Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
poet units sentences
The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
people nuclear may
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
elements pleasure position
There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.
simple making-love meals
On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.
self building process
the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
political definitions arbitrary
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
religious speaks-french views
My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.
psychics fiction literature
Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
imagination structure pornography
Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
photography art mean
Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?
enormous
God, living is enormous!
art expression silence
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
art real cutting
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.
understanding possibility ability
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.