Still, we are careless in our language. Miss Sontag is right in that charge. But she is not innocent in her practice. That is the kind of statement she would now repudiate, not for its political sentiment but for its recourse to the metaphor of cancer. In the last chapter of her book she comments on the fact that the same vocabulary is used in reference to cancer, aerial warfare and science fiction.
Tumors are malignant or benign.
And so on. Miss Sontag is sensitive to this issue partly, I think, because she knows that her own rhetoric has often been guilty. Her victims have mostly been literary critic, so they have not deserved better treatment, but the habit of mind in her sentences has regularly been punitive. None of these sentences represents Miss Sontag at her best. At her best she is tough but fair.