'Illness as Metaphor' and 'AIDS and Its Metaphors' by Susan Sontag . [non fiction]
08.11.2012
The Romantics were creepy as fuck, their cult to the morbid and depression was bad enough but they were the ones that became enamoured with sickly looking people, too thin, too pale. It is not hard to understand why vampires became super popular with people who thought a debilitating illness (be it depression or tuberculosis) was sexy languor and powerlessness the sexiest and most interesting of qualities (they did not seem to discriminate between the genders in this, at least).
[Spoiler (click to open)]
Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth century manners. It became rude to eat heartily. It was glamorous to look sickly… It was fashionable to be pale and drained… the TB influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks - at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly an image. Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look came to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark or distinction, of breeding. Pp. 29
It is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront their deaths,a nd in the images that collected around the disease on can see emergering a modern idea of individuality that has taken in the twentieth century a more aggressive, if no less narcissistic, form. Sickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’ - which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined. The ideal of perfect health, Novalis wrote, is only scientifically interesting. What is really interesting is sickness, which belongs to individualizing. Pp 31
The Romantics invented invalidism as a pretext for leisure, and for dismissing bourgeois obligations in order to live only for one’s art. It was a way of retiring from the world without having to take responsibility for the decision - the story of the Magic Mountain. pp 34
In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity.... Like TB, insanity is a kind of exile. pp 36
Once that illness was TB; now it is insanity that is thought to bring consciousness to a state of paroxysmic prestige of irrational or rude (spontaneous) behaviour (acting-out), of that very passionateness whose repression was once imagined to cause TB, and is now thought to cause cancer. PP 37
Having an orgasm in 19th century slang was not ‘coming’ but ‘spending’. Pp 64
Early capitalism assumes the necessity of regulated spending, saving, accounting, discipline -an economy that depends on the rational limitation of desire. TB is described in images that sum up the negative behaviour of nineteenth century homo econimicus: consumption; wasting; squandering of vitality. Advance capitalism requires expansion, speculation, the creation of new needs (the problem of satisfaction and dissatisfaction); buying on credit, mobility - an economy that depends on the irrational indulgence of desire. Cancer is described: abnormal growth; repression of energy, that is, a refusal to consume or spend. Pp 64-5
[throughout the 19th century] Disease, which could be considered as much a part of nature as is health, became the synonym of whatever was ‘unnatural.’ PP 75
Of course, one cannot think without metaphors. But that does not mean there aren’t some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire. As, of course, all thinking is interpretation. But that does not mean it isn’t sometimes correct to be ‘against’ interpretation. (Sontag, 1991: 91)
Abuse of the military metaphor might be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities people are not supposed to view ‘realistically’; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent - war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. PP 96-7
The removal of doorknobs and the installation of swing door on US Navy ships and the disappearance of the metal drinking cups affixed to public water fountains in the USA in the first decades of the century were early consequences of the ‘discovery’ of syphilis’ ‘innocently transmitted infection’; and the warning to generations of middle-class children always to interpose paper between bare bottom and the public toilet seat is another trace of the horror stories about germs of the syphilis being passed to the innocent by the dirty that were once and are still widely believed. PP 113
when illnesses were innumerable, mysterious, and the progression from being seriously ill to dying was seen as normal (not, as now, as a failure or lapse of medicine, destined to be corrected) pp 119
the most terrifying illnesses are those perceived not as lethal but as deshumanizing. Literally so. (ie. face deformities) pp 124
[In ancient times] only injuries and disabilities, not diseases, were thought of as individually earned. pp 131
there is a link between imagining disease and foreigness. it lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical to that of non-us, the alien. pp 134
...the fantasy that peoples with little reason to expect exemption from misfortune have a lessed capacity to feel misfortune. pp 137
In contrast to bacteria, relatively complex, viruses are described as an extremely primitive life form. At the same time, their activities are far more complex than those envisaged in earlier models of germ infection. Not simply agents of contamination, they transform genetic material, they transform cells. And they themselves evolve. Indeed, virus is now a synonym for change.
Beginning again - that is very modern, very American too. pp 173
crash october 1987?
patient = sufferer????
[quotes], [quotes] books/non-fiction, #non-fiction, #essay, 2012: essay in english, 2012, book-2012 [essay], book-2012, @read in english, *author: female, +academic, *read for university, +medicine
The Romantics were creepy as fuck, their cult to the morbid and depression was bad enough but they were the ones that became enamoured with sickly looking people, too thin, too pale. It is not hard to understand why vampires became super popular with people who thought a debilitating illness (be it depression or tuberculosis) was sexy languor and powerlessness the sexiest and most interesting of qualities (they did not seem to discriminate between the genders in this, at least).
[Spoiler (click to open)]
Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth century manners. It became rude to eat heartily. It was glamorous to look sickly… It was fashionable to be pale and drained… the TB influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks - at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly an image. Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look came to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark or distinction, of breeding. Pp. 29
It is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront their deaths,a nd in the images that collected around the disease on can see emergering a modern idea of individuality that has taken in the twentieth century a more aggressive, if no less narcissistic, form. Sickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’ - which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined. The ideal of perfect health, Novalis wrote, is only scientifically interesting. What is really interesting is sickness, which belongs to individualizing. Pp 31
The Romantics invented invalidism as a pretext for leisure, and for dismissing bourgeois obligations in order to live only for one’s art. It was a way of retiring from the world without having to take responsibility for the decision - the story of the Magic Mountain. pp 34
In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity.... Like TB, insanity is a kind of exile. pp 36
Once that illness was TB; now it is insanity that is thought to bring consciousness to a state of paroxysmic prestige of irrational or rude (spontaneous) behaviour (acting-out), of that very passionateness whose repression was once imagined to cause TB, and is now thought to cause cancer. PP 37
Having an orgasm in 19th century slang was not ‘coming’ but ‘spending’. Pp 64
Early capitalism assumes the necessity of regulated spending, saving, accounting, discipline -an economy that depends on the rational limitation of desire. TB is described in images that sum up the negative behaviour of nineteenth century homo econimicus: consumption; wasting; squandering of vitality. Advance capitalism requires expansion, speculation, the creation of new needs (the problem of satisfaction and dissatisfaction); buying on credit, mobility - an economy that depends on the irrational indulgence of desire. Cancer is described: abnormal growth; repression of energy, that is, a refusal to consume or spend. Pp 64-5
[throughout the 19th century] Disease, which could be considered as much a part of nature as is health, became the synonym of whatever was ‘unnatural.’ PP 75
Of course, one cannot think without metaphors. But that does not mean there aren’t some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire. As, of course, all thinking is interpretation. But that does not mean it isn’t sometimes correct to be ‘against’ interpretation. (Sontag, 1991: 91)
Abuse of the military metaphor might be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities people are not supposed to view ‘realistically’; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent - war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. PP 96-7
The removal of doorknobs and the installation of swing door on US Navy ships and the disappearance of the metal drinking cups affixed to public water fountains in the USA in the first decades of the century were early consequences of the ‘discovery’ of syphilis’ ‘innocently transmitted infection’; and the warning to generations of middle-class children always to interpose paper between bare bottom and the public toilet seat is another trace of the horror stories about germs of the syphilis being passed to the innocent by the dirty that were once and are still widely believed. PP 113
when illnesses were innumerable, mysterious, and the progression from being seriously ill to dying was seen as normal (not, as now, as a failure or lapse of medicine, destined to be corrected) pp 119
the most terrifying illnesses are those perceived not as lethal but as deshumanizing. Literally so. (ie. face deformities) pp 124
[In ancient times] only injuries and disabilities, not diseases, were thought of as individually earned. pp 131
there is a link between imagining disease and foreigness. it lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical to that of non-us, the alien. pp 134
...the fantasy that peoples with little reason to expect exemption from misfortune have a lessed capacity to feel misfortune. pp 137
In contrast to bacteria, relatively complex, viruses are described as an extremely primitive life form. At the same time, their activities are far more complex than those envisaged in earlier models of germ infection. Not simply agents of contamination, they transform genetic material, they transform cells. And they themselves evolve. Indeed, virus is now a synonym for change.
Beginning again - that is very modern, very American too. pp 173
crash october 1987?
patient = sufferer????
[quotes], [quotes] books/non-fiction, #non-fiction, #essay, 2012: essay in english, 2012, book-2012 [essay], book-2012, @read in english, *author: female, +academic, *read for university, +medicine