HUMAN 1B Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Quiet Life, Signify, Roman Magistrate
Document Summary
Waiting for the barbarians (1980) is the third of twelve novels. Opponent of animal cruelty, has worked that into fiction. Three simultaneous phenomena in the structure of torture. A theory about the social and political function of torture. Part of a longer book that considers pain in different realms of society at different points in history: moves discussion of pain outside a medical realm and into social considerations, including its role in war. Book inspired by so few accounts/descriptions of pain in literature. Aversive, a negation of the body: a stabbing pain; does not feel like it belongs there. At odds with the regular functioning in the physical sense. Conflates private and public (and here, we might think back to the public official) Obliterates consciousness annihilation of thought and emotion: so overwhelmed that they go unconscious in the process, later, the person may not be able to remember inability to recall. A mechanism that precludes the public presentation.
