AIDS and Its Metaphors Quotes

“Like other diseases that arouse feelings of shame, AIDS is often a secret, but not from the patient. 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.”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

“[...] there has been a shift in the focus of the moralistic exploitation of illness. This shift, to diseases that can be interpreted as judgments on the individual, makes it harder to use epidemic disease as such. For a long time cancer was the illness that best fitted this secular culture's need to blame and punish and censor through the imagery of disease. Cancer was a disease of an individual, and understood as the result not of an action but rather of a failure to act (to be prudent, to exert proper self-control, or to be properly expressive). In the twentieth century it has become almost impossible to moralize about epidemics - except those which are transmitted sexually.”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

“Kinglake's influential book Eothen (1844) - suggestively subtitled "Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East" - illustrates many of the enduring Eurocentric presumptions about others, starting from the fantasy that peoples with little reason to expect exemption from misfortune have a lessened capacity to feel misfortune. Thus it is believed that Asians (or the poor, or blacks, or Africans or Muslims) don't suffer or don't grieve as Europeans (or whites) do. 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.”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

“Considering illness as a punishment is the oldest idea of what causes illness, and an idea opposed by all attention to the ill that deserves the noble name of medicine.”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

“In the wake of its rejection by scientists, the theory [of miasma] inspired at least one great work of art: the opera Debussy made from Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande, a sort of Tristan und Isolde relocated in the world of miasma. It is right that Pelleas et Melisande, in which everyone avows feelings of weakness and being lost, and some are already ailing; with its old, decaying castle that lets in no light; where the ground is full of subterranean terrors and dank or watery depths into which one can fall - all the correlatives of miasma, minus the stench - seems, to us, supremely a portrait of psychological sickness, of neurosis. For precisely as the category of generic sickliness was phased out of nineteenth-century medical thinking by the new understanding of the extreme specificity of what causes illness, it migrated to the expanding domain of psychology. The physically sickly person became the neurasthenic or neurotic person. And the idea of an organically contaminated, objectively pathogenic environment reappeared in the notion of a psychologically contaminated ambiance that produced a disposition to mental illness.”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

“The terrorists are now coming to us with a weapon more terrible than Marxism: AIDS”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors