ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the more openly political and social issues. In the political life, it was the way she was selected or selected herself that grates on the social scientists and historians of the period. Even for the least socially swayed researchers, the “expanded notion” of the disease “creates a new class of lifetime pariahs, the ill”. On the very low end of the mediation scale, we have come to metaphors, from which, seemingly, social constructions just accumulate. Susan Sontag does not trust the myths of modernist art nor the metaphors of social constructions. What Sontag hopes to do is to throw the “ordinariness” of diseases against the glacial movement, the “slow catastrophe” of the end of the millennium’s apocalyptic predictions. Sontag has reproduced herself in her work; she has molded herself into her entire project. Her essays and her fiction and her films have poured into one another until they appeared to her as hybridized things.
