The emergence of a new catastrophic epidemic, when for several decades it had been confidently assumed that such calamities belonged to the past, would not be enough to revive the moralistic inflation of an epidemic into a “plague.” It was necessary that the epidemic be one whose most common means of transmission is sexual. Even the disease most fraught with meaning can become just an illness. It offers a stoic, finally numbing contemplation of catastrophe. News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. Many doctors, academics, journalists, government officials, and other educated people believe that the virus was sent to Africa from the United States, an act of bacteriological warfare whose aim was to decrease the African birth rate, which got out of hand and has returned to afflict its source. European societies, less committed to sexual hypocrisy in their public edicts, are unlikely to urge people to be chaste as a way of warning them to be prudent. Behind what they now consider the excessive publicity given the disease they discern the desire to placate an all-powerful minority; in the willingness to consider that “their” disease could well be “ours,” further evidence is seen of the sway of nefarious “liberal” values and of America’s spiritual decline. It is typical of modern society that the demand for mobilization is kept very general and the reality of the response falls well short of what seems to be demanded to meet the challenge of the nation-endangering menace. “So remember when a person has sex, they’re not just having it with that partner, they’re having it with everybody that partner had it with for the past ten years,” runs an endearingly gender-vague pronouncement made in 1987 by the secretary of health and human services, Dr. Otis R. Bowen. Africans who detect racist stereotypes in much of the speculation about the geographical origin of AIDS are not wrong. Considering illness as a punishment is the oldest idea of what causes illness—an idea opposed by all attention to the ill that deserves the noble name of medicine. (Or feels as if it is in slow motion, because we know about it, can anticipate it; and now have to wait for it to happen, to catch up with what we think we know.). Save 50% off the regular rate and 75% off the cover price and receive a free 2021 calendar! illness as metaphor and aids and its metaphors Oct 07, 2020 Posted By Anne Rice Public Library TEXT ID 4462635f Online PDF Ebook Epub Library the specific case of aids aids and its metaphors was published in 1988 while illness as a metaphor was published ten years earlier before the emergence of aids into the Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, 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. The virus invades the body; the disease (or, in the newer version, the fear of the disease) is described as invading the whole society. This sort of rhetoric has a life of its own: it serves some purpose if it simply keeps in circulation an ideal of unifying, communal practice that is precisely contradicted by the pursuit of accumulation and isolating entertainments urged on the society’s citizens. I think that we are not going to solve the AIDS epidemic unless we deal with these issues, and vice versa. So indispensable has been the plague metaphor in bringing summary judgments about social crisis that its use hardly abated during the era when collective diseases were no longer treated so moralistically—the time between the influenza and encephalitis pandemics of the early and mid-1920s and the acknowledgment of a new, mysterious epidemic illness in the early 1980s—and when great infectious pandemics were so often and confidently proclaimed a thing of the past.5 The plague metaphor was common in the 1930s as a synonym for social and psychic catastrophe. That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity. (This is assuming that the reassurances to “the general population” are justified, an assumption much disputed within the medical community.) But “the general population” may be as much a code phrase for whites as it is for heterosexuals. A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms…and it doesn’t occur. And now there is one more. 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. Both views are in fact being held simultaneously. The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienation have compelled most victims to conceal their status while the malevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge to unsuspecting men and women. Defoe’s historical fiction, purporting to be an eyewitness account of bubonic plague in London in 1665, does not further any understanding of the plague as punishment or, a later part of the script, as a transforming experience. Many progressive and invariably fatal disorders of the central nervous system, and some degenerative diseases of the brain that can appear in old age, as well as the so-called auto-immune diseases, are now suspected of being, in fact, slow virus diseases. Future-mindedness is as much the distinctive mental habit, and intellectual corruption, of this century as the history-mindedness that, as Nietzsche pointed out, transformed thinking in the nineteenth century. At the same time their activities are far more complex than those envisaged in the earlier germ models of infection. In late 1986 President Reagan pronounced AIDS to be spreading—“insidiously”—“through the length and breadth of our society.” 6 But while it is the pretext for expressing dark intimations about the body politic, AIDS has yet to seem credible as a political metaphor for internal enemies, even in France, where AIDS—in French le sida—was quickly added to the store of political invective. The sense of cultural distress or failure gives rise to the desire for a clean sweep, a tabula rasa. His proposal for a sexual ban, to be enforced by fines and prison terms, is no less impractical as a means of curbing sexually transmitted diseases than the more commonly made proposals for quarantines—that is, for detention. And it still looms. But there is a larger meaning in all these messages about being careful, not being ignorant, that will hasten the acceptance of this kind of public service ad in the US as well. “Has America become a country where classroom discussion of the Ten Commandments is impermissible but teacher instructions in safe sodomy are to be mandatory?” inquires Pat Buchanan, protesting the “foolish” proposal made in the report of the recent Presidential Commission on the epidemic, chaired by Admiral Watkins, to outlaw discrimination against people with AIDS. Most of what experts pronounce about the future contributes to this new, double sense of reality—beyond the doubleness to which we are already accustomed by the comprehensive duplication of everything in images. Repeated on Moscow’s “Radio Peace and Progress” in English, the story was taken up by newspapers and magazines throughout the world. AIDS also seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. Tuberculosis, in its identity as a disease of the poor (rather than of “the sensitive”), was also linked by late-nineteenth-century reformers to alcoholism. AIDS is everyone’s Trojan horse: six months before the 1988 Olympics the South Korean government announced that it would be distributing free condoms to all foreign participants. It is, of course, unlikely that AIDS, first identified in the early 1980s, is a new disease. Illness is experienced as a species of invasion, and indeed is often carried by soldiers. Susan Sontag’s 1978 book Illness As Metaphor is an eighty-seven-page work of critical theory exploring the language we use to describe disease and its connotations.She argues against the victim-blaming metaphors commonly used to describe diseases. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ’s blood or your neighbor’s. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. The bubonic plague that reappeared in London in the 1720s arrived from Marseilles, which was where plague in the eighteenth century was usually thought to enter Western Europe: brought by seamen, then transported by soldiers and merchants. One of the messages of the society we live in is: Consume. In the countdown to a millennium, a rise in apocalyptic thinking may be inevitable. It's part of being a decent human to be tested for STDs. And there is what it portends: the imminent, but not yet actual, and not really graspable, disaster. ↩, Reagan’s affirmation through cliché of the frightening reality of a disease of other people contrasts with his more original denial of the reality of his own illness. In France computer specialists already speak of the problem of “le sida informatique.”) And they reinforce the sense of the omnipresence of AIDS. Le Pen has dismissed some of his opponents as “AIDS-ish” (sidatique), and the antiliberal polemicist Louis Pauwels said that lycée students on strike last year were suffering from “mental AIDS” (sont atteint d’un siaa mental). No one wants a plague, of course. “Some will allow no Diseases to be new, others think that many old ones are ceased; and that such which are esteemed new, will have but their time: However, the Mercy of God hath scattered the great heap of Diseases, and not loaded any one Country with all: some may be new in one Country which have been old in another. Punning on “equal-opportunity employer,” the phrase subliminally reaffirms what it means to deny: that AIDS is an illness that in this part of the world afflicts minorities, racial and sexual. There has always been reluctance in American health campaigns to communicate information about ways of having safer sex. (Or with despised and feared minorities.). It's really important for people who are HIV positive to reach out to let other people know that they can be tested, they can find out they can still live a life -- a positive life, a happy life. This piece, written at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, examines in terms similar to those used in the earlier work how the disease was being described at the time, when there was much talk of contamination, plagues, and punishment. Machines supply new, popular ways of inspiring desire and keeping it safe, as mental as possible: the commercially organized lechery by telephone (and in France by “Minitel”) that offers a version of anonymous promiscuous sex without physical contact. It is usually epidemics that are thought of as plagues. From the untrammeled intercontinental air travel for pleasure and business of the privileged to the unprecedented migrations of the underprivileged from villages to cities and, legally and illegally, from country to country—all this physical mobility and interconnectedness (with its consequent dissolving of old taboos, social and sexual) is as vital to the maximum functioning of the advanced, or world, capitalist economy as is the easy transmissibility of goods and images and financial instruments. Education about how to keep from getting AIDS does imply an acknowledgment of, therefore tolerance of, the ineradicable variousness of expression of sexual feeling.). It's so irresponsible. The eminent Harvard historian of science Stephen Jay Gould has declared that the AIDS pandemic may rank with nuclear weaponry “as the greatest danger of our era.” But even if it kills as much as a quarter of the human race—a prospect Gould considers possible—“there will still be plenty of us left and we can start again.” Scornful of the jeremiads of the moralists, a rational and humane scientist proposes the minimum consolation: an apocalypse that doesn’t have any meaning. Dostoevsky’s model is undoubtedly cholera, called Asiatic cholera, long endemic in Bengal, which had rapidly become and remained through most of the nineteenth century a worldwide epidemic disease. Do what you want. “Never put a disk in your computer without verifying its source.” The so-called vaccine programs being marketed are said to offer some protection; but the only sure way to curb the threat of computer viruses, experts agree, is not to share programs and data. It's going to be the next decade issue. OCHE OTORKPA, The Unseen Terrorist. It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance. In rich countries freedom has come to be identified more and more with “personal fulfillment”—a freedom enjoyed or practiced by oneself for oneself whatever involvement with others one may have. And diseases. We seem to be in the throes of one of the modern versions of apocalypse. AIDS and Its Metaphors extends her critique of cancer metaphors to the metaphors of dread surrounding the AIDS virus. Don’t let yourself go. The assignment of fault is not contradicted by cases that do not fit. In this case, to say it over and over is to instill the consciousness of risk, the necessity of prudence as such, prior to and overriding any specific recommendation. The more important reason is that there has been a shift in the focus of the moralistic exploitation of illness. The survival of the nation, of civilized society, of the world itself is said to be at stake—claims that are a familiar part of building a case for repression. People circulate, in greater numbers than ever. Although these specialists in ugly feelings insist that AIDS is a punishment for deviant sex, what moves them is not just, or even principally, homophobia. Astonishingly large sums of money are cited as the cost of providing minimum care to people who will be ill in the next few years. I think racism is a bottom-line AIDS issue. Thus, illustrating the classic script for plague, AIDS is thought to have started in the “dark continent,” then spread to Haiti, then to the United States and to Europe, then…. We would rather fear them. And these mass incidences of illness are understood as inflicted, not just endured. With a slow-motion epidemic, these same precautions take on a life of their own. Ever. His use of the plague metaphor, more epitome than metaphor, is detached, stoic, aware—it is not about bringing judgment. Moralistic explanations abounded from the beginning. By the nineteenth century the foreign origin was usually more exotic, the means of transport less specifically imagined, and the illness itself had become phantasmagorical, symbolic. AIDS and Its Metaphors is a 1989 work of critical theory by Susan Sontag.In this companion book to her Illness as Metaphor (1978), Sontag extends her arguments about the metaphors attributed to cancer to the AIDS … The succession of cholera epidemics in the nineteenth century shows a steady waning of religious interpretations of the disease: more precisely, these increasingly coexisted with other explanations. And because of AIDS, the popular misidentification of cancer as an epidemic, even a plague, seems to be receding: AIDS has helped to divest cancer of much of its aura of shame, of the unspeakable. © 1963-2020 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. ↩, The other side of this refusal to give instructions about practices that would be less risky was the feeling that there was something less than manly in submitting one’s sexual life to the guidelines of safety and prudence. I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. Part of making an event real is just saying it, over and over. In this country AIDS has so far evoked less pointedly racist reactions than in Europe, including the Soviet Union, where the African origin of the disease is stressed. But a visitation on “them” is invariably described as different from one on “us.” “I believe that about one half of the whole people was carried off by this visitation,” wrote the English traveler Alexander Kinglake, reaching Cairo at a time of the bubonic plague (sometimes called “oriental plague”). With an epidemic in which there is no immediate prospect of a vaccine, much less of a cure, prevention plays a larger part in consciousness. medical professionals and above all on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers illness as metaphor and aids and its metaphors quotes showing 1 25 of 25 a large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism a secular ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of There is what is happening now. But for the general consciousness it is a new disease, and for medicine, too: AIDS marks a turning point in current attitudes toward illness and medicine, as well as toward sexuality and toward catastrophe. Many of the myths concerning cancer arose from ignorance about its causes, an aspect Sontag discusses in her companion essay, AIDS and its Metaphors. The battle against AIDS is not a last decade issue. 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