Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

Blurb:

Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today.
How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.

Review:

There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder to maintain [a] kind of moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The iamges say: This is what human beings are capable of doing–may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, righteously. Don't forget.

This is going to be short and sweet because, frankly, I don't have a lot to say and I strongly believe that I need to re-read this in the near future once I've processed this text.


Sontag, as I had expected, raises some interesting points and does so eloquently. When I re-read this I definitely need to be able to access the internet and look up all of the images she talks about because I tended to feel like my brain was so busy trying to imagine what Sontag was describing that I couldn't  properly focus on the words anymore. But I do feel like I understand a little more, not sure what exactly I understand more but this is definitely one of those books you feel like you can grow from when reading. I don't necessarily agree with every point she makes, or at least not with the way she makes them (which is totally fine, btw), but I would need more time to figure out how I would respond to these little disagreements.

One thing is for certain: Regarding the Pain of Others has induced a lot of thinking and that, certainly, is a good things. Because of the whole "wanting to re-read this"-thing I somehow don't really feel qualified to give much more of an opinion. Make of that what you want. Anyhow, I do think it's worth giving this one a shot. It's also quite short so there's not much of a commitment.

"We"–this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through–don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

Rating:

I'm like a broken record: I can't decide on a rating, yet, because I do feel like I need to re-read this first. Hopefully, though, I'll remember to revisit this review once I've actually done the re-reading deal and all.

Details:

Name: Regarding the Pain of Others

Deutscher Titel: Das Leiden Anderer betrachten

Author: Susan Sontag

Publisher: Picador USA

Pages: 131

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