Illness and war

Abstract The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has reignited the debate on the metaphors of illness. Susan Sontag’s contributions from the 1970s and 1980s continue to serve as a milestone in multidisciplinary discussions on figurative language: her conception of illness carries relevant consequences in different directions. The present essay unfolds in two parts. The first part retraces the 20th-century debate on metaphor, focusing particularly on the question of metaphoric truth, with an emphasis on Continental philosophy. The second part endeavours to reconstruct a sort of political “metaphorology” of the pandemic, also serving as a critical review of Sontag’s argument. Through a bio-linguistic and biopolitical reconsideration of the COVID crisis, it becomes evident that the “disease/war” dispositif is as radical as an absolute metaphor.