AIDS and Its Metaphors - Critical Response

Critical Response

Although "valuable as both history and practical advice", the work is missing conclusions and opinions that would make it more powerful. It is "hard to tell what Ms. Sontag's point of view is", as she functions as both objective historian and attacker of views she disagrees with. Sontag doesn’t actually answer the questions of whether adapting behavior in the face of AIDS is the appropriate protection against infection, or how society should react to the epidemic. And her conclusion in the last pages, that the metaphors she is “most eager to see retired” are the set drawn from military vocabulary. After the many topics discussed in the work, this seems a shallow point on which to end.

Another critic still holds that "the disease itself, and not the way we talk about it, is the true source of its horror," and turns Sontag's point that "we cannot think without metaphors" on itself. This indicates that, instead of attempting to deconstruct these diseases entirely, we should be asking "whether its metaphors are well or ill chosen."