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Susan Sontag - "Illness as Metaphor" (1977/8s) - Coggle Diagram
Susan Sontag - "Illness as Metaphor" (1977/8s)
What is the problem Sontag is thinking through?
"My subject is not illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. [...] that the most truthful way of regarding illness--is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking" (3): illness is
real
not metaphoric, and the trend towards metaphor can be damaging?
Why is metaphor a problem?
Dustin: metaphor creates distance (the gap between relationality is where meaning making happens); instead of a vehicle for change, it becomes stuck in negativity/negative affect
"While disease metaphors are never innocent, it could be argued that the cancer metaphor is a worst case: implicitly genocidal" (84)); the idea that both the disease, the bad thing, and the person with cancer need to be eliminated from society.
how SYSTEMS go about authorizing deaths/nongrievable
"accumulating medical knowledge" inerrupted by this fantasy of subversive/alternative aesthetics
What is "damaging"?
"as bad as" cancer: "
the impact of metaphors on those who
have
What does this do to people who have that illness
TB
"The use of metaphor drawn from TB to describe love" "diseased love" (20). Disease isn't actualy disease, it's what "love" does to a person.
"promoting the TB self image" (29). Illness as fashionable and "cult of thinness" (
it goes beyond TB--a new form of romanticizing "trips" and that "illness exacerbates consciousness" (36)
By taking illness and neurodiversity outside of lived, real experience, we lose sight of care, safety, and treatment
Cancer
Tb is sexy and OK; dying with cancer is a nightmare: "the person dying of cancer is portrayed as robbed of all capacities of self-transcendence, humiliated by fear and agony" (17)
"Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo" (9). if we think of heart failure as a part not working, we see how loaded
"Cancer is a disease of growth" (12).
Cancer tied to "shameful" body parts (
this is the problems with cancer: the metaphors create shame, horror, and makes the individual feel at fault.
the power of positive thinking (53);
""TB is a disease of time; it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it. In both English and French, consumption 'gallops.' Cancer has stages rather than gaits; it is (eventually) 'terminal.' Cancer works slowly, insidiously: the standard euphemism in obituaries is that someone has 'died after a long illness'" (14).
participates in the ways the "self" isn't transcended
"There is the 'fight' or 'crusade' against cancer; cancer is the 'killer' disease; people with cancer are 'cancer victims" Ostensibly the illness is the culprit. But it is also the cancer patient who is made culpable" (57). This language makes it seem
What's our way out?
the metaphor moves to the next illness. Metaphorizing the illness in real time
"it is, of course, likely that the language about cancer will evolve in the comingg years. It must change, decisively, when the disease is finally understood" (86).
the problems that are obfuscated by illness as metaphor are laid out in this litany of failures and fears (87).
A ubiquitous archive across literature, philosophy, and political thought
Doomed lovers tropes (Fault in Our Stars) and sick lit;
"epidemic diseases were a common figure for social disorder" (58) -- see this page for he use of disease for scapegoating
oops, COVID flashbacks