Ok so this one I have to be honest and say I did not read straight through. I picked it up, got a chapter and a half in on torture, put it down for three weeks because it’s genuinely heavy going, picked it back up, did the same thing again around the Bible/Marx section. Total time from first page to last, something like two months, in pieces. I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book, I think it’s a flaw in trying to read it like a normal book.

Scarry’s actual argument, once you get under the difficult prose, is that physical pain is the one state of consciousness that has no object, you’re never in pain “of” or “about” something the way you’re afraid of something or thinking about something, and that this objectlessness is exactly why pain resists language, why we reach for weapons and words like “stabbing” and “burning” to give it a fake object just so we can talk about it at all. Once she’d said that I noticed it everywhere, every time someone described pain to me for weeks afterward I caught myself checking whether they were reaching for a borrowed object to hang it on.

The torture chapter is the one that’ll actually get you, she’s very precise about how torture regimes turn the room itself, furniture, domestic objects, into instruments, and how confession functions as a kind of obscene unmaking of the world rather than information-gathering. It’s not comfortable reading and I don’t think it’s supposed to be.

Four stars, not five, because the second half on Marx and material culture lost me a little, I felt the through-line get thinner right when I most needed it to hold. But the first half alone earned this a permanent spot on the shelf, not the donate pile.