- Tags:: #📚Books - Author:: [[Susan Sontag]] - Genre:: [[Nonfiction]], [[Philosophy]], [[Essays]] - Source date:: [[2025-10-24]] - Audience score:: 8.2 - Link:: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52373.Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others?from_search=true&from_srp=ZCjM1b0I0q&qid=1 - ISBN:: 9780141012377 - Added to vault date:: [[2025-10-24]] - Finished date:: [[2025-12-04]] - Liked:: 8 - Cover:: <img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1623544466i/52373.jpg" width="100"> ## Why did I want to read it? Me lo encontré de chiripa en el [[Centre Pompidou Málaga]] y me vino delux por un tema que llevaba en la cabeza. Nos veo continuamente hacer repost en Instagram de las barbaridades del genocidio en Gaza pero... ¿qué fuste tiene que nos reposteemos unos a otros esto, en mi burbuja de comunidad en la que todos estamos más que concienciados, y sin hacer nada más? (aparte de, espero, votar en consecuencia, y acudir a las manifestaciones pertinentes). Por supuesto, esto no quiere decir que no tenga sentido producir estas imágenes y que se difundan. Hay mucha peña que definitivamente necesitaría verlas y humanizarse con ellas. Por desgracia, no estoy seguro de que quien más se beneficiaría de esa empatía vaya a elegir verlas o las vaya a interpretar como el horror que son. Tampoco es que yo quiera aislarme en mi privilegio de mundo de piruleta: si tiene algún valor que sigamos observando aquellos somos conscientes de las injusticias que andan ocurriendo, hágamoslo aún con el desagrado... pero es que yo creo que no tiene valor por si mismo. Es más, sospecho que incluso hay motivos perversos e incluso contraproducentes el hacerlo. Ha coincidido también que en [[Samabooks]] leyeramos [[Las malas]], que me pareció un libro bastante duro sobre el sufrimiento de una comunidad trans en Argentina. Pensé algo muy parecido y así se lo pregunté al club... ¿por qué precisamente nosotros nos estamos leyendo esto? (que, espero, ya estamos más que empatizados con la mierda que tienen que aguantar y que, espero, ya apoyamos las luchas de este colectivo). Creo que como en muchas otras cosas en la vida, merece la pena intentar quitarse el automatismo de encima de pensar que esto es algo que hay que hacer por defecto y que es siempre bueno y por una buena causa. Porque más allá de conocer y denunciar las injusticias que suceden en el mundo (para intentar eliminarlas), ¿por qué revolcarse en el sufrimiento de otros? ## What did I get out of it? Muchísimo, especialmente para ser un librillo de 100-ish páginas. Vuelve a ser otro de estos libros difíciles de sumarizar... hay muy poca paja. Eso además me ha dado paz: había tela que rascar. > One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. (p. 83) ^8520b1 El mega tl;dr es que la ética de mirar el sufrimiento de otros es compleja: hay buenas razones pero también morbosas y autocomplacientes. ### La obvia: mirar para movilizarse >The pictures of Bosnian atrocities were seen **soon after the events took place. (...) Therefore one could feel an obligation to look at these pictures, gruesome as they were, because there was something to be done, right now, about what they depicted.** (p. 80) >The practice of representing atrocious suffering as something to be deplored, and, if possible, stopped, enters the history of images with a specific subject: the sufferings endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage. (p. 36) >The point of creating public repositories for these and other relics is to ensure that the crimes they depict will continue to figure in people's consciousness. (p. 75) >Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction. All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important. (p. 74) ### Pero es fácil no moverse e insensibilizarse >Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to 'care" more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention. (p. 68) > It is because a war, any war, doesn't seem as if it can be stopped that people become less responsive to the horrors. Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated • into action, or it withers. (p. 88) >And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse. (...) People don't become inured to what they are shown—if that's the right way to describe what happens—because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. (p. 89) >So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response. **To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine**—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark. (p. 89) Me recordó a [[Demasiado tarde para despertar|Demasiado tarde para despertar]] ![[Demasiado tarde para despertar#^fb27fa]] ### Aunque insensibilizarse, si acaso, es un privilegio de clase Remind me of what a felt in Hiroshima: >Does shock have term limits? (...) People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out. But do people want to be horrified? Probably not. Still, there are pictures whose power does not abate, in part because one cannot look at them often (...) is it correct to say that people get used to these? (p.72) > An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry. (p. 10) >There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality. (p. 97) >No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate. >that in a world saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we become callous (...) the critique being almost as old as modernity itself \[introduces an example from 1800]. (p. 92) >What horrified public opinion in the 1930s was that the slaughter of civilians from the air was happening in Spain; these sorts of things were not supposed to happen here. (p. 26) ### ¿Pero cuál es el punto si es algo pasado? ¿Hay algo que aprender? El valor de ser testigo >Other issues are raised when we are invited to respond to a dossier of hitherto unknown pictures of horrors long past. (...) What is the point of exhibiting these pictures? To awaken indignation? To make us feel bad; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don't they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)? (p. 80) > ..."should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of barbarians' but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.) (p. 81) >...it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. **No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.** There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder to maintain this 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 images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget.** (p. 100) >Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends. (p. 101) >the Sarajevans did want their plight to be recorded in photographs: victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique. (p. 98) >There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. (p. 101) >that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. >The frustration of not being able to do anything about what the images show may be translated into an accusation of the indecency of regarding such images, or the indecencies of the way such images are disseminated—flanked, as they may well be, by advertising for emollients, pain relievers and SUVs. If we could do something about what the images show, we might not care as much about these issues. ### También se puede buscar belleza en lo atroz Aunque esto es turbio de narices. > As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation. (p. 86) >Leonardo is suggesting that the artist's gaze be, literally, pitiless. The image should appall, and in that terribilità lies a challenging kind of beauty. That a gory battlescape could be beautiful–in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. (...) The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle! (p. 65) ### Pero también manipulación, espectáculo y morbo > It used to be thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted. As a consequence, morally alert photographers and ideologues of photography have become increasingly concerned with the issues of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation) in war photography and of rote ways of provoking feeling. Photographer-witnesses may think it more correct morally to make the spectacular not spectacular. But the spectacular is very much part of the religious narratives by which suffering, throughout most of Western history, has been understood. (p. 69) > To photograph was to compose (with living subjects, to pose), and the desire to arrange elements in the picture did not vanish because the subject was inmobilized, or immobile. (...) What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed. (p. 47) >Often their decisions are cast as judgments about 'good taste' - always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions. (p. 59) >Most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest. (...) images of the repulsive can also allure. Everyone knows that what slows down highway traffic going past a horrendous car crash is not only curiosity, (p. 83) >The hunt for more dramatic (as they're often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value. (p. 18) > There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching. > But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it (...) **The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be** (p. 36) >Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which. drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature. (p. 84) >William Hazlitt, in his essay on Shakespeare's lago and the attraction of villainy on the stage, asks, 'Why do we always read the accounts in the newspapers of dreadful fires and shocking murders?' Because, he answers, 'love of mischief, love of cruelty, is as natural to human beings as is sympathy. (p. 85) >This is not happening to me, I'm not ill, I'm not dying, I'm not trapped in a war seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify.(p. 87) ### Caution! Strong images ahead A lo largo del libro se referencian fotografías especialmente duras que quise tener presentes. The Falling Soldier - Robert Capa (a republican soldier being shot at Spanish Civil War): ![[IMG_1134.jpeg]] It's terrible that... >When Capa's at-the-moment-of-death picture of the Republican soldier appeared in Life on July 12, 1937, it occupied the whole of the right page; facing it on the left was a full-page advertisement for Vitalis, a men's hair cream (p. 27) About photo resignification, Land Distribution Meeting, Extremadura, Spain, 1936: ![[IMG_1148.jpeg|300]] The woman was not scouting the sky for bomber planes (as it would soon happen). Ron Haviv. Bijeljina, 1992 (p. 82) **![[IMG_1158.webp]]** Trench with unburied British soldiers in Boer War. ![[Pasted image 20251206115753.png]] ![[Pasted image 20251206123253.png]] ### Other notes Quoting [[virginia-woolf|Virginia Woolf]]: >Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is 'some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy. (p. 1) > In the first important wars of which there are accounts by photographers, the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and in every other war until the First World War, combat itself was beyond the camera's ken. (...) The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was the first war to be witnessed (‘covered’) in the modern sense: by a corps of professional photographers at the lines of military engagement and in the towns under bombardment, whose work was immediately seen in newspapers and magazines in Spain and abroad. (p. 16) [[Photography]]: >Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced - this for many reasons, among them the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures. (p. 23) > It takes some very peculiar circumstances for a war to become genuinely unpopular. (The prospect of being killed is not necessarily one of them.) When it does, the material gathered by photographers, which they may think of as unmasking the conflict, is of great use. Absent such a protest, the same antiwar photograph may be read as showing pathos, or heroism, admirable heroism (p. 33) > (To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.) (p. 63) >The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. (p. 34)