Direitos humanos e linguagem imagética do horror: da estética do sofrimento à ética do olhar em Susan Sontag

Abstract

This study was dedicated to the theme of Human Rights in coexistence with language with imagery language of horror. We seek to think, at first, about the emergence of post-modernity and its instruments of hypersimplification of horror, promoted by the mass media and the new technologies of the Society of the Spectacle, especially with regard to the commercialization and capitalization of suffering. Human. In this sense, the fundamental path was centered on the representation of horror in imagery language, distributed in three levels: painting, photography and cinema. Subsequently, we undertake a commitment to conceptual clarification of the disputes around the meaning of modern and postmodern – taking into account, mainly, the critical view of Susan Sontag. In the two following moments, the philosophical path was centered on Susan Sontag’s contributions, based on thinking about the theoretical shift from an aesthetics of suffering to an ethics of the gaze in her thinking. As a theoretical bulwark developed by the philosopher about the imagery language of horror, we used a good part of her essayistic fortune – in addition to complementary works. Finally, we sought to understand that human rights in coexistence with the imagery language of horror can be understood according to an ethics of the gaze, above all as a proposal to reach the sensitivity and otherness of the one who observes, moving us to the field of history and the “memory of the dead”.