Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

by Susan Sontag

This separation is a main point of one of European culture’s principal iconographical traditions, the depiction of Christian martyrdom, with its astounding schism between what is inscribed on the face and what is happening to the body. Those innumerable images of Saint Sebastian, Saint Agatha, Saint Lawrence (but not of Christ himself), with the face demonstrating its effortless superiority to the atrocious things that are being inflicted down there. Below, the ruin of the body. Above, a person, incarnated in the face, who looks away, usually up, not registering pain or fear; already elsewhere. (Only Christ, both Son of Man and Son of God, suffers in his face: has his Passion.) Our very notion of the person, of dignity, depends on the separation of face from body,1 on the possibility that the face may be exempt, or exempt itself, from what is happening to the body. And however lethal, illnesses like heart attacks and influenza that do not damage or deform the face never arouse the deepest dread.