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ISSUES WHICH SEEM THREATENING MAY ACTUALLY BE HARMLESS
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- “APOCALYPTIC SCENARIO” DISCOURSE SHOULD BE REJECTED
ISSUES WHICH SEEM THREATENING MAY ACTUALLY BE HARMLESS1. SEEING SOCIETY AS FLAWED AND IN NEED OF RESTORATION RESULTS IN VIOLENCE Susan Sontag, American philosopher. ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, 1990, pp. 8 1-2. It is hardly the last time that revolutionary violence would be justified on the grounds that society has a radical, horrible illness. The melodramatics of the disease metaphor in modern political discourse assume a punitive notion: of the disease not as punishment but as a sign of evil, something to be punished. Modern totalitarian movements, whether of the right or of the left, have been peculiarly--and revealingly--inclined to use disease imagery. The Nazis declared that someone of mixed ‘racial’ origin was like a syphilitic. European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis, and to a cancer that must be excised.
Susan Sontag, American philosopher. ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, 1990, p. 42. At the least, the calamity of disease can clear the way for insight into lifelong self-deceptions and failures of character. The lies that muffle Ivan Ilych’s drawn-out agony--his cancer being unmentionable to his wife and children--reveal to him the lie of his whole life; when dying, he is, for the first time, in a state of truth. The sixty-year-old civil servant in Kurosawa’s film Ikiru (1952) quits his job after learning he has terminal stomach cancer and, taking up the cause of a slum neighborhood, fights the bureaucracy he had served. With one year left to live, Watanabe wants to do something that is worthwhile, wants to redeem his mediocre life.
Susan Sontag, American philosopher. ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, 1990, pp. 55-6. For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. 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 spirit over matter. “APOCALYPTIC SCENARIO” DISCOURSE SHOULD BE REJECTED1. APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE REFLECTS WESTERN SOCIAL FEARS Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, p. 175. There is also the need for an apocalyptic scenario that is specific to “Western” society, and perhaps even more so to the United States. (America, as someone has said, is a nation with the soul of a church--an evangelical church prone to announcing radical endings and brand new beginnings.) The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. The sense of cultural distress or failure gives rise to the desire for a clean sweep, a tabula rasa. No one wants a plague, of course. But, yes, it would be a chance to begin again. And beginning again--that is very modern, very American, too. 2. APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC DESENSITIZES PEOPLE TO REAL THREATS Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, pp. 175-6. With the inflation of apocalyptic rhetoric has come the increasing unreality of the apocalypse. A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse ....... and it doesn’t occur. And it still looms. We seem to be in the throes of one of the modern kinds of the apocalypse. There is the one that’s not happening, whose outcome remains in suspense: the missiles circling the earth above our heads, with a nuclear payload that could destroy all life many times over, that haven’t (so far) gone off. And there are the ones that are happening, and yet seem not to have (so far) the most feared consequences--like the astronomical Third World debt, like overpopulation, like ecological blight; or that could happen and then (we are told) didn’t happen--like the October 1987 stock market collapse, which was a “crash,” like the one in October 1929, and was not. Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On.” Apocalypse has become an event that is happening and not happening.
Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, pp. 177-8. Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. (Either the too little and becoming less: waning, decline, entropy. Or the too much, ever more than we can handle or absorb: uncontrollable growth.) Most of what experts pronounce about the future contributes to this new double sense of reality--beyond the doubloons to which we are already accustomed by the comprehensive duplication of everything in images. There is what is happening now. And there is what it portends: the imminent, but not yet actual, and not really graspable, disaster. 4. OVEREMPHASIS ON APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS PRODUCE DANGEROUS DENIAL Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, p. 179. A proliferation of reports or projections of unreal (that is, ungraspable) doomsday eventualities tends to produce a variety of reality-denying responses. Thus, in most discussions of nuclear warfare, being rational (the self-description of experts) means not acknowledging the human reality, while taking in emotionally even a small part of what is at stake for human beings (the province of those who regard themselves as menaced) means insisting on unrealistic demands for the rapid dismantling of the peril.
Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, p. 181. 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. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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