourselves on September 11 suggests serious flaws in our national security. The need to act in "a matter of minutes" has been invoked to justify military arrangements
increasingly outside the citizenry's control, yet the only successful defense on September 11 was carried out, after a vote, by the passengers themselves on hijacked Flight 93.
Arguments made at the time of the writing of the Constitution judged that the only plausible way to defend the home ground was to have actions measured against the norms of civilian life: the military had to be "held within a civil frame." Scarry asks, have we strayed too far from this model? Does our authoritarian conception of national defense diminish our capacity to protect ourselves? Is it legal? Is it moral? Responding to her argument are nine prominent thinkers and writers from across the political spectrum, including
Richard Falk, Ellen Willis, Admiral Eugene Carroll, and Antonia Chayes.
Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professorof Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, is the author of The Body in
Pain, On Beauty and Being Just, Dreaming by the Book, and Resisting Representation.

During his impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted, "I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead." Nixon was accurately describing not only his own power but also the power of every American president in the nuclear age. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each contemplated using nuclear weapons—Eisenhower twice, Kennedy three times, Johnson once, Nixon four times. Whether later presidents, from Ford to Obama, considered using them we will learn only once their national security papers are released. In this incisive, masterfully argued new book, award-winning social theorist Elaine Scarry demonstrates that the power of one leader to obliterate millions of people with a nuclear weapon—a possibility that remains very real even in the wake of the Cold War—deeply violates our constitutional rights, undermines the social contract, and is fundamentally at odds with the deliberative principles of democracy. According to the Constitution, the decision to go to war requires rigorous testing by both Congress and the citizenry; when a leader can single-handedly decide to deploy a nuclear weapon, we live in a state of “thermonuclear monarchy,” not democracy. The danger of nuclear weapons comes from potential accidents or acquisition by terrorists, hackers, or rogue countries. But the gravest danger comes from the mistaken idea that there exists some case compatible with legitimate governance. There can be no such case. Thermonuclear Monarchy shows the deformation of governance that occurs when a country gains nuclear weapons. In bold and lucid prose, Thermonuclear Monarchy identifies the tools that will enable us to eliminate nuclear weapons and bring the decision for war back into the hands of Congress and the people. Only by doing so can we secure the safety of home populations, foreign populations, and the earth itself.

In Thinking in an Emergency, Elaine Scarry lays bare the realities of "emergency" politics and emphasizes what she sees as the ultimate ethical concern: "equality of survival." She reveals how regular citizens can reclaim the power to protect one another and our democratic principles. Government leaders sometimes argue that the need for swift national action means there is no time for the population to think, deliberate, or debate. But Scarry shows that clear thinking and rapid action are not in opposition. Examining regions as diverse as Japan, Switzerland, Ethiopia, and Canada, Scarry identifies forms of emergency assistance that represent "thinking" at its most rigorous and remarkable. She draws on the work of philosophers, scientists, and artists to remind us of our ability to assist one another, whether we are called upon to perform acts of rescue as individuals, as members of a neighborhood, or as citizens of a country.

The scientific research literature on memory is enormous. Yet until now no single book has focused on the complex interrelationships of memory and belief. This book brings together eminent scholars from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, literature, and medicine to discuss such provocative issues as "false memories," in which people can develop vivid recollections of events that never happened; retrospective biases, in which memories of past experiences are influenced by one's current beliefs; and implicit memory, or the way in which nonconscious influences of past experience shape current beliefs.

Ranging from cognitive, neurological, and pathological perspectives on memory and belief, to relations between conscious and nonconscious mental processes, to memory and belief in autobiographical narratives, this book will be uniquely stimulating to scholars in several academic disciplines.

"These essays are about previous ends of centuries, but are also themselves fin-de-sicle instruments and achievements. They will become part of any future study of our own time."--Peter Sacks, The Johns Hopkins University.

In Les Fins de Sicle Elaine Scarry brings together an eminent group of contributors to examine a subject that increasingly occupies our thoughts as this century--and this millennium--approaches an end. Arranged chronologically, the chapters treat English poetry and culture at successive turns-of-the-century. The result is a rich picture of the ways calendar and culture affect one another. Even if we must pass through our own century's turn "unprotected," these pictures from the past provide an array of models that may prove useful: the book shows us portraits of the fin de sicle as a radical invitation to political distribution (Braudy), as a prolonged kiss (McGann), as an assassin (Vendler), and even as an Hegelian reader, "curled up in an easy chair" wishing to exempt itself from the rest of the century (de Grazia). The number of great poets who wrote at their century's end--Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare--works to deepen our attention to the poetry now emerging in the 1990s.