A great book. I am surprised that some people give the book such low ratings. Rereading this book after so many years, I liked it even more because it rings so true. One reason why Humanities are so important because they tell us something significant about ourselves and about power structures within which we live. What Sontag argues in the book is so relevant to the present-day discourse about the Corona virus––for instance the media initially referred to it as the Wuhan virus. Sontag shows the...

A part of me thinks you shouldn't be allowed to write a book that's just your random, personal opinion about something, even though a bigger part of me wishes that that were my job.I can see how this book was probably really important when it came out, and I'll bet it's done a lot of great things for people's thinking about illness. But although I did really love a few bits of it, on the whole I didn't like this much, even though I was expecting to. I was never totally sure whether this was beca...

Fascinating musings about the use of cancer, Aids, and in the past Tuberculosis as a metaphor for ills in society and morals. It is not a linear argument, but just a lot of interesting connections. It made me think of Emperor of all Maladies, the biography of cancer. He uses cancer as a metaphor there--about the fears and alienation of our current society.

Sontag's classic concept of being against interpretation rides again! This time it's against the needless interpretation of illness as a deliberate karmic misfortune rather than a happenstance, i.e., AIDS is not a divine punishment but rather a disease that happens to people regardless of demographic, queer and straight alike. It's depressing that this sort of entry-level critical thinking is still pertinent, but thankfully Sontag is an excellent writer, and her work has aged quite well.

I've always had a certain disdain for Sontag. My understanding is she was quite closeted as a queer through most of her life, and was the subject of much criticism from the AIDS movements with which she also had many personal connections. AIDS and Its Metaphors has a very poor understanding of how thoroughly homophobia, racism, and poverty saturated every aspect of AIDS as a political and psychic construction. But it is beautifully written, and although very limited her core theses are helpful a...

4.5/5 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. Somewhere and at some past in the history of the world, someone woke up to the news of the AIDS epidemic and was thrilled. It is no longer 1989, two years before my birth and therefor permanently irretrievable in the dir...

Another stonker from Suze.

Twenty years after Sontag wrote her perceptive book, the newspapers (in the UK) headline with the news that images of warfare do not aid those recovering from cancer: new metaphors are required for healing. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2...Science isn't always in the frontline; in this case, two decades behind literary criticism.

“Modern disease metaphors specify an ideal of society’s wellbeing, analogised to physical health, that is frequently anti-political as it is a call for a new political order.”Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors is an eloquently incisive dissection of how diseases used as metaphors limit, twist, and bring forth several other meanings that can jeopardise and vaporise their medical definition. This, in turn, can have a strange, harmful effect to people who have these diseases and the peopl...

In a world where the Wuhan pneumonia has taken the media by storm, where fascism has crept back into relevancy, and where climate change threatens to unleash global catastrophe, I find this book increasingly relevant to our times. Sontag wrote about cancer, then added AIDS to the catagory of "illnesses used as metaphors for bad things." it may seem irrelevant today given medical advances and that HIV is no longer a death sentence. But only yesterday, my country's fascist president declared those...

It was an doubly amazing experience to read this: in the post(?)-pandemic world, and as a cancer patient. I think it should be required reading for health care providers, because the language we use to talk about disease directs how we treat people, both medically and simply how we interact with each other. There is compassion and wry humour through the book that I found touching.Many of Sontag's insights feel especially relevant today:'Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest i...

I'm refraining from a star rating here. I didn't enjoy this, and I was disappointed because I had high hopes and enjoyed some of Sontag's other writing. I found this to be flat, repetitive, and dull, but I think I wanted this book to be something that it simply wasn't. And that's more of a personal problem than an issue with the actual book. Oh well.

I wish Susan Sontag were alive to write about the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m sure she would have found profound and brilliant things to say about how the disease has taken on war metaphors, been symbolically politicized and caused irreparable harm to certain segments of society.That’s essentially what she did with cancer/tuberculosis and AIDS, the subjects, respectively, of her books Illness and Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), which are collected here in one volume. How often have...

Personally I found the first essay, Illness as Metaphor, to be more thought provoking than the second one. In part, while a dodgy argumentative strategy, I found the comparisons and contrasts between tuberculosis and cancer to be very interesting, particularly as I had not read that much about TB in the 19th century.Sontag's main argument is that our capacity for metaphorical thinking, while mostly a wonderful thing, is generally counter-productive when it comes to thinking about disease. She re...

I've been thinking a lot about the metaphor of healing lately, so this seemed an appropriate read. I was struck by Sontag's reflections on both the metaphors we use to describe illness and the way illnesses are used as metaphors. We describe cancer as a war, and we describe violence as a cancer. My recent bout of hyperparathyroidism made me think a lot about how some illnesses are just too much of a mouthful to be metaphorized. Too clunky, too obscure, too easily confused with a thyroid conditio...

We pass from the so beautiful tuberculosis consumption to the horrible, shameful cancer, with a small passage by other diseases like the plague and the "madness" in the background. Even more disgraceful according to the imagined qualities of the affected organ. The glory of the lungs, the shame of the colon."... modern metaphors for the disease are all crummy. Individuals afflicted with the disease are of little help when they hear the name used to represent evil.Sontag insists that the metaphor...

Sontag came up in two of my recent reads. In Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer for her views on cancer and Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America for her "Notes on Camp". And somehow I decided to try her out. image: I quite liked Illness as Metaphor. AIDS and Its Metaphors not so much. But over all I could get through without any loss of interest.If you think that the book talks about defusing illness through metaphors, you are

--Illness as Metaphor--AIDS and Its Metaphors

Language in service of ideology, the danger of metaphor, the struggle to expose the material truth behind the veils of capitalist society. All the vintage Sontag topics are here, and all of them are fantastic. A short book with a punch that should give pause not only to anyone discussing the nature of disease, but also the reading public in general-- how easy it is to fall prey to our own stories about the world.The comments on AIDS are especially trenchant, and, unlike many books of critical th...

Some of Sontag's arguments are a bit repetitive and drawn out over the chapters, but a lot of her analyses are insightful, particularly on how language/metaphors around disease are stigmatising and entail victim blaming. Some insights are even baffling from a historical / ethical standpoint, such as that cancer patients' families, and not the patients themselves were often informed of the diagnosis. At other moments she is a bit too critical / discursive, and could have also explored how some of...