Regarding the Pain of Others

by Susan Sontag

Overview

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture—its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.

Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

"For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war."

One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away?

First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312422196
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	02/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	118,677
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.15(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

SUSAN SONTAG (1933–2004) was the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories, I, Etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and seven works of nonfiction, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Illness as Metaphor, and Where the Stress Falls. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work; in 2003, she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Editorial Reviews

Wise and somber. . .Sontag's closing words acknowledge that there are realities which no picture can convey.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The history of sensibility in a culture shaped by the mechanical reproduction of imagery....has always been one of the guiding preoccupations of her best work, from Against Interpretation to The Volcano Lover....Regarding the Pain of Others invites, and rewards, more than one reading.” —Newsday

“For 30 years, Susan Sontag has been challenging an entire generation to think about the things that frighten us most: war, disease, death. Her books illuminate without simplifying, complicate without obfuscating, and insist above all that to ignore what threatens us is both irresponsible and dangerous.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“A timely meditation on politics and ethics. . .extraordinary . . .Sontag's insight and erudition are profound.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“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.” —The New York Times Magazine

“A fiercely challenging book. . .immensely thought-provoking.” —The Christian Science Monitor

From the Publisher

Twenty-six years after the publication of her influential collection of essays On Photography (1977), Sontag (In America) reconsiders ideas that are "now fast approaching the status of platitudes," especially the view that our capacity to respond to images of war and atrocity is being dulled by "the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images" in our rapaciously media-driven culture. Sontag opens by describing Virginia Woolf's essay on the roots of war, "Three Guineas," in which Woolf described a set of gruesome photographs of mutilated bodies and buildings destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Woolf wondered if there truly can be a "we" between man and woman in matters of war. Sontag sets out to reopen and enlarge the question. "No `we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain," she writes. The "we" that Sontag has come to be much more aware of in the decades since On Photography is the world of the rich. She has come to doubt her youthful contention that repeated exposure to images of suffering necessarily shrivels sympathy, and she doubts even more the radical yet influential spin that others put on this critique-that reality itself has become a spectacle. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle... universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world...." Sontag reminds us that sincerity can turn a mere spectator into a witness, and that it is the heart rather than fancy rhetoric that can lead the mind to understanding. (Mar.) FYI: In a letter published in the January 13, 2003, issue of the New Yorker, Woolf scholar Jane Marcus asserts that Woolf never published the horrible war photos that she described-they appeared only in later editions of her antiwar essay. Instead, Woolf substituted images of a general, an archbishop, a judge-wordlessly insisting that her readers constantly consider the men of power who make wars. Marcus assumes that Sontag was drawing her conclusions from a later edition without realizing that she was crying Woolf. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Images of violence and suffering, whether photographic representations or artistic interpretations, are the subject of Sontag's (On Photography) latest dissection of modern culture. In meticulously documented and compulsively readable prose, this National Book Award-winning author explores a formidable array of associated topics. The complex relationships of image maker, object, image, and image viewer; the history of war photography; the image as propaganda; censorship, the staged photograph, and authenticity vs. aestheticism; the question of overexposure to images of atrocities; and the events of September 11, 2001, are only a brief sample of subjects she analyzes in these provocative and articulate essays. In one telling essay, she elaborates on the concept of the "memory museum" as a repository for photographic archives of suffering and atrocity and wonders why, given the success of the Holocaust Museum, there is as yet no museum devoted to the history of slavery in America. Perhaps, she speculates, some memories are simply too dangerous to social stability to be commemorated. Academic libraries supporting programs in journalism (especially photojournalism), communications, psychology, sociology, military history, and art history will find this work invaluable, and it could also be useful in high schools to spark discussion in current events and history classes. All libraries, regardless of type, size, or demographics, should own this book. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/02.]-M.C. Duhig, Lib. Ctr. of Point Park Coll. & Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

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. 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. 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. And yet, for all its author’s capabilities, the essay remains only imperfectly satisfying. 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. 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 probablynot true that people are responding less"), leaving the greatest question--whether there is any "way to guarantee contemplative . . . space for anything now"--nudged at only lightly, and left to slumber on. Moments of brilliance and wonder amid the generally disappointing.

Kirkus Reviews