Whether I have or not isn’t really important. Why should I care what she has to say? Why should I bother reading her books if I haven’t or care what they say if I have?
You are the one positing that her works matter. Me asking a question about why I should care isn’t predicated on whether or not I know anything about the topic or her writing and criticism. If I am intimately familiar with her work, then you should be able to articulate why it should matter to me. Likewise, if I know nothing, you should be able to articulate why her work should matter to me. Nothing changes.
If you cannot articulate to anyone but another person already familiar with her works, of their validity and import then you do not sufficiently understand said works to propose others should heed the words they contain. You would just be someone referencing another’s work in a self important manner as if it brings you validity or standing for your own opinions. Which it does not. Empty reference brings you no backing or validty, you have to assert your reasoning.
do you mean that this was a genuine question of curiosity ☞ “Why should anyone care what she says though?”
i took it as a put down, which was reinforced by your following comment ☞ “Why should I bother reading her books if I haven’t or care what they say if I have?”
as a curious person i never thought of reading as a “bother”. If i misunderstood your curiosity as refutation, excuse me.
if we were face to face offline, we would be discussing the “why” and i may have even given you my books to read. But online, you could have easily read at least a couple of pages from sontag instead of engaging in this forgettable discussion.
here, in 10 minutes you will have your response :
The melodramatics of the disease metaphor in modern political discourse assume a punitive notion: not of the disease as a punishment but as a sign of evil, something to be punished.
Modern totalitarian movements, whether of the right or the left, have been peculiarly—and revealingly— inclined to use disease imagery. The Nazis said that someone of mixed “racial” origin was like a syphilitic. European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis, and to a cancer that must be excised. Disease metaphors were a staple of Bolshevik polemics, and Trotsky, the most gifted of all communist polemicists, used them with the greatest profusion—particularly after his banishment from the Soviet Union in 1929. Stalinism was called a cholera, a syphilis, and a cancer. To use only fatal diseases for imagery in politics gives the metaphor a much more pointed character. Now, to liken a political event or situation to an illness is to impute guilt, to prescribe punishment.
This is particularly true of the use of cancer as a metaphor. It amounts to saying, first of all, that the event or situation is unqualifiedly and unredeemably wicked. It enormously ups the ante. In Hitler’s first recorded speech, an anti-Semitic diatribe delivered in 1919, he accused the Jews of producing “a racial tuberculosis among nations.” Tuberculosis still retained its prestige as the overdetermined, culpable illness of the nineteenth century. (Recall Hugo’s comparison of monasticism with TB.) But the Nazis quickly modernized their rhetoric, and indeed the imagery of cancer was far more apt for their purposes. As was said in speeches about “the Jewish problem” throughout the 1930s, to treat a cancer one must cut out much of the healthy tissue around it. The imagery of cancer for the Nazis prescribes “radical” treatment, in contrast to the “soft” treatment thought appropriate for TB—the difference between sanatoria (that is, exile) and surgery (that is, crematoria). (The Jews were also identified with, and became a metaphor for, city life—with Nazi rhetoric echoing all the Romantic clichés about cities as a debilitating, merely cerebral, morally contaminated, unhealthy environment.)
To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and “severe” measures—as well as strongly reinforcing the popular perception that the disease is necessarily fatal. The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal. No specific political view seems to have a monopoly on this metaphor. If Hitler called the Jews the cancer of Europe, Trotsky called Stalinism the cancer of Marxism, and in China in the last year the Gang of Pour have become, among other things, “the cancer of China.” John Dean called Watergate “the cancer on the presidency.”
The standard metaphor of Arab polemics—heard by Israelis on the radio every day for the last twenty years—is that Israel is “a cancer in the heart of the Arab world” or “the cancer of the Middle East,” and an officer with the Christian Lebanese rightist forces besieging the Palestine refugee camp of Tal Zaatar in August 1976 called the camp “a cancer in the Lebanese body.” The cancer metaphor seems hard to resist for those who wish to register indignation. Thus Neal Ascherson wrote in 1969 that the Slansky Affair “was—is—a huge cancer in the body of the Czechoslovak state and nation”; Simon Leys, in Chinese Shadows, speaks of “the Maoist cancer that is gnawing away at the face of China”; D.H. Lawrence called masturbation “the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization”; and I once wrote, in the heat of despair over America’s war on Vietnam, that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”
But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of “evil” but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil. Trying to comprehend “radical” or “absolute” evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the very epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably a call to simplification—always to be resisted. And it is, in most cases, a justification of fanaticism, of harsh measures, including, usually, violence.
It is instructive to compare the image of cancer with that of gangrene. With some of the same metaphoric properties as cancer—it starts from nothing; it spreads; it is disgusting—gangrene would seem to be laden with everything a polemicist would want. Indeed, it was used in one important moral polemic—against the French use of torture in Algeria in the 1950s; the title of the famous book exposing that torture was called La Gangrène. But there is a large difference between the cancer and the gangrene metaphors. First, causality is clear with gangrene. It is external—gangrene can develop from a scratch; cancer is internal, as well as external. Second, gangrene is not as all-encompassing a disaster. It leads (often) to amputation, less often to death; cancer is presumed to lead to death in most cases. Not gangrene—and not the plague (despite the notable attempts by writers as different as Artaud, Reich, and Camus to impose that as a metaphor for the dismal and the disastrous)—but cancer remains the most “radical” of disease metaphors. And just because it is so radical it is particularly tendentious—a good metaphor for paranoids, for those who need to turn campaigns into crusades, for the fatalistic (cancer = death), and for those under the spell of ahistorical revolutionary optimism (the idea that only the most “radical” changes are desirable). As long as so much militaristic hyperbole attaches to the description and treatment of cancer, it is a particularly unapt metaphor for the peace-loving.
It is, of course, likely that the language about cancer will evolve in the coming years. It must change, decisively, when the disease is finally understood and the rate of cure becomes much higher. It is already changing, with the development of new forms of treatment. As chemotherapy is more and more supplanting radiation in the treatment of cancer patients, an effective form of treatment (already a supplementary treatment of proven use) seems likely to be found in some kind of immunotherapy. Concepts have started to shift in certain medical circles, where doctors are concentrating on the steep buildup of the body’s immunodefensive system against cancer. As the language of treatment changes from an aggressive, militarized language to one centered on the body’s “natural defenses,” cancer will be partly demythicized; and it may then be possible to compare something to a cancer without implying either a fatalistic diagnosis or a rousing call to fight by any means whatever a lethal, insidious enemy. Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor.
But at that time, perhaps nobody will want any longer to compare anything awful to cancer. Since the interest of the metaphor is precisely that it refers to a disease so overlaid with mystification, so charged with the fantasy of inescapable fatality. Since our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our shallow attitude toward death, for our anxieties about feeling, for our reckless improvident responses to our real “problems of growth,” for our inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasingly violent course of history. The cancer metaphor will be made obsolete, I would predict, long before the problems it has reflected so persuasively will be resolved.
Yes, I was asking out of curiosity on why you think it matters what she says. It was blunty phrased, and tone was of course lost in translation. She was a writer and a critic. But those aren’t distinctions that I find compelling. Anyone can criticise and stir up contrary opinions. Being a writer just makes it easier to put it in a way that others will see or read.
So yes, I did want to know, and in short I am gathering that you just find her words self evident? The writing makes a fair point, but I think it was more relevant during the time of writing, and she says as much in the passage you pasted here that it may change with time. At the very least I don’t find it to be disparaging the patients afflicted with cancer in the way she suggests. I partially agree that it is used as an extremist comparison. But with so much being compared to cancer, I feel that it has lost its edgey bite and is now just a comparative. But maybe that’s more that I am personally numb to it as a comparison.
At the very least, I personally don’t see her to be some irrefutable authority on the matter. And because of that I’m not sure why she is being posited that way. Hence my question. If your answer is that it’s self evidentiary, that’s fine. Just wanted to hear your reasoning on why I should take her seriously or care what she has to say on the matter.
You do understand figurative speech?
Susan Sontag wrote a whole book about your maladressed figurative speech ☞ Illness as Metaphor
Why should anyone care what she says though?
did you read any of her books?
Whether I have or not isn’t really important. Why should I care what she has to say? Why should I bother reading her books if I haven’t or care what they say if I have?
it is important. If you didn’t read s. sontag, then you’re writing about something you know nothing about.
You are the one positing that her works matter. Me asking a question about why I should care isn’t predicated on whether or not I know anything about the topic or her writing and criticism. If I am intimately familiar with her work, then you should be able to articulate why it should matter to me. Likewise, if I know nothing, you should be able to articulate why her work should matter to me. Nothing changes.
If you cannot articulate to anyone but another person already familiar with her works, of their validity and import then you do not sufficiently understand said works to propose others should heed the words they contain. You would just be someone referencing another’s work in a self important manner as if it brings you validity or standing for your own opinions. Which it does not. Empty reference brings you no backing or validty, you have to assert your reasoning.
do you mean that this was a genuine question of curiosity ☞ “Why should anyone care what she says though?”
i took it as a put down, which was reinforced by your following comment ☞ “Why should I bother reading her books if I haven’t or care what they say if I have?”
as a curious person i never thought of reading as a “bother”. If i misunderstood your curiosity as refutation, excuse me.
if we were face to face offline, we would be discussing the “why” and i may have even given you my books to read. But online, you could have easily read at least a couple of pages from sontag instead of engaging in this forgettable discussion.
here, in 10 minutes you will have your response :
The melodramatics of the disease metaphor in modern political discourse assume a punitive notion: not of the disease as a punishment but as a sign of evil, something to be punished.
Modern totalitarian movements, whether of the right or the left, have been peculiarly—and revealingly— inclined to use disease imagery. The Nazis said that someone of mixed “racial” origin was like a syphilitic. European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis, and to a cancer that must be excised. Disease metaphors were a staple of Bolshevik polemics, and Trotsky, the most gifted of all communist polemicists, used them with the greatest profusion—particularly after his banishment from the Soviet Union in 1929. Stalinism was called a cholera, a syphilis, and a cancer. To use only fatal diseases for imagery in politics gives the metaphor a much more pointed character. Now, to liken a political event or situation to an illness is to impute guilt, to prescribe punishment.
This is particularly true of the use of cancer as a metaphor. It amounts to saying, first of all, that the event or situation is unqualifiedly and unredeemably wicked. It enormously ups the ante. In Hitler’s first recorded speech, an anti-Semitic diatribe delivered in 1919, he accused the Jews of producing “a racial tuberculosis among nations.” Tuberculosis still retained its prestige as the overdetermined, culpable illness of the nineteenth century. (Recall Hugo’s comparison of monasticism with TB.) But the Nazis quickly modernized their rhetoric, and indeed the imagery of cancer was far more apt for their purposes. As was said in speeches about “the Jewish problem” throughout the 1930s, to treat a cancer one must cut out much of the healthy tissue around it. The imagery of cancer for the Nazis prescribes “radical” treatment, in contrast to the “soft” treatment thought appropriate for TB—the difference between sanatoria (that is, exile) and surgery (that is, crematoria). (The Jews were also identified with, and became a metaphor for, city life—with Nazi rhetoric echoing all the Romantic clichés about cities as a debilitating, merely cerebral, morally contaminated, unhealthy environment.)
To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and “severe” measures—as well as strongly reinforcing the popular perception that the disease is necessarily fatal. The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal. No specific political view seems to have a monopoly on this metaphor. If Hitler called the Jews the cancer of Europe, Trotsky called Stalinism the cancer of Marxism, and in China in the last year the Gang of Pour have become, among other things, “the cancer of China.” John Dean called Watergate “the cancer on the presidency.”
The standard metaphor of Arab polemics—heard by Israelis on the radio every day for the last twenty years—is that Israel is “a cancer in the heart of the Arab world” or “the cancer of the Middle East,” and an officer with the Christian Lebanese rightist forces besieging the Palestine refugee camp of Tal Zaatar in August 1976 called the camp “a cancer in the Lebanese body.” The cancer metaphor seems hard to resist for those who wish to register indignation. Thus Neal Ascherson wrote in 1969 that the Slansky Affair “was—is—a huge cancer in the body of the Czechoslovak state and nation”; Simon Leys, in Chinese Shadows, speaks of “the Maoist cancer that is gnawing away at the face of China”; D.H. Lawrence called masturbation “the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization”; and I once wrote, in the heat of despair over America’s war on Vietnam, that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”
But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of “evil” but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil. Trying to comprehend “radical” or “absolute” evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the very epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably a call to simplification—always to be resisted. And it is, in most cases, a justification of fanaticism, of harsh measures, including, usually, violence.
It is instructive to compare the image of cancer with that of gangrene. With some of the same metaphoric properties as cancer—it starts from nothing; it spreads; it is disgusting—gangrene would seem to be laden with everything a polemicist would want. Indeed, it was used in one important moral polemic—against the French use of torture in Algeria in the 1950s; the title of the famous book exposing that torture was called La Gangrène. But there is a large difference between the cancer and the gangrene metaphors. First, causality is clear with gangrene. It is external—gangrene can develop from a scratch; cancer is internal, as well as external. Second, gangrene is not as all-encompassing a disaster. It leads (often) to amputation, less often to death; cancer is presumed to lead to death in most cases. Not gangrene—and not the plague (despite the notable attempts by writers as different as Artaud, Reich, and Camus to impose that as a metaphor for the dismal and the disastrous)—but cancer remains the most “radical” of disease metaphors. And just because it is so radical it is particularly tendentious—a good metaphor for paranoids, for those who need to turn campaigns into crusades, for the fatalistic (cancer = death), and for those under the spell of ahistorical revolutionary optimism (the idea that only the most “radical” changes are desirable). As long as so much militaristic hyperbole attaches to the description and treatment of cancer, it is a particularly unapt metaphor for the peace-loving.
It is, of course, likely that the language about cancer will evolve in the coming years. It must change, decisively, when the disease is finally understood and the rate of cure becomes much higher. It is already changing, with the development of new forms of treatment. As chemotherapy is more and more supplanting radiation in the treatment of cancer patients, an effective form of treatment (already a supplementary treatment of proven use) seems likely to be found in some kind of immunotherapy. Concepts have started to shift in certain medical circles, where doctors are concentrating on the steep buildup of the body’s immunodefensive system against cancer. As the language of treatment changes from an aggressive, militarized language to one centered on the body’s “natural defenses,” cancer will be partly demythicized; and it may then be possible to compare something to a cancer without implying either a fatalistic diagnosis or a rousing call to fight by any means whatever a lethal, insidious enemy. Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor.
But at that time, perhaps nobody will want any longer to compare anything awful to cancer. Since the interest of the metaphor is precisely that it refers to a disease so overlaid with mystification, so charged with the fantasy of inescapable fatality. Since our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our shallow attitude toward death, for our anxieties about feeling, for our reckless improvident responses to our real “problems of growth,” for our inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasingly violent course of history. The cancer metaphor will be made obsolete, I would predict, long before the problems it has reflected so persuasively will be resolved.
source, if you want to read the rest
Yes, I was asking out of curiosity on why you think it matters what she says. It was blunty phrased, and tone was of course lost in translation. She was a writer and a critic. But those aren’t distinctions that I find compelling. Anyone can criticise and stir up contrary opinions. Being a writer just makes it easier to put it in a way that others will see or read.
So yes, I did want to know, and in short I am gathering that you just find her words self evident? The writing makes a fair point, but I think it was more relevant during the time of writing, and she says as much in the passage you pasted here that it may change with time. At the very least I don’t find it to be disparaging the patients afflicted with cancer in the way she suggests. I partially agree that it is used as an extremist comparison. But with so much being compared to cancer, I feel that it has lost its edgey bite and is now just a comparative. But maybe that’s more that I am personally numb to it as a comparison.
At the very least, I personally don’t see her to be some irrefutable authority on the matter. And because of that I’m not sure why she is being posited that way. Hence my question. If your answer is that it’s self evidentiary, that’s fine. Just wanted to hear your reasoning on why I should take her seriously or care what she has to say on the matter.