“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. Many of the ideas aren’t fully developed or entirely convincing, but that can be useful for reflection and stimulate discussion. “I am wounded,” he writes. Start by marking “Regarding the Pain of Others” as Want to Read: Error rating book. To make oneself more numb. Author: Susan Sontag: Country: United States: Language: English: Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Publication date. by Susan Sontag ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others book. . UNITED STATES | Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | space for anything now”—nudged at only lightly, and left to slumber on. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. This book is about images of human suffering and human wickedness. I also hoped for discussion of the popularity of graphic fictional pain (e.g. I actually believe this is a strength utilized in her essays. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published Where On Photography was quite theoretical and full of jargon, following, as it did, the work of the French critic Roland Barthes, Regarding the Pain of Others is a series of simple ideas written in plain language. by Penguin. In our culture of always being the spectator, have we simply lost the power to be shocked? ; Newsnight Review discussed Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. 3.5 ⭐️ Sontag engages in some interesting intellectual exercises here as she considers our relationship with images of human suffering. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? Ibram X. Kendi GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | Despite living in an age commonly understood as being awash with images of atrocity, there are few writers who theorize the relationship between political conflict and its pictorial representation. (Since becoming legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille’s books published during his lifetime, in 1961, Les Armes d’Eros (The Tears of Eros)). Magazine Subscribers (How to Find Your Reader Number). In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag explores visual representations of war and violence in today's culture - from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War and contemporary horrific images of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine - asking a series of questions: What is the purpose of showing the atrocities of war? © Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. With a glance back at the essays in On Photography (1977), the eminent intellectual, critic, and writer cobbles together a defense of war photography—with a result that’s as much maunder as miracle. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Regarding the Pain of Others at Amazon.com. Sontag retells the familiar stories about photographs that sanitise or falsify the conflict they are suppos. " Regarding the Pain of Others bristles with a sense of commitment--to seeing the world as it is, to worrying about the ways it is represented, even to making some gesture in the direction of changing it...the performance is thrilling to witness." 9 Reviews. To steel oneself against weakness. These photojournalists mostly clicked photographs of the victims of apartheid or of the violence perpetrated by clashes between different black ethnic groups in South Africa. 'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering' The New York Times. I don't want to see it. She does not argue that the realities of war and violence must be kept in secret, but she explores this particular and very possible moment when the witness of other people's pain gets so used with atrocity that his moral sense and will to act is overcomed by apathy and inaction. But it's nice to see them explored, thought over despite having been thought over already. Sontag's essay is concerned with the moral implications of looking, through photographs, at people who are suffering or dead. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.” Familiar, too, is the Sontagian pleasure of watching a mind roam through fields of history and reading—as the thinker touches down one moment in Plato, at another in Leonardo or Edmund Burke, all the while keeping up knowledgeably detailed references to politics and conflict from the Crimean war up to Somalia and Bosnia. Regarding The Pain Of Others not rely on information about who and when and where; the arbitrariness of the relentless slaughter is evidence enough. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. A brilliant expansion and revision of On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others argues for approaching images of suffering only as invitations to consider the origins and impact of social inequality. RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015. I’ve always thought that one of the things it would be fairly reasonable to have written on my headstone would be, “He often missed the obvious”. From Matthew Brady to now, photos of death and war have raised the question of whether prurience or sympathy is raised in the viewer of such images, degradation and moral numbing on the one hand or any kind of useful understanding on the other. A bracingly intelligent look at the assumptions we make about images of suffering (paintings, war photography, TV reporting, etc.). from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford. These photojournalists mostly clicked photographs of the victims of apartheid or of the violence perpetrated by clashes between different black ethnic groups in South Africa. Crime, Media, Culture 2005 1: 1, 120-123 Download Citation. Retrieve credentials. One of the great theorists of the erotic, Georges Bataille, kept a photograph taken in China in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing “the death of a hundred cuts” on his desk, where he could look at it every day. Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this Regarding the Pain of Others study guide. With recommendations from world experts and thousands of smart readers. And yet, for all its author’s capabilities, the essay remains only imperfectly satisfying. All Rights Reserved. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag is alerting us about the dangers of the wearing out of our moral feelings. Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry .the performance is thrilling to witness.” Refresh and try again. BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag examines the manner in which war is perceived, taking into account such factors as sex, culture and status. Regarding the Pain of Others is an interesting, detailed explication of a subject Sontag touched on in her previous work, On Photography, but one that she felt needed some further explanation: the use of war photography as a medium by which the public might be awakened to the horrifying reality of … She received her B.A. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds! There’s nothing quite like an essay or book by Susan Sontag. Moments of brilliance and wonder amid the generally disappointing. Worth the read, I've been thinking along these lines for some time now. That was why I bought it. . this is such a fantastic, powerful essay that it truly is a pity how it suffers from (a) a very diffused telling, so much so that the chapter categorizations seem rushed through, and (b) the lack of visual?? I never look at this stuff. Ta-Nehisi Coates Sontag does not give us easy answers, because the act of looking at other people's pain is uncomfortable, and probably. this was really important. Sontag is brilliant. Deepa essay, nonfiction May 3, 2020 May 9, 2020 6 Minutes. Ellen Oh is an award-winning author of middle grade and young adult novels such as Spirit Hunters, The Dragon Egg Princess, and A Thousand... To see what your friends thought of this book, I’ve always thought that one of the things it would be fairly reasonable to have written on my headstone would be, “He often missed the obvious”. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag Hamish Hamilton £12.99, pp128. One of the journalists of the club, Kevin Carter (played by Taylor Kitsch in the movie), had won a Pulitzer for his famous photograph depicting a starving child and a vulture in famine hit Sudan in 1993. “This photograph,” Bataille wrote, “had a decisive role in my life. Trouble signing in? (Since becoming legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille’s books published during his lifetime, in 1961, Les Armes d’Eros (The Tears of Eros)). The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future. RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2003. Sontag initially addresses a question posed to writer and anti-war activist Virginia Woolf: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” but then, deducing that war is perennial, Sontag uses the remainder of her book to examine the relation between photography and feelings and ideas about war. تحكي سونتاغ عن الصورة والتي تعطي المعنى الموضوعي وبالحين نفسه تعبر الى العاطفة التي تطرح المعنى وتفسره وهذا ما لا يقدر عليه سواها, An engaging essay on the photography of suffering: what can we photograph, what should we, do we have a duty, when does it become voyeurism or exploitative, when is it reference, do we become numb to seeing atrocities in a world where were bombarded with information and can you make people care. We don't get it. Benjamin Taylor, by And, if there is no grand thesis to keep in mind, her exploration is full of smaller, thought-provoking observations. REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS. Well, I thought this was going to be about something other than what it is, which is just some thoughts on warporn, deathporn, painporn--things Sontag seems to have an almost necrophiliacly prurient interest in. “This photograph,” Bataille wrote, “had a decisive role in my life. I don't understand people who do; all I know is that they twist themselves into ethical knots trying to justify and give a larger meaning to their nasty little fetish. Sontag retells the familiar stories about photographs that sanitise or falsify the conflict they are supposed to be documenting, and the media have trained our eyes only too well to instinctively transform an intolerable, unintelligible reality into fiction. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click on download. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.” To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge—a complex response that many people must find hard to credit. In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. But the work is far more focused on describing the medium of photography than exploring man's fascination with the images of suffering. She asks us to examine the photographs of war, unimaginable suffering and death. Sontag rejects the notion that war imagery will necessarily compel a repudiation of war, instead arguing that war is itself perennial. ETHNICITY & RACE, by For most, the image is simply unbearable: the already armless sacrificial victim of several busy knives, in the terminal stage of being flayed—a photograph, not a painting; a real Marsyas, not a mythic one—and still alive in the picture, with a look on his upturned face as ecstatic as that of any Italian Renaissance Saint Sebastian. [1] [2] It was her last published book before her death in 2004. By Autumn Royal | 1 May 2019 ‘What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?’ – Susan Sontag. Read 789 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The movie also focused on the distress which these journalists went through after or while clicking the photographs. Book Review “Regarding The Pain of Others” by Susan Sontag. Much of the book is a history of war photography, which is intimately bound with the history of public tolerance of violent photos. Words are Sontag's antidote to strong images, she is only really concerned with photography's prurient intrusiveness, there dislocation of reality, actual photographs are of less interest to her, and are mentioned, in stern verbal paraphrase, only to be reproved for their untrustworthiness. however, it's certainly given me some insight into what goes on in my own psyche when i see horrible sceneries in form of photographs. Ibram X. Kendi Her discussion of the nature of ‘remembering’ is probably worth the effort in reading the book. Why is there no real museum dedicated to the holocaust that occurred to the Australian Aboriginals? Good food for thought, for sure, but her argumentation left me wanting more. I was saying to people at work the other day that there was a part of this book where I thought, “god, how did I get to be 50 and never think of this before?” It was the bit where she talks about the holocaust and holocaust museums and then questions why America doesn’t have a museum to the victims of slavery – you know, those victims are still walking. Sontag reviews and explores this old question, and her answer, though without doubt the right one—“Let the atrocious images haunt us”—leads her to unexpected banalities (“There is simply too much injustice in the world”) and an unfocused ending that all but randomly touches on great matters—whether the mass media create passivity, for example—and just as inexplicably glances away from them (“But it’s probably not true that people are responding less”), leaving the greatest question—whether there is any “way to guarantee contemplative . An examination of images of war and how those that view these images react to them. Ashley Lukashevsky, by Somewhere at the bottom of my mind I was kind of hoping it would. But such ambivalence doesn't make for compelling reading, especially since the themes which she explores (e.g., the suspicious claim to objectivity of photography, voyeurism/complicity masquerading as disinterestedness in the viewer) will be familiar to anybody who has reflected on the subject. Author– Susan Sontag. To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. The slightly superior, ever-unflappable tone will be familiar here to Sontag readers, as will be the wonderful aperçus that come along in a kind of pearls-on-a-string parade—“All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person,” for example, or “To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture,” or “Narratives can make us understand. Press articles around the time of release implicitly associated the book and Sontag's cancer, so I thought a lot of it would be philosophy and psychology about ways people respond to someone who is ill, perhaps in different times and societies. A very interesting essay filled with thought-provoking remarks. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. Susan Sontag. While Sontag does not provide any revolutionary ideas, the essay is a succinct and thorough examination of the issues surrounding photography. The picture was clicked at such an angle that it seemed that the vulture was waiting for a chance to pounce upon the poor child. For years I'd been under the impression this wasn't simply about war photography, instead that it was a work on the whole title topic that used war photography as a starting point. Can there be any real justification for the creation, and consumption, of such images? It is very well written. but it was so repetitive you could literally summarize every chapter in one page maximum. The core questions of this short book are, Do photographs of the destruction and … ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES, by The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. [Regarding] The Pain of Others. in horror films) and of gruesome true crime stories. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”, Categories: We’d love your help. Cécile Van De Voorde. Categories: Susan Sontag (/ˈsɒntæɡ/; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”, National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Criticism (2003), Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form (2004), Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors, Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, A Young Adult Fiction Expert's Year of Spectacular Teen Reads. . Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. illustrated by ‧ Press articles around the time of release implicitly associated the book and Sontag's cancer, so I thought a lot of it would be philosophy and psychology about ways people respond to someone who is ill, perhaps in different times and societies. (Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.) Regarding the pain of others does touch upon the satisfaction derived from watching the suffering of others, or at least images thereof. Amazon.in - Buy Regarding the Pain of Others book online at best prices in India on Amazon.in. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. Drawing attention to how photography is always both art and testimony, Sontag convincingly deconstructs the idea that a photo of pain by itself can reveal anything universal or self evident about … Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 144 pp., $20 cloth. It is regarded by many to be a follow-up or addendum to On Photography, despite the fact that the two essay collections convey Sontag's radically different opinions about photography. A lot of these ideas are not new. She notes, for example, that displaying photos of dead bodies is less taboo the more foreign and faraway those bodies are. Anyway, while it's not particularly enlightening or revelatory (or helpful), the essay does help the reader focus his/her own ideas on the feelings conjured by the photography of suffering, and perhaps approach the images more intellectually. , 2003 comments on photographs from war in crime stories the word “ woke appears. 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