Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
forgiving care culture
But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.
body inevitable compare
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.
hate elderly views
His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
air breathing body
The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.
men body back-when
A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.
mind body crowds
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
war health disease
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
military health medicine
[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.
health may imagine
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
distance suffering way
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
order white america
America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.
mean patient sufferers
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
women important disease
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
suicide sex thinking
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.