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Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

HealthPhilosophy

The story behind the card

Sontag wrote the book while being treated for advanced breast cancer, and kept herself entirely out of it: no diary, no scene at the hospital. Her target was the language around illness: the idea that tuberculosis belonged to the passionate and cancer to the repressed, and that a diagnosis says something about the person who received it. Metaphors like that, she argued, add a second illness on top of the first, and this one is made of shame. The sentence opens the book, and in 1989 she applied the same argument to AIDS in AIDS and Its Metaphors.

Türkçe oku
Dünyaya gelen herkes çifte vatandaşlık taşır: sağlıklıların ülkesinde de hastaların ülkesinde de.
Susan Sontag, Metafor Olarak Hastalık

Sontag bu kitabı ilerlemiş meme kanseri tedavisi görürken yazdı, ama kendini metnin tamamen dışında tuttu: ne günlük var ne hastane sahnesi. Hedefi hastalığın çevresindeki dildi: veremin tutkulu insanlara, kanserin duygularını bastıranlara özgü olduğu fikri, bir teşhisin onu alan kişinin karakteri hakkında bir şey söylediği inancı. Sontag'a göre bu tür mecazlar ilk hastalığın üstüne ikinci bir hastalık ekler ve bu ikincisi utançtan yapılmıştır. Bu cümle kitabın ilk cümlesidir; Sontag 1989'da aynı düşünceyi AIDS ve Metaforları'nda AIDS'e uyguladı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Illness as Metaphor
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