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Regarding the Pain of Others By Susan Sontag ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux )
Release Date: 2002-02-19
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $20.00
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Product Description
From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
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"the ethical value of an assault by images" ( kwalters@gettysburg.edu )
In her On Photography, which appeared 35 years ago, Susan Sontag worried that the public's continuous exposure to horrific photos of the violence of war might backfire. The purpose (or at least one of the purposes) of such photos is to rouse opposition to the cruelty of war. But the continuous publication of them can surfeit and benumb, encouraging instead public passivity.
In her Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag rethinks this claim (even though it's now become received wisdom), suggesting that such photos in fact haunt us. True, our attraction to images of suffering can be prurient (Plato, in the Republic, was the first to catalog this human curiosity). The way in which a photo of suffering is framed, moreover, can transform it from an object of horror into one (primarily) of heroism. But notwithstanding these and other manipulations, photos of war victims remain what Sontag calls "emblems of suffering" that awaken us to the fact that the violence of warfare is very real indeed, and that we may be complicitous in it, notwithstanding the fact that, as "spectators," we are far removed from the imaged violence. Photographs shouldn't be "supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering [they] pick out and frame." But they are effective "invitation[s] to pay attention" (p. 117). Viewing photographs of suffering is no substitute for hard thinking about war, murderous violence, and our moral responsibilities. But photos can spark and fuel such reflection (p. 103). For those of us who will never have firsthand experience of the horrors of war, this vicarious exposure can be a moral catalyst. That we can turn away from such photos does nothing to "impugn the ethical value of an assault by images" (p. 116).
Like all Sontag-authored extended essays, this one is so rich in ideas and insights that at times it seems (but ony, I believe, seems) to ramble. Along the way, Sontag discusses the history of war photography, the ethical dilemma of merely "looking at" atrocities rather than doing something about them, the French school of "the spectacle" founded by Guy Debord and made "respectacle" by Baudillard and Bataille. Chapter headings would be profoundly helpful here, as well as an occasional summary. But Sontag presumably wants to provoke thought in her readers, and hesitates to provide roadmaps.
Moreover, accompanying photographs would be helpful, especially since Sontag refers to a good baker's dozen to illustrate her arguments. The curious thing--and perhaps this was her point--is that any educated reader is likely to form an immediate memory image of the photo under discussion. We are, indeed, haunted by such photos.
An intriguing, genuinely thought-provoking book--and thought-provoking books are rare these days.
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 Excellent anti-war book
Surely Susan Sontag addresses the pain of others and how to deal with it, but her book goes deeply against all war, and as such, should have been read by George W. Bush before he started the Iraq war. She shows a great deal of sensitivity to what pain is caused by war, and how senseless it is. This is one of her books that makes me regret that she never received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Fortunately, she received a number of other literary prizes she nobly deserved, such as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
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A Book that Everybody Must Read!!! ( sylviastel )
Susan Sontag only passed away recently. She was more of a philosopher, social activist, literary critic, and essayist than a fictional writer. In this book, she points out British writer Virginia Woolfe's view of war in today's society. War is a crime and an outrage where ever it might be whether it's in the boardroom, Wall Street, Sarajevo, Kabul, Baghdad, etc. War comes in many shapes and forms but what does war really mean to us. Is it about killing human lives or what about the destruction of the human soul in our society, we are transformed by the images displayed on cable television about the two wars going on and the lives lost. We are close to four thousand American soldiers being killing in Iraq. We had no reason to go but we did and now we must clean up the mess. I totally support our troops overseas because they are selfless human beings who would sacrifice their lives for their country. But what about the leaders who sent them there only to return home in coffins or end up at Walter Reed Medical Center for the injured veterans. Are the injured better off than the casualties? Maybe not because they have to live with their images of war and their actions. Sontag's book works because it makes us think about war without thinking so much about it. Where do we stand? Of course, it would be a perfect world without war and peace prevailed but war is a fact of life. Maybe Sontag should have used examples of wartime strategies that are not so gory or gloom with images of death and destruction. She did not live long enough to see Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast. What about the business world where casualties are not just in coffins but at the unemployment office? This book made me think so that's why I'm writing about this situation. We lose 18,000 Americans every year because they lack health insurance, that's six times the amount of the victims of September 11, 2001. Maybe we don't have to declare war, uninsured Americans are at war with a society who has neglected them or disregarded their needs for whatever reason.
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Suggestive but incomplete ( irinaalexandra )
Sontag's essay is concerned with the moral implications of looking, through photographs, at people who are suffering or dead. Much of the book is a history of war photography, which is intimately bound with the history of public tolerance of violent photos. While Sontag does not provide any revolutionary ideas, the essay is a succinct and thorough examination of the issues surrounding photography. And, if there is no grand thesis to keep in mind, her exploration is full of smaller, thought-provoking observations. She notes, for example, that displaying photos of dead bodies is less taboo the more foreign and faraway those bodies are. Until she pointed it out, I had not even realised how North American coverage of 9-11 included practically no pictures of corpses, although picturing the dead in foreign conflicts is an expectable way of rallying support for the victims. Her remarks on the way a photo replaces the memory of the thing itself are, if not surprising, good to have restated.
Sontag also does not ignore the uncomfortable reality of the pleasure which most people have in regarding suffering, but in this as in many areas of her essay, I wished that she would go further, spend more time teasing out and elaborating her analysis -- I wished, in other words, that she had written a real book-length book, not a long essay. On the other hand, the incompleteness of her discussion means that it is particularly good at stimulating further thought, at opening questions rather than closing them off.
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Sontag adds here name to the after postmodernism movement ( mfinch56 )
Sontag questions her ideas that have influenced half a centary. She is not alone Terry Eagleton (After Theory), Elain Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and even Derrida (life.after theory) have done the same
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