TO, czyli gra z chorobą

Abstract

Modernity has removed sickness from the public life, closed it in the ghettos of clinics, hospitals, and hospices; it marked it with a stigma of difference, gave it a label of pathology, deprived it of visibility, and condemned to nonexistence. Being sick has been removed from the public scene of everyday life and sent back to the private sphere; it became a covert, intimate, often shameful experience of an individual. Sickness, just like crime, became a deviation from the norm that requires isolation. A clinic — just like an asylum and a prison — became a deviation from the norm that requires isolation. Clinics and hospitals, just like asylums and prisons, became places of technical correction of misfits, who are not able to properly participate in social life; they also became institutions, which hide from the world key human experiences — sickness and death. Sickness — especially cancer — became a stigma of modernity. Cancer remains the most dangerous and difficult puzzle of medicine. Epochal discoveries in 20th century molecular biology revealed the mechanism of creation and development of cancer. Sickness, dying, death, as well as funeral, with spectacular experiencing pain and grief are no longer public exhibitions. Suffering and pain, hidden behind the closed doors of health institutions, houses, and flats, behind the dark glasses of mourners, do not disturb the modernity, possessed by the mania of health and beauty, sent back to the land of mental childhood. Still, cancer patients enter the contemporary, treacherous world of shows and reveal their trauma, suffering, fear, intimacy, their beauty and joy de vivre, in television, theater, on the Internet, billboards, and exhibitions. The stake in this risky game with the world, with the self, and with cancer — the desire to accustom both themselves and the world to IT. To subjugate cancer…