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
sex past ignored
The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
photography art twilight
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
views intelligence culture
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
serious relation camps
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
anger made shouting
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
selfishness messages want
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
intelligent conversation
All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
courage fear people
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
interesting people illness
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
divorce errors birth
Love dies because its birth was an error.
believe health reality
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
history crowds fiction
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them ...
unjust illness metaphor
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
character tests moral
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.