Document:Brown reviews Sontag
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Amazon.com
6 August 2006
Sontag is spot-on in her analysis of metaphors of AIDS: the military metaphors, the latency metaphors, and the plague metaphors. Her observations are keen and insightful in this regard. It is troubling then, that she seems unwilling to follow her own analysis and that she dismisses "psychological" aspects of disease causation in favor of a purely materialist understanding. Does she not realise that the "de-interpretation" of illness metaphors is itself a psychological act that affects patients? How does she reconcile her dismissal of psychological states with the fact that her very own writings on illness and AIDS are themselves psychological and therapeutic?
Sontag forgets that metaphor itself is a social-psychological phenomenon. If she had kept this fact in mind, she might have arrived at the conclusion that the basic medical and scientific paradigm of AIDS is itself flawed and kept alive solely through metaphor. At many points, she appears to be on the cusp of piercing the HIV mythology, pointing out discrepancies and exposing flaws in the science. For example, she recognizes the use of the latency period as a way of holding people in a perpetual state of "just haven't gotten AIDS...yet". She observes that the "AIDS tests" test for antibody, not virus, and that objectively healthy people are claimed to be ill based solely on infection (what would later be codified as "HIV disease".) She plainly points out the distinctions between "AIDS" in Africa vs. North America and Europe, and rightly discerns the racist motives behind an "African origin" of AIDS, yet she accepts the racist scientific wisdom (which has not been borne out in 20 years) that the African situation is the "true" AIDS situation and that North American and European AIDS will explode into the heterosexual population.
It's too bad she wasn't willing to follow through on her train of thought. That a thinker of her intellectual acumen was able to come so close to grasping the essence of the HIV mythology, and then, at the last minute, get derailed and capitulate to conventional wisdom, is a testament to the enormous power of group-fantasy.
© 2006 Amazon.com
