AIDS Without Metaphor: Sontag and Her Struggle With Disease

The article considers the demetaphorization strategy which Susan Sontag used in her essay AIDS and Its Metaphors. The program that Sontag put forward in Against Interpretation is readily applicable to diseases such as cancer or AIDS, which inevitably become entangled in metaphorical descriptions that encourage sermonizing and moralism. The modernist ideal of avoiding interpretation that Sontag proposed would enable thinking about a disease as a distinct etiological entity brought into sharp focus by the very process of stripping away its cloak of metaphorical layers, myths and imaginings. The article suggests that Sontag’s strategy, which is both practical and semiological, can be understood as a critique of the tradition of holistic medicine usually called “alternative” as well as a countermeasure to it. Medicine of that kind in the West harks back to ancient paradigms and in particular to Stoicism by presupposing that moral errors can be equated with diseases and sins with symptoms. Sontag believes that metaphors are not only useless but also harmful in that they impose a mistaken therapeutic program for both disease and patient, for example, by prescribing exercise or a healthy lifestyle when they are irrelevant. The article analyzes some problems in Sontag’s demetaphorization and argues in particular that the isolation and detection of a disease as such are not somehow antecedent to metaphor, even if the nature of the disease is well understood. Diseases whose nature or treatment are unknown, at least at a given point in history, are an additional problem. Sontag assumes a correlation between a disease as an isolated entity and a drug of choice or a precise therapeutic method, but that correlation cannot always be made.