Welcome back Susan Sontag

David Bidussa*

Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in “Illness as Metaphor”, a book that has been lost for a long time and which the publisher Nottetempo will release again in bookstores on November 19th, warned against considering illnesses as moral malaises and psychic failures. “Illness – she wrote in the first lines of the work – is not a metaphor”. Then she added: “The most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of […] metaphorical thinking”. We miss this healthy material vision, lost as we are in conspiracy theories and idolatrous culprit hunting.

*Social historian of ideas

Translated by Oyebuchi Lucia Leonard and revised by Antonella Losavio, students at Trieste University and at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste university, interns at the newspaper office of the union of the Italian Jewish Communities.