文學批評首頁   /  Cultural Studies 文化研究  /  理論家  /  Susan  Sontag    /  作品
AIDS and Its Metaphors:
理論家 Theorists  /  Susan  Sontag  

Cathy Chang

July 4, 2009

AIDS and Its Metaphors:

A Quote Outline

Sontag, Susan. “AIDS and Its Metaphors.” Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador, 1989. 89-183.

“Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else, says Aristotle (93).

I.      Introduction to AIDS

II.    Military Metaphors

III.   Myths of AIDS, Cancer, Syphilis

IV.    Medicine and Diagnosis

V.      Dreadful Effects of Disease

VI.    AIDS and Plague

VII.    AIDS and Sex

VIII.     AIDS and the World

 

I.      Introduction to AIDS
 

A.    “AIDS—acquired immune deficiency syndrome—is not the name of an illness at all. It is the name of a medical condition, whose consequences are a spectrum of illness” (104).

B.     “The very definition of AIDS requires the presence of other illnesses, so-called opportunistic infections and malignancies” (104).

C.     “AIDS has a dual metaphoric genealogy” (105).

1.      “As a microprocess, it is described as cancer is: an invasion” (105).

2.      With reference to the transmission, “an older metaphor, reminiscent of syphilis, is invoked: pollution. (One gets it from the blood or sexual fluids of infected people or from contaminated blood products)” (105).

TOP

II.    Military Metaphors

 

A.    Cancer is seen as “a domestic subversion” in which a “rogue cells inside the body mutate, eventually moving out from an original site or organ to overrun other organs or systems” (105).

§         “Cancer makes cells proliferate” (107).

B.     “In the description of AIDS the enemy is what causes the disease, an infectious agent that comes from the outside” (105) and its process is seen as “infiltrating the society” (107).

§         “…in AIDS, cells die” (107).

TOP

III.   Myths of AIDS, Cancer, Syphilis

 

A.    AIDS is feared because the “viral contamination” is seen as being permanent—“the viral enemy would be forever within” even if no symptoms appear (108).

B.     “AIDS is a clinical construction, an inference” (108).

1.      “It takes its identity from the presence of some among a long, and lengthening, roster of symptoms (no one has everything that AIDS could be), symptoms which ‘mean' that what the patient has is this illness” (109).

2.      “That AIDS is not a single illness but a syndrome, consisting of a seemingly open-ended list of contributing or ‘presenting' illness which constitute…the disease, makes it more a product of definition or construction than even a very complex, multiform illness like cancer” (116).

C.     “AIDS is progressive, a disease of time” (109).

1.      AIDS is similar to syphilis in which both diseases are characterized by stages (109).

2.      There are three stages in AIDS—“the first of which is infection with a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and early evidence of inroads on the immune system—with a long latency period between infection and the onset of the ‘telltale' symptoms” (109).

3.      Cancer, although also diagnosed in stages, “is mostly a spatial notion: that the cancer advances though the body, traveling or migrating along predictable routes” whereas the definitions for AIDS and syphilis “depends on constructing a temporal sequence of stages” (110).

D.    “AIDS, like cancer, does not allow romanticizing or sentimentalizing, perhaps because its association with death is too powerful” (112)

§         In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, there was a link made “between syphilis and heightened (‘feverish') mental activity that parallels the connection made since the era of the Romantic writers between pulmonary tuberculosis and heightened emotional activity” (111).

E.     “To get AIDS is precisely to be revealed [with a sense of shame]… as a member of a certain ‘risk group,' a community of pariahs. The illness flushes out an identity that might have remained hidden from neighbors, jobmates, family, friends”—being a homosexual man (112-113).

F.      Cancer and AIDS are both seen as the fault of the victims themselves, but with more negative effect for AIDS.

1.      Cancer is also seen as the fault of the victim. It is seen as a “punishment for living unhealthy lives” or “the price one pays for excesses of diet and ‘life-style' and “are the result of a weakness of will or a lack of prudence, or of addiction to legal…chemicals” (113).

2.      “The unsafe behavior that produces AIDS [is seen as]…indulgence, delinquency—addictions to chemicals that are illegal and to sex regarded as deviant” (113).

3.      “AIDS is understood as a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity” (114)

G.    “Infection diseases to which sexual fault is attached always inspire fears of easy contagion and bizarre fantasies of transmission by nonvenereal means in public places” (115).

1.      “AIDS is perceived as afflicting, in great proportions than syphilis ever did, the already stigmatized” (115-116).

2.      Those who are tested HIV positive are seen as “people-with-AIDS, who just don't have it…yet” and are also treated as those with AIDS (120).

TOP

IV.    Medicine and Diagnosis

 

A.    “In premodern medicine, illness is described…as a relation of outside and inside: an interior sensation or something to be discerned on the body's surface, by sight (or just below by listening, palpating), which is confirmed when the interior is opened to viewing (in surgery, in autopsy)” (123).

B.     “Modern—that is, effective—medicine is characterized by far more complex notions of what is to be observed inside the body: not just the disease's results (damaged organs) but its cause (microorganisms), and by a far more intricate typology of illness” (123).

C.     Another difference between cancer and AIDS is that “A cancer diagnosis was frequently concealed from patients by their families; an AIDS diagnosis is at least as often concealed from their families by patients” (124).

TOP

V.     Dreadful Effects of Disease

 

A.    “It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades” (125).

§         “AIDS, like cancer, leads to a hard death” (126).

B.     “Our very notion of the person, of dignity, depends on the separation of face from body, on the possibility that the face may be exempt, or exempt itself, from what is happening to the body” (128).

§         “The marks on the face of a leper, a syphilitic, someone with AIDS are the signs of a progressive mutation, decomposition; something organic” (129).

TOP

VI.    AIDS and Plague

 

A.    “‘Plague' is the principal metaphor by which the AIDS epidemic is understood”

1.      “Plague, from the Latin plaga (stroke, wound), has long been used metaphorically as the highest standard of collective calamity, evil, scourge…” (132).

2.      “It is usually epidemics that are thought of as plagues. And these mass incidences of illness are understood as inflicted, not just endured” (133).

B.     “Diseases, insofar as they acquired meaning, were collective calamities, and judgments on a community” (133).

§         “The mist feared disease, those that are not simply fatal but transform the body into something alienating, like leprosy and syphilis and cholera and (in the imagination of many) cancer, are the ones that seem particularly susceptible to promotion to ‘plague'” (133).

C.     “AIDS is understood in a premodern way, as a disease incurred by people both as individuals and as members of a ‘risk group'—that neutral-sounding, bureaucratic category which also revives the archaic idea of a tainted community that illness has judged” (134).

D.    “One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else” (135).

1.      “Part of the centuries-old conception of Europe as a privilege cultural entity is that it is a place which is colonized by lethal diseases coming from elsewhere. Europe is assumed to be by rights free of disease” (138).

2.      “[P]eople are ‘visited' by plagues” (138).

3.      “The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place” (139).

4.      “AIDS is thought to have started in the ‘dark continent,' then spread to Haiti, then to the United States and to Europe, then… . It is understood as a tropical disease: another infestation from the so-called Third World…” (139-40).

§ “AIDS is not just infectious but contagious” (150).

5.      “Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease” (150).

E.     Plague as Judgment

1.      “Plagues are invariably regarded as judgments on society…This is a traditional use of sexually transmitted diseases: to be described as punishments not just of individuals but of a group (‘general licentiousness')” (142).

2.      “Health itself was eventually identified…[as] evidence of virtue as disease was of depravity” (143).

F.      Plague as Metaphor

1.      “The plague metaphor was common in the 1930s as a synonym for social and psychic catastrophe” (145).

2.      The plague metaphor “allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others' and as (potentially) everyone's disease” (152).

G.    AIDS in the Political Arena

1.      “The AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia…[I]t is as much a reminder of feelings associated with the menace of the Second World as it is an image of being overrun by the Third” (150).

2.      “AIDS is a favorite concern of those who translate their political agenda into questions of group psychology: of national self-esteem and self-confidence” (151).

3.      “A whole politics of ‘the will'—of intolerance, of paranoia, of fear of political weakness—has fastened on this disease [AIDS]” (151).

H.    AIDS as Metaphor

1.      AIDS is “a marker of both individual and social vulnerabilities. The virus invades the body; the disease (or, in the newer version, the fear of the disease) is described as invading the whole society” (153-4).

2.      AIDS can be used as a metaphor for “contamination and mutation” (155).

I.       Virus as Metaphor

1.      “Notions of conspiracy translate well into metaphors of implacable, insidious, infinitely patient viruses” (156).

2.      “In contrast to bacteria…viruses are described as an extremely primitive form of life” (156).

§ Viruses not only infects and contaminates, but “They [also] transport genetic ‘information,' [and] they transform cells…many of them, evolve” (156).

3.      “Virus is now a synonym for change” (157).

TOP

VII.    AIDS and Sex

 

A.    Sex refigured

1.      “Contraception and the assurance by medicine of the easy curability of sexually transmitted diseases (as of almost all infectious diseases) made it possible to regard sex as an adventure without consequences. Now AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder” (160).

2.      “AIDS reveals all but long-term monogamous sex as promiscuous (therefore dangerous) and also as deviant, for all heterosexual relations are also homosexual ones, once removed” (161).

B.     Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates” (161).

§         “Life—blood, sexual fluids—is itself the bearer of contamination. These fluids are potentially lethal. Better to abstain” (161).

C.     “Talk of condoms and clean needles is felt to be tantamount to condoning and abetting illicit sex, illegal chemicals. (And to some extent is. Education about how to keep from getting AIDS does imply an acknowledgement of, therefore tolerance of, the ineradicable variousness of expression of sexual feeling)” (163).

D.    “The catastrophe of AIDS suggests the immediate necessity of limitation, of constraint for the body and for consciousness” (166).

§         Before AIDS, “The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty—of the indefinite expansion of possibility.” “Appetite is supposed to be immoderate” (165).

E.     “The response to AIDS, while in part perfectly rational, amplifies a widespread questioning that had been rising in intensity throughout the 1970s of many of the ideas (and risks of enlightened modernity)” such as “recreational and commercialized sexuality” while leading to “a growth of the ideal of monogamy, of a prudent sexual life” (166-7).

TOP

VIII.     AIDS and the World

 

A.    “Because it [AIDS] is a world event—that is, because it affects the West—it is regarded as not just a natural disaster. It is filled with historical meaning. (Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where the major calamites are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature” (171-2).

B.     “The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide” (180).

TOP

 
   
 
 
Copyright ©2009 國科會人文學中心 All Rights Reserved.