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SUSAN SONTAG AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AND CRITIC (b. 1933)



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SUSAN SONTAG

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AND CRITIC (b. 1933)

The most interesting thinkers of this century have been those who have talked about the way we talk, written about the way we write. Until philosophy took that self-reflective turn, its conclusions and methods were not careful enough to see that philosophers’ own biases and blind-spots often blocked intellectual progress.


Susan Sontag is a philosopher obsessed with biases and blind-spots. Her work takes the obvious, the unquestioned, as its starting point and leaves the reader eventually enraged at his or her own inability to have seen the forest for the trees. Sontag has done this with cultural attitudes, language, revolutionary politics and aesthetics, leaving no stone unturned, considering nothing too sacred for serious, but respectful criticism.

Life And Work

Conceived in China (where her American parents were trading furs), Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, and grew up around West Coast cities such as Tucson and Los Angeles, raised by a plethora of distant relatives. By the time most people are ready to consider themselves “adults” and begin their lives, Sontag had already lived a fuller life than many of us. At age fifteen, she entered U.C. Berkeley, staying one year. Then she transferred to the University of Chicago, where at seventeen (by that time she was ready to graduate) she got married. The same year --her nineteenth--she entered Harvard as a postdoctoral student, she had her first child and eventually got degrees in literature and philosophy. She was divorced and studying at Oxford and Paris by age twenty four, and in 1959 she returned to New York and began writing for the Partisan Review and teaching.


Sontag was considered part of a “cutting edge” circle of New York intellectuals who helped usher in the radical literature and criticism of the 1960s; mostly concerned with critiquing elitist attitudes on culture and the arts, she wrote: “The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer--a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity and empty phrases.” She believed harsh criticism was the most important role of any intellectual; institutions which had laid hegemonic claim to American society were ready to be torn down: “All possibility of understanding,” she wrote, “is rooted in the ability to say no.”
In 1966, Sontag published Against Interpretation, a book encouraging the acceptance of new art forms and a new artistic sensibility which reflected the innovation of non-traditional artists. In the book, Sontag criticized the tendency to unthinkingly apply old or “familiar” cultural interpretations to newer styles of art. Most artistic and literary criticism had assumed there was some “message” behind the statement made by the work itself. Sontag encouraged readers instead to “listen” to the work rather than dismiss it with some dry interpretive pattern. The gist of Against Interpretation was more political than aesthetic; Sontag was arguing that humanity was changing, becoming more crowded and quick. Open-mindedness and a willingness to accept pluralism, she argued, was not ‘radical,” subversive or harmful, but instead was practical and vital for the changing times.
Eventually, the intense interest in radical politics which emerged at this time drew Sontag into the fray, and she visited both revolutionary Cuba and war-torn Vietnam. In 1969, she wrote Styles of Radical Will her attempt to deal with politics. Nominally a liberal to that point, Sontag admitted she was beginning to develop “a sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire.” But characteristically, she criticized American radicals for glamorizing third world revolutions; American intellectuals, she felt, had set Vietnam up as an “object” designed to “show” how evil America was, instead of truly appreciating the Vietnamese struggle for liberation. Western radicalism, she argued, talks too much and feels too little.

For the next several years, Sontag devoted most of her writing to artistic enterprises such as photography, movies and theater. But in the l970s, her life would dramatically change as she was diagnosed with cancer. While recovering from the disease, she wrote Illness as Metaphor. which examined the way diseases are used as political and spiritual metaphors by naive or cynical social writers. Later, she would pen a sequel, AIDS and its Metaphors which continued her running commentary that the chief sign of a society’s enlightenment was both the way it treated its sick and the way it used sickness to represent other social problems.


Always critical of both the left and the right in politics, in 1982 Sontag publicly renounced communism, calling it “fascism with a human face,” and became active in PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists), an international anti-censorship group. Throughout her career, she has seen the writer as a vital self-checking mechanism of the democratic society; everything from cold interpretation to flaming metaphors to the naked totalitarianism of censorship has come under attack from Sontag as a silencing of the human spirit.

Criticism, Education And Democracy

Susan Sontag’s work is eclectic: political philosophy, literary and artistic criticism, personal essays, deconstructive analysis, fiction and films have all been produced by this leading American intellectual. But all are ripe with themes of autonomy and the necessity to continually question ourselves. The most important statement made by Sontag is that the modern age, which confuses us with its speed, impersonalness and rapid production of information, requires the critics to keep it in line.


Sontag believes that the self-intellect, one’s own intellectual mind, is itself “dialectical,” always debating with itself, like a play with protagonists and antagonists. This ability to criticize is the basis of modernity, and Sontag believes we should love “the modern” and cultivate it through an educated class of critics. But contemporary life, she feels, is killing this tradition by, in a sense, “affirming” and validating everything, making every new idea or artwork a classic or a collectable. Now, more than ever, we must promote critical thinking, dissent, and “free speculation.”
Contrary to the belief that such thinking is “post-modern” (because the post-modern is often associated with dissent, the radical left, the avant garde in art, etc.), the idea of constant criticism is, to Sontag, the very essence of the modern. Post-modernism can often in reality be a hidden pro-institutional ideology because it encourages us to accept everything the way it is and not to try to change anything (post-modernists, Sontag argues, see the attempt to change things as somehow unethical because “changing” denotes bias and prejudice against the way things are, and since all bias and prejudice is, according to post-modernists, “bad,” things should be left alone). Sontag argues that nothing which cannot withstand scrutiny is worth shielding from criticism. Unless everything is subject to such critical tests, our language, symbols and ideas became rigid and oppressive.
The rigidity with which ideas and norms are imbedded into the collective consciousness can be seen in society’s use of metaphors. Sontag singled out disease metaphors because she had encountered them in her own struggle with cancer and with watching her friends die of AIDS, but her statements about how we use and re-use language can apply to any overused metaphors. She points out, for example, that “disease” is used as a metaphor for social strife, which legitimizes a “sterilization” or “healing” which can in reality be nothing more than the totalitarian eradication of dissent.
“War” metaphors are another favorite target of her critiques; she points out that the “war on disease,” like the “war on poverty” or the “war on drugs’ is dangerous not only because it legitimizes the violence of genuine war fighting, but because it raises images which obscure the reality of the struggle against these undesirable things. Instead, she argues, we should at all times attempt to call things what they are and struggle against them as they are.
Finally, although Sontag has in recent years became less militantly critical of everything, she has throughout her intellectual career encouraged her readers to live as if they are in a time of intense change, whether this is “objectively true” or not. This is because we must always feel a sense of urgency about what is around us in order for our ideas to change and grow. Nothing, in Sontag’s opinion, is exempt from criticism. This separates her from both the right and the left, who have their own respective sets of taboos and untouchables. Sontag has been denounced by all sides, which, to her, is the ultimate sign of her success.



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