susan sontag essay

The New York Times

Magazine | how susan sontag taught me to think.

• How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think

By A.O. SCOTT OCT. 8, 2019

The critic A.O. Scott reflects on the outsize influence Sontag has had on his life as a critic.

I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes aren’t what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different — in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. It’s a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once you’ve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents’ bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. “Against Interpretation.” No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the book’s allure — the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat — but the charisma of the title shouldn’t be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldn’t say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever “interpretation” turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way I’ve made my living as an adult. It’s not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 “Against Interpretation,” a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Saint Genet,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie,’’ Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures”), modestly presents itself as “case studies for an aesthetic,” a theory of Sontag’s “own sensibility.” Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontag’s signature is ambivalence. “Against Interpretation” (the essay), which declares that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ ” is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration — “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” — deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 It’s hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact “Against Interpretation” had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadn’t — hadn’t yet! — read and movies I hadn’t heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the ’60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading “Against Interpretation” — following it with “Styles of Radical Will,” “On Photography” and “Under the Sign of Saturn,” books Sontag would later deprecate as “juvenilia” — for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called “On Style”). For the voice, I guess, but that’s a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked “Against Interpretation” from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontag’s called “Pilgrimage.” One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. “I felt I was slumming in my own life,” Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The “pilgrimage” in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susan’s “shame and dread” at the prospect of paying the call. “Oh, Merrill, how could you?” she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks “like a book review.” The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. “Why would I want to meet him?” she wondered. “I had his books.”

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazine’s editors. “Tell him Susan Sontag called. He’ll know why.” (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading — or maybe just walking — through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book “On Photography.” The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks — words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief — had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didn’t want to fail to impress her; I didn’t want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close . I didn’t want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties — anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mother’s illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. “Sempre Susan,” a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the “I knew Susan” minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontag’s own “Pilgrimage.” It’s about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s longtime publisher, issued “Reborn,” the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries aren’t intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind , documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (“I.”; “H”; “C.”). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday — the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays — and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser — “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” published last month — shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. “What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized,” he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more — no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment — has at last been decisively captured by what she called “the image-world,” the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of “On Photography”), but it’s hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe it’s inevitable that after Sontag’s death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing — that rigorous, serious, impersonal self — has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag — brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable — surely fits the bill.

10 “Interpretation,” according to Sontag, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.” And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into “the life,” a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I can’t deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I don’t want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say that’s why she matters to me. In “Sempre Susan,” Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhard’s comic “possessive thinker,” who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose “art selfishness” makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

I’m the opposite of that. I don’t like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasn’t a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, she’s often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didn’t talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay — certainly among the most controversial — is “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by “the spirit of extravagance” with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings — “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it” — that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the “Notes” like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent “a seriousness that fails,” then “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of “Against Interpretation” called “Camus’ Notebooks” — originally published in The New York Review of Books — Sontag divides great writers into “husbands” and “lovers,” a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the “ideal husband of contemporary letters.” It isn’t really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. He’s the guy the reader will settle for, who won’t ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Céline or Gide. He’s also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontag’s serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in “Against Interpretation” and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into “The Pornographic Imagination” with the warning that “No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornograph ies — there are at least three — and before pledging to take them on one at a time.”

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontag’s masterful prose. She’s the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game don’t simply dictate silence or obedience on the reader’s part. What sustains the bond — the bondage, if you’ll allow it — is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. “Against Interpretation” was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. “On Photography” was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years I’ve purchased at least three copies of “Under the Sign of Saturn” — if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, I’d pick that one — and in each the essay on Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I’ve never met such a person. “Mind as Passion” is the best thing I’ve ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer “teaches us how to breathe,” about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in “Under the Sign of Saturn.” Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader — who is also, of course, a writer — is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontag’s reader, the love story becomes an implicit ménage à trois. Each essay enacts the effort — the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown — to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write — the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it — is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. It’s almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why aren’t the kids reading Canetti? Why don’t trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that “the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people.”

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The “new sensibility” she heralded in the ’60s, “dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia,” survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and “let people enjoy things” looks like an emoji-friendly update of “Against Interpretation,” with “enjoy things” a safer formulation than Sontag’s “erotics of art.”

That isn’t what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this year’s Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the ’Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of “On Photography,” which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the ’60s and ’70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query “What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter?” The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism “fascism with a human face.” After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”

That doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontag’s writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda — a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken — was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didn’t soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didn’t read — or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances — to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: “From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

20 “Consciousness” is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. It’s sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs — in ways that escape scientific analysis — to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single person’s private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontag’s great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders — Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud — but Sontag doesn’t quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 “Under the Sign of Saturn” opens in a “tiny room in Paris” where she has been living for the previous year — “small bare quarters” that answer “some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on.” Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If she’s alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

It’s only reading. By which I mean: It’s everything.

A.O. Scott is a chief film critic at The Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.” He last wrote for the magazine about the great film performances of 2018.

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‘The Word Is Camp’: What to Know About the Inspiration for This Year’s Met Gala, as Explained in 1964

T he annual benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is as high-fashion as fashion gets — but this year’s Met Gala, on Monday night, will bring a heavy dose of low culture to the red carpet. After all, the gala’s theme celebrates the opening of its exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion , and that interaction of high and low is key to camp’s spirit.

While the origins of camp can be traced back to the reign of the French King Louis XIV, the inspiration for this show is much more recent. The modern camp aesthetic was solidified in the 1964 Partisan Review essay “Notes on ‘Camp'” by the American critic Susan Sontag .

The essay first appeared that fall, and didn’t take long to grab mainstream attention. Case in point: That December, TIME’s “Modern Living” section explained to readers why everyone was suddenly talking about camp:

Where are the dandies these days? Not the mere fops and mannered exhibitionists, but the lovers and arbiters of style for style’s sake, the cherishers and curators of what’s amusing (as opposed to what’s serious) — a predilection that is one of the luxuries of affluent societies. They thrived in Socrates’ Athens and at the Roman courts of emperors and Popes. The 18th century shone with them, and the 19th century produced the dandy of all time, Oscar Wilde. Wilde rebutted the industrial revolution with flowing locks and velvet suits; he warded off its fumes with a long-stemmed flower. The modern dandy, on the other hand, revels detachedly and deliciously in the vulgarity of mass culture. And the word is not dandyism any more. According to one of Manhattan’s brightest young intellectuals, Novelist Susan Sontag, the word is “Camp.” The essence of Camp, writes Miss Sontag in the Partisan Review , is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Tiffany lamps are Camp, she says by way of illustration, and so is a fondness for Scopitone films and the lurid pseudo journalism of the weekly New York National Enquirer. Turn-of-the-century postcards are Camp; so is enthusiasm for the ballet Swan Lake and the 1933 movie King Kong . Dirty movies are Camp — provided one gets no sexual kick out of them — and so are the ideas of the French playwright Jean Genet, an ex-thief and pederast who boasts about it. “Genet’s statement that ‘the only criterion of an act is its elegance’ is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde’s ‘In matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.'” In matters sexual, according to Miss Sontag, Camp goes against the grain, cherishing either the androgynous, swoony girl-boys and boy-girls of pre-Raphaelite painting or the plangent supersexiness of Jayne Mansfield or Victor Mature. In art, Camp’s exaggeration must proceed from passion and naiveté. “When something is just bad (rather than Camp),” she writes “it’s often because the artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. ‘It’s too much,’ ‘It’s fantastic,’ ‘It’s not to be believed,’ are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.” Click here to read the full story from 1964 in the TIME Vault

The essay launched Sontag’s career as a literary critic, in which “she argued for a more sensuous, less intellectual approach to art,” TIME noted in her obituary , when she died in 2004 at the age of 71. “It was an irony lost on no one, except perhaps her, that she made those arguments in paragraphs that were marvels of strenuous intellection.”

“Notes on ‘Camp'” not only launched her career, but also it launched a new way of thinking. It fit right in with the spirit of the ’60s, an era known for new ideas and the breaking down of taboos. As TIME noted in 1964, when it came to camp, this phenomenon was particularly true in terms of sexuality. Camp was not gender or sexuality specific, Sontag argued, but the aesthetic had been embraced by the LGBTQ community as a way to “neutralize moral indignation” by promoting a playful approach to that which others took seriously.

Which was not to say Sontag didn’t take camp seriously.

“Seriousness was one of Sontag’s lifelong watchwords, but what she sometimes dared to take seriously were matters that educated opinion, as it emerged from the cramped quarters of the 1950s, dismissed as trivia,” TIME wrote in her obituary. “At a time when the barriers between high-and lowbrow were absolute, she argued for a genuine openness to the pleasures of pop culture.”

At the time, however, some were worried that coverage in a mainstream publication like TIME would spell the closing of camp’s fun. “By publishing your recent analysis of ‘Camp,’ you have ensured that Camp will no longer be Camp, if you see what I mean,” one reader argued in a letter to the editor, while another argued that “‘Camp’ is here to stay.” Fifty-five years later, on camp’s big night, it’s clear that the latter was right.

For more current examples of “camp,” see TIME’s illustrated guide .

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5 Key Takeaways from Susan Sontag’s Famous Essay On Style

Susan Sontag’s On Style is a core text of the post-critique movement that argues that analyzing a work of art’s style is an essential component of understanding the work.

Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay On Style outlined her philosophy of the function of style within art and literature. In the mid-twentieth century, criticism was dominated by external frameworks, like Freudian analysis or Marxist critique. These movements tended to think of style as separate from the artwork’s meaning. Sontag’s essay rejected that method of critique and became a core work in a movement called post-critique, which evaluates artworks based on their internal merits.

Who was Susan Sontag?

Susan Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt on January 16, 1933. Her isolated, bookish childhood sparked an insatiable curiosity that drove her first to the University of California, Berkeley, and then the University of Chicago, where she studied philosophy, literature, and politics. In 1950, while still a student, Sontag met and swiftly married (after a mere ten days) a sociology professor called Philip Rieff. Already from her undergraduate days, Sontag looked outside of the academy towards the thriving literary world. She launched into criticism in the final year of her undergraduate degree when the Chicago Review published her review of H. J. Kaplan’s novel The Plenipotentiaries .

Though she would go on to earn her MA in English literature and philosophy at Harvard University, raising her son David, who was born in 1952, made dedicating herself entirely to her intellectual pursuits difficult. Her marriage was also on the rocks, and though Sontag spent much of her time contributing research for her husband’s upcoming book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist , she was also looking for a way out.

In 1957, the opportunity finally arrived: Sontag received the American Association of University Women’s Fellowship to study abroad at St. Anne’s College at Oxford University. Putting her husband in charge of their young son, Sontag set out alone. The time away gave Sontag the space to pursue her own intellectual interests and, after her divorce was finalized, her personal freedom as well. From England she traveled to Paris, studying at the Sorbonne for two years. When she finally returned to New York in 1959, she found a city buzzing with creative energy, and among the abstract expressionists and beatnik poets in Greenwich Village, she began to write. Below are five key takeaways from her 1965 essay On Style that outline a new philosophy.

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Please check your inbox to activate your subscription, 1. every artwork has a style.

According to Sontag, critics and artists both misunderstand the relationship between style and content, often treating them as separate entities. Sontag traced the idea of artists believing that style was external to their artworks back to the Renaissance. However, this continues to the present day.

Sontag articulated this with the works of American author Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman claimed to be removing style from his writing. In the 1855 edition of his most famous work Leaves of Grass , Whitman wrote that great poets do not allow elegance or effect to get between them at the truth. This metaphor, which compares style to curtains hanging between the reader and the truth, is a common mistake of both artists and critics. For a work of art to be authentic, we believe, it must be without any kind of artifice, and style is seen as artificial.

Sontag described the idea that a work of art can be without style as one of the most tenacious fantasies of modern culture . Style is the formal choices that an artist makes when rendering their work, and since all artists make choices, all artists have style.

Whitman did not succeed in having an art form without a style, his poetry would later be considered a forerunner of the Confessional Movement , for example. This is not because Whitman failed at his mission, but because his mission was impossible to fulfill from the start since there is no artwork that doesn’t have a style.

2. Stylization Happens When the Artwork’s Style is Artificial

You might be asking yourself, are some works of art more reliant on style than others? Yes. Sontag described the phenomena of stylization which happens when an artist intentionally focuses on producing a new style. She identified two moments in which this occurred historically: Mannerism and Art Nouveau.

Mannerism was an art movement of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries whose name comes from the Italian maniera , meaning style . For something to be done in a Mannerist style, or literally stylish style , meant that it cultivated an intentionally elegant, artificial aesthetic. Through elongated bodies and vibrant colors, artists like Giorgio Vasari and Paolo Veronese intentionally departed from the grounded naturalism of the high Renaissance.

Similarly, the Art Nouveau movement consisted of artists, architects, and designers who cultivated a certain aesthetic. Regardless of an object’s practical function, it would be decorated with swirls, flowers, and other natural forms. Artists such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Victor Horta created designs that were stylized because of the intense study that they put into cultivating this aesthetic. Sontag wrote that when other critics encountered the exaggerated styles of these movements, they mistakenly inferred that movements with less obvious stylization had no style at all. However, this was a mistake since all artworks have style, some are just more artificially cultivated than others.

3. Styles Only Become Apparent When a New Style Emerges

According to Sontag, artists are rarely conscious of a style as it is being created. Similarly, critics looking at works of contemporary art and literature will rarely understand a work’s style and they are prone to mistakenly refer to it as being without style. How, then, do we begin to recognize a style?

Sontag argued that an existing style is only understood in hindsight after it has been replaced by a new dominant style. Artists begin to work by understanding the style of their forerunners as something to escape from. The choices made by their predecessors seem incorrect, even artificial, and the new generation pursues a style that seems more authentic and without style to them. In doing so, they make new formal and aesthetic choices, developing a new style. Sontag specifically identified Cubism as an example of this natural emergence of style.

Critics articulate the old style in their writing about how the new artists are pushing boundaries, thereby articulating what the older style’s boundaries actually were. This pattern repeated endlessly during the twentieth century, as artists constantly challenged the artistic decisions of their forebearers, giving rise to the endless parade of art movements that defined modernism .

4. Artworks Are Not Statements, They Are Experiences

Sontag believed that one of the biggest mistakes that a viewer could make when approaching a new work of art is to attempt to disregard its style in favor of understanding the statement it is trying to make. Many museumgoers around the world asked themselves but what does it mean? That question is not entirely irrelevant, but it’s off the mark.

For Sontag, art is an experience, not just the content or message of the work. She wrote: Art is not only about something; it is something . Sontag provided the example of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina . Anna Karenina may be a commentary on relationships, but if we attempt to boil it down to a core message like the statement romantic relationships are complex , we have not truly experienced the novel. To experience the novel is not just to experience its message, but also its form and its style.

Sontag likened artworks to seduction: as viewers, we must be willing participants. If we are constantly trying to disregard style and pursue an inner kernel of meaning, we will misunderstand the work. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to experience the artwork formally and aesthetically, we will have a greater grasp of its significance.

5. Susan Sontag Thought Style Was the Primary Thing to Consider 

How, then, are we supposed to approach a work of art or literature as an audience? Sontag had a handful of suggestions, as well as a few warnings. Sontag described a core problem of viewers who confuse works of art with ethical statements. As she articulated, art is not a moral phenomenon, it is an aesthetic phenomenon. If we think about a painting, for example, we should not judge it based on whether we think the scene depicted on the vase is a good thing or a bad thing.

Sontag used an example of a Greek vase, which we can expand upon. The vase depicts the Greek warrior Neoptolemos attacking Priam, king of Troy, seeking refuge at the altar of Zeus. The vase is not more or less beautiful if we condemn Neoptolemos’ actions if we think that murder is wrong. To do so would be to judge the work of art as a moral phenomenon. Instead, we should evaluate its aesthetic qualities, or, in other words, its style.

While some critics mistakenly believe that a work of art is content wrapped in a gauzy blanket of style, Sontag articulated that content was just the pretext for inviting us into an aesthetic stylistic experience. Style is the primary thing that an artist thinks about when creating the work of art, and the primary thing that we as an audience understand when discussing an artist’s work. Sontag reminded the readers that this may be applied elsewhere: to everyday objects, to speech, and even to behavior. Her vision of style has the potential to transform our understanding of the entire world around us if we accustom ourselves to analyzing how things speak, rather than just what they say.

Who Was Susan Sontag?

By Mary Rose Bedell MA Art History, BA Art History & History Mary is an art historian with a current research focus on modern American Art. She works as an art researcher and adjunct faculty instructor teaching Art History courses. She holds an MA in Art History from Syracuse University and a BA in Art History and History from Mount Holyoke College. Mary is an avid reader and frequently shares book reviews and recommendations online.

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The Aesthetic of Silence: Susan Sontag on Art as a Form of Spirituality and the Paradoxical Role of Silence in Creative Culture

By maria popova.

In The Aesthetics of Silence , the first essay from her altogether indispensable 1969 collection Styles of Radical Will ( public library ), Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933–December 28, 2004) examines how silence mediates the role of art as a form of spirituality in an increasingly secular culture.

Shortly after she wrote in her diary that “art is a form of consciousness” and shortly before Pablo Neruda penned his beautiful ode to silence and Paul Goodman — who shared a mutual admiration with Sontag — enumerated the nine kinds of silence , she writes:

Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is “art.” The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move), have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions. Of course, the site needs continual refurbishing. Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness. Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.

But modern art, Sontag argues, is as much a form of consciousness as an answer to our longing for anti-consciousness, speaking to what she calls “the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement”:

Art is no longer understood as consciousness expressing and therefore, implicitly, affirming itself. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote — evolved from within consciousness itself.

As such, art usurps the role religion and mysticism previously held in human life — something to satisfy our “craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech.” The spiritual satiation that arises from this dialogue between art and anti-art, Sontag points out, necessitates the pursuit of silence. For the serious artist, silence becomes “a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak.”

In a counterpart to her later admonition that publicity is “a very destructive thing” for any artist , Sontag considers the zeal the artist must have in protecting that zone of silence — a notion of particular urgency in our age of tyrannical expectations regarding artists’ engagement with social media:

So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience… Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

And yet, in a sentiment that calls to mind Kierkegaard’s astute observation that expressing contempt is still a demonstration of dependence , Sontag recognizes that the gesture of silence in abdication from society is still “a highly social gesture.” She writes:

An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence.

Silence, then, is exercised not in the absolute but in degrees, mediating between art and anti-art, between consciousness and anti-consciousness:

The exemplary modern artist’s choice of silence is rarely carried to this point of final simplification, so that he becomes literally silent. More typically, he continues speaking, but in a manner that his audience can’t hear… Modern art’s chronic habit of displeasing, provoking, or frustrating its audience can be regarded as a limited, vicarious participation in the ideal of silence which has been elevated as a major standard of “seriousness” in contemporary aesthetics. But it is also a contradictory form of participation in the ideal of silence. It is contradictory not only because the artist continues making works of art, but also because the isolation of the work from its audience never lasts… Goethe accused Kleist of having written his plays for an “invisible theatre.” But eventually the invisible theatre becomes “visible.” The ugly and discordant and senseless become “beautiful.” The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. […] Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the ultimate weapon in the artist’s inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer to silence.

And yet, Sontag points out, silence is relational — while it may be the intention of the artist, it can never be the experience of the audience. (For a supreme example, we need not look further than John Cage , who even during his most forceful imposition of silence was in dynamic dialogue with the audience upon which silence was being imposed.)

Sontag, in fact, shined a sidewise gleam on this notion three years earlier in her masterwork Against Interpretation — for what is interpretation if not the act of filling the artist’s silence with the audience’s noise? She writes:

Silence doesn’t exist in a literal sense, however, as the experience of an audience. It would mean that the spectator was aware of no stimulus or that he was unable to make a response… As long as audiences, by definition, consist of sentient beings in a “situation,” it is impossible for them to have no response at all. […] There is no neutral surface, no neutral discourse, no neutral theme, no neutral form. Something is neutral only with respect to something else — like an intention or an expectation. As a property of the work of art itself, silence can exist only in a cooked or non-literal sense. (Put otherwise: if a work exists at all, its silence is only one element in it.) Instead of raw or achieved silence, one finds various moves in the direction of an ever receding horizon of silence — moves which, by definition, can never be fully consummated.

She illustrates this with the classic scene from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass , where Alice encounters a shop “full of all manner of curious things,” and yet whenever she looks closely at any one shelf, it appears “quite empty, though the others round it were crowded full as they could hold.” Silence, similarly, is relational rather than absolute:

“Silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence: just as there can’t be “up” without “down” or “left” without “right,” so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence… A genuine emptiness, a pure silence is not feasible — either conceptually or in fact. If only because the artwork exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue.

Silence, Sontag argues, is also a way of steering the attention. In a passage triply timely today, half a century of attention-mauling media later, she writes:

Art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention… Once the artist’s task seemed to be simply that of opening up new areas and objects of attention. That task is still acknowledged, but it has become problematic. The very faculty of attention has come into question, and been subjected to more rigorous standards… Perhaps the quality of the attention one brings to bear on something will be better (less contaminated, less distracted), the less one is offered. Furnished with impoverished art, purged by silence, one might then be able to begin to transcend the frustrating selectivity of attention, with its inevitable distortions of experience. Ideally, one should be able to pay attention to everything.

Many years later, Sontag would advise aspiring writers to learn to “pay attention to the world” as the most important skill of storytelling. Silence, she argues here, invites us to pay selfless and unselfconscious attention to the world the artist is creating. In a sentiment that explains why there are no comments on Brain Pickings and captures today’s acute spiritual hunger for a space for unreactive contemplation amid a culture of reactive opinion-slinging, Sontag writes:

Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject… In principle, the audience may not even add its thought. All objects, rightly perceived, are already full. […] The efficacious artwork leaves silence in its wake. Silence, administered by the artist, is part of a program of perceptual and cultural therapy, often on the model of shock therapy rather than of persuasion. Even if the artist’s medium is words, he can share in this task: language can be employed to check language, to express muteness… Art must mount a full-scale attack on language itself, by means of language and its surrogates, on behalf of the standard of silence.

Once again, Sontag’s extraordinary prescience shines its brilliant beam upon our time, across half a century of perfectly anticipated cultural shifts. Much like she presaged the downsides of the internet’s photo-fetishism in the 1970s and admonished against treating cultural material as “content” in the 1960s, she captures the entire ethos of our social media in 1967:

The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that .

The Aesthetics of Silence is an immeasurably rewarding read in its entirety, as is the remainder of Styles of Radical Will . Complement it with Sontag on love , “aesthetic consumerism” and the violence of visual culture , how polarities imprison us , why lists appeal to us , her diary meditations on art , and her advice to aspiring writers .

— Published July 6, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/06/the-aesthetic-of-silence-susan-sontag/ —

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Susan Sontag

(1933-2004)

What Is Susan Sontag Known For?

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York City. In 1964, she gained recognition for her essay “Notes on Camp.” Sontag became widely known for her nonfiction works including Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), On Photography (1976) and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as for novels like The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), for which she won the National Book Award. Sontag died from cancer on December 28, 2004, in New York.

Early Life and Education

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York, New York to Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt, with the couple later having a second daughter, Judith. Sontag’s father was a fur trader, and her parents lived overseas for his business while Sontag lived with her grandparents in New York. Sontag's father died when she was still a child. Her mother moved the family to milder climates because of Sontag’s asthma and they eventually relocated ato California. In 1945, Mildred married Air Corps captain Nathan Sontag, from whom a pre-teen Sontag would take her surname.

Sontag became an avid reader and learner. She graduated high school at the age of 15 and attended the University of California at Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she met lecturer Philip Rieff. The two were married in less than two weeks after meeting and would have a son, David. Upon earning her bachelor’s in philosophy, Sontag went on to earn her master’s in English and philosophy at Harvard and did additional postgraduate work abroad at Oxford and the Sorbonne.

'Notes on Camp'

Sontag returned to the states by the late 1950s and opted to end her marriage with Rieff, moving to back to New York City with her son. She worked as a college instructor and began to make a name for herself as an essayist, writing for publications like The Nation and The New York Review of Books . A piece she wrote for The Parisian Review , “Notes on Camp,” earned her accolades. She had also been working on her debut novel, The Benefactor , released in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s publisher for the duration of her career.

As an intellectual and a woman in what was still too often a boys’ club, Sontag challenged traditional notions of how art should be interpreted and consumed and what cultural tropes could receive serious scrutiny. She was a renaissance soul as known for everything from collections of nonfiction prose like Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) and On Photography (1977) to fiction like I, etcetera: Stories (1978) and The Volcano Lover (1992). She also wrote and directed films, including Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Letter from Venice (1981).

National Book Award

Sontag was the source of much controversy throughout her career, with critics looking at everything from her political statements (i.e. she once offered words of support for communist governments, changing her stance later on) to the amount of attention she received from the general media.

Relationships, Illness and Death

Though Sontag took on sexuality-based cultural criticism, she was generally private about her affairs and enjoyed intimate relationships with women, including Eva Kollisch and photographer Annie Leibovitz , with whom she collaborated on the book Women (1999).

Sontag was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 1975. She detailed how myths around the disease can derail effective treatment in the book Illness as Metaphor (1978), later followed by another book about health and stigma, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989).

Sontag died from a form of leukemia on December 28, 2004, in New York City. Her son David, who went on to become an editor and a writer as well, paid tribute to Sontag in the book Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008).

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Susan Sontag
• Birth Year: 1933
• Birth date: January 16, 1933
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: New York City
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Susan Sontag was a critical essayist, cultural analyst, novelist and filmmaker. She wrote 'On Photography,' 'Illness as Metaphor,' 'The Volcano Lover' and 'In America,' among many other works.
• War and Militaries
• Education and Academia
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Politics and Government
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• The Sorbonne
• Oxford College
• University of Chicago
• Harvard University
• Nacionalities
• Occupations
• Anti-War Activist
• Death Year: 2004
• Death date: December 28, 2004
• Death State: New York
• Death City: New York City
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Susan Sontag Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/susan-sontag
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 26, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is the zone of freedom.
• I did have the idea that I’d like to have several lives, and it’s very hard to have several lives and then have a husband. … [S]omewhere along the line, one has to choose between the Life and the Project.
• If literature has engaged me as a project, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories of concern.
• It never occurred to me that I would want to marry someone who didn't like someone who read a lot of books.

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Susan sontag.

by Tresa Grauer , updated by Dory Fox Last updated June 23, 2021

In her essays, or "case-studies," examining art and the "modern sensibility," Susan Sontag covered topics from photography to illness to fascism. One of the most widely read cultural critics of her generation, she is pictured here on a visit to Israel to receive the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, an event which engendered much debate regarding her relationship with the Jewish community.

Institution: Jerusalem International Book Fair

Susan Sontag was born in New York City in 1933 and raised mostly in Los Angeles. She showed a voracious interest in literature at a young age and graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. She married while in college and had one son. After several years studying in Boston, England, and France, she settled in New York, where she had a highly successful literary career. Her essay “Notes on Camp,” about the quirky, high-low “camp” aesthetic, earned her early fame. Her book Against Interpretation (1966) further solidified her position as a public intellectual. She went on to write many books of essays, novels, and plays. Some of her most famous works deal with AIDS and illness, photography, aesthetics, and morality. Sontag was first diagnosed with cancer in 1975; after multiple recurrences, she ultimately died of leukemia in 2004.

Introduction

When her essays first began appearing on the American critical scene in the early 1960s, Susan Sontag was heralded by many as the voice—and the face—of the Zeitgeist. Advocating a “new sensibility” that was “defiantly pluralistic,” as she announced in her groundbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag became simultaneously an intellectual of consequence and a popular icon, publishing everywhere from Partisan Review to Playboy and appearing on the covers of Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine . She became for many a cultural symbol, the image of the female intellectual; she herself would joke that she was best known for the white streak in her dark hair, rather than for anything she had written. In her work, she rejected the traditional project of art interpretation as reactionary and stifling and called instead for a new, more sensual experience of the aesthetic world: “an act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness” ( Against Interpretation , 29). Challenging what she saw as “established distinctions within the world of culture itself—that between form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and... ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,” Sontag stood as a champion of the avant-garde and visual arts in particular ( Against Interpretation , 297).

As the only woman among the 1960s world of New York Jewish intellectuals, Sontag was both venerated and villainized, depicted as either a counter-cultural hero or a posturing pop celebrity. In a 1968 essay in Commentary , Irving Howe saw her as the “publicist” for a young generation of critics that was making its presence felt “like a spreading blot of anti-intellectualism.” Focusing on the woman rather than the work, other critics dubbed her “Miss Camp” (after her famous essay “Notes on Camp”) and “The Dark Lady of American Letters” (a moniker borrowed from Mary McCarthy). Indeed, in his 1967 book Making It , Norman Podhoretz snidely attributed her popularity to her gender and to the fact that she was “clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong taste of naughtiness.” While Sontag’s public image later shifted from that of sixties radical to nineties neo-conservative, neither representation accounts for either the complexity of her views or the significance of her contribution to contemporary cultural debates—particularly on topics such as photography, illness, and the representation of suffering.

Sontag was the subject of intense media scrutiny throughout her career, despite her own consistent rejection of the biographical as a means of understanding a work. “I don’t want to return to my origins,” she told Jonathan Cott in an interview. “I think of myself as self-created—that’s my working illusion.” Her distrust of the potentially reductive nature of personal, biographical criticism was magnified by her insistence that she herself did not “have anything to go back to.”

Early Life and Education

Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933, in New York City, the older of Jack and Mildred (Jacobson) Rosenblatt’s two daughters. Her early years were spent with her grandparents in New York while her parents ran a fur export business in China. When she was five, her father died of tuberculosis and her mother returned from China. A year later, mother and daughters moved to Tucson, Arizona, in an effort to relieve Susan’s developing asthma. In 1945, Mildred Rosenblatt married Army Air Corps captain Nathan Sontag, the daughters assumed their stepfather’s last name, and the family left Arizona for a suburb of Los Angeles. Although her parents were Jewish, Sontag did not have a religious upbringing, and she claims not to have entered a synagogue until her mid-twenties.

The one autobiographical essay that Sontag published during her lifetime, “Pilgrimage,” depicts the writer’s long-standing sense of rootlessness and fragmentation as “the resident alien” in a “facsimile of family life.” It also expresses her feeling of intellectual isolation and her fear of “drowning in drivel” in suburban America. “Literature-intoxicated” from a very young age, she read the European modernists to escape “that long prison sentence, my childhood” and to achieve “the triumphs of being not myself.” Many of these issues—the fierce individualism of the intellect, the pleasure and nourishment to be derived from knowledge, and the question of what it means to be modern—became central themes in Sontag’s fiction and essays. These concerns are also on display in her posthumously published journals, which record her thoughts, beginning at age fourteen. The journals display a young writer brimming with both precocious intellect and recurrent self-questioning.

At age fifteen, Sontag discovered literary magazines at a nearby newsstand, and she described her excitement in an interview with Roger Copeland by explaining that “from then on my dream was to grow up, move to New York, and write for Partisan Review .” She achieved this dream in 1961, after twelve years in the academic world. Having graduated from high school at age fifteen, Sontag spent one semester at the University of California at Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago for the remainder of her college study. There she met Philip Rieff, a sociology lecturer, while auditing a graduate class on Freud. They married ten days later, when Sontag was seventeen and Rieff twenty-eight. Their only son, David, who would later be for some time her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was born in 1952. That same year, Sontag entered Harvard as a graduate student in English and philosophy. After receiving master’s degrees in both fields (1954 and 1955, respectively), Sontag left her husband and son and spent two years studying at Oxford and the Sorbonne, although she did not complete a dissertation at either institution.

Shortly after her return to the United States in 1959, she divorced Rieff and moved to New York City, with “seventy dollars, two suitcases and a seven-year-old [her son].” As she explained in the interview with Jonathan Cott: “I did have the idea that I’d like to have several lives, and it’s very hard to have several lives and then have a husband. … [S]omewhere along the line, one has to choose between the Life and the Project.” In the final decade and a half of her life, Sontag had a relationship with her the photographer Annie Leibovitz , with whom she would sometimes collaborate artistically.

Literary Career

In New York, Sontag began establishing herself as an independent writer while teaching philosophy in temporary positions at Sarah Lawrence, City College, and Columbia University and working briefly as an editor at Commentary . She published twenty-six essays between 1962 and 1965, as well as an experimental novel, The Benefactor , in 1963. Although best known for her nonfiction, Sontag worked in many creative genres. The 1960s and 1970s saw the production of a second novel, Death Kit (1967), a collection of short stories, I, Etcetera (1978), and the script and direction of three experimental films: Duet for Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), and Promised Lands (1974). Promised Lands , a documentary on Israel’s The Day of Atonement, which falls on the 10 th day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei and is devoted to prayer and fasting. Yom Kippur War, was the only one of Sontag’s works that dealt explicitly with Jewish issues.

Sontag’s career-long series of essays—or “case studies,” as she called them in Against Interpretation —revealed an expansive and democratic definition of art, encompassing such diverse subjects as photography, illness, fascist aesthetics, pornography, and the Vietnam War. A self-described intellectual generalist, Sontag explained in an interview with Roger Copeland that her overarching project was to “delineate the modern sensibility from as many angles as possible.” Sontag’s writing was notable for its style, often aphoristic in character. Her essays ranged freely from high modernism to mass culture, from European to American artistic figures, from the aesthetics of silence to the contemporary media proliferation of images and noise. Her career as a writer was characterized by the tension between such oppositions: “Everything I’ve written—and done,” she explained, “has had to be wrested from the sense of complexity. This, yes. But also that . It’s not really disagreement, it’s more like turning a prism—to see something from another point of view.”

In both her fiction and her critical essays, Sontag told Copeland, she used such disjunctive forms of writing as “collage, assemblage, and inventory” to demonstrate her thesis that “form is a kind of content and content an aspect of form.” Insisting that interpretation is “the revenge of the intellect against the world,” Against Interpretation , her first collection of essays, sought to subvert both the style and the subject matter of traditional critical inquiry. The function of criticism should be to help us experience art more fully, she explained, “to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is , rather than to show what it means .” Against Interpretation introduced an American audience to lesser-known European figures such as Georg Lukács, Simone Weil, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It also explored the irreverent playfulness and self-conscious artificiality of an underground camp aesthetic.

Styles of Radical Will (1969) advanced Sontag’s aesthetic argument by looking closely at pornography, theater, and film, and by examining the impact of self-consciousness on the modern art and philosophy of E. M. Cioran, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard. But the collection suggested a political as well as an aesthetic mode of transforming consciousness. The essay “Trip to Hanoi,” originally published in 1968 as a separate book, was Sontag’s candid response to her trip to North Vietnam as she grappled with the limits of her own culturally formed perceptions. Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), which comprised seven essays of the 1970s, combined personal reflections on Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes with sustained analyses of Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, and Elias Canetti. It also contained the well-known piece “Fascinating Fascism,” in which Sontag used Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films to discuss the ways in which history becomes theater.

Sontag’s award-winning volume On Photography (1977) analyzed how photographic images have changed our ways of looking at the world. Resistant to the acquisitive nature of photography and its consequent leveling of meaning, Sontag here displayed a growing suspicion of the “sublime neutrality” of art that she had so heralded in Against Interpretation . Although hopeful about the value of photography when it awakens the conscience of the audience, she was also concerned about its potentially predatory nature, explaining that “[t]o photograph people is to violate them.” Like On Photography, Illness as Metaphor (1978) broke new critical ground by examining the significance of a common cultural phenomenon, specifically regarding pain and suffering: in this case, the discursive representation of disease. Growing out of Sontag’s own diagnosis of breast cancer in 1975, the book sought to expose the fantasies and fears that are masked by the vocabulary of illness. In 1989, she elaborated on this theme in AIDS and Its Metaphors , which was received with some controversy. Many in the gay community criticized her efforts to disentangle the cultural metaphors of AIDS from its politics.

Sontag also focused her efforts on fiction and theater in these years. Unguided Tour, the film version of an earlier short story, appeared in 1983. In 1985, she directed the premier production of Milan Kundera’s play Jacques and His Master . Her own play, Alice in Bed , premiered in Bonn, Germany, in 1991 and was published in 1993. That same year, she traveled with her partner, photographer Annie Leibovitz to act, in her words, as a “star witness” during the Bosnian War. While there Sontag directed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in war-besieged Sarajevo. Twenty-five years after the publication of her previous novel, Sontag’s critically acclaimed The Volcano Lover (1992) appeared, bringing together concerns that long animated her writing: the relationship between style and form, the moral pleasure—and service—of art, and the psychology of collecting. A historical novel with a self-consciously modern narrator, The Volcano Lover was a revisionary retelling of the eighteenth-century love affair between Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Horatio Nelson that moved away from the abstraction of Sontag’s earlier fiction while still remaining a novel of ideas. Sontag’s final novel, In America (2000), which won the National Book Award for Fiction, was also set in the past; based on the life of a nineteenth-century Polish performer who immigrated to America with the dream of establishing a utopian community, the novel relied on the language of theater and acting in order to consider the thematic possibilities of re-inventing both the individual and the nation.

Sontag continued to write essays about photography toward the end of her life. She returned to the topic, first with an essay written to accompany a series of women’s portraits by Leibovitz (published as Women in 1999; an exhibition of the photographs then went on national tour), and then with Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which discussed the ramifications of the near ubiquity of images of war. Her final work published during her lifetime was Regarding the Torture of Others (May 23, 2004), an essay in the New York Times Magazine about American soldiers’ torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Building on her body of work, she explored the moral ramifications of the seemingly banal, widely circulated, cell phone-captured photographs of this torture.

End of Life and Intellectual Legacy

Over the course of her career, Sontag remained committed to the idea of cultural criticism, explaining that it is “what being an intellectual—as opposed to being a writer—is.” Her contributions were recognized through numerous awards and grants, which included two Rockefeller Foundation Grants (1964, 1974), two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (1966, 1975), the Arts and Letters Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1976), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1990), the Writers for Writers award (1998) and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (2001). In 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, after having been named an Officier in the same order in 1984. She received two additional European tributes in 2003—the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She served as a member of the selection jury for the Venice Film Festival and the New York Film Festival and was a founding member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Sontag also served as president of the PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989. When the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his “blasphemous” book The Satanic Verses (1988), Sontag spearheaded protests on his behalf within the literary community. “Her resolute support,” Rushie said after Sontag’s death, “helped to turn the tide against what she called ‘an act of terrorism against the life of the mind.’”

Sontag’s cultural criticism took many forms and did not conform to a single political ideology. In the 1960s, her writing aligned with the avant-garde; in later years, she was frequently criticized for aesthetic and political conservatism. She publicly broke with the New Left at a town hall in 1982 when she denounced communism. Her politics consistently evaded categorization. “I don’t like party lines,” she explained in an interview published in Salmagundi . “They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.”  In the early 2000s, Sontag was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. war in Iraq, and she criticized President George Bush’s response to the September 11th terrorist attacks within weeks of their occurrence.

While her consistent advocacy of critical autonomy did not itself mark a turn to the political right, toward the end of her career her insistence on being considered a universalist, and her refusal to be identified by gender, religion, or sexual orientation, did leave her outside crucial debates that fueled contemporary critical discourse. This suspicion of particularist affiliations placed Sontag at some distance from contemporary art and culture; however, it also stood as an unresolved tension within her own work. For example, despite her disavowal of feminism as “an empty word,” The Volcano Lover ends with the admission by a female character that “all women, including the author of this book … lie to [themselves] about how complicated it is to be a woman.” 

Although Sontag did not write explicitly about Jewish issues, Jews are frequently a point of reference in her writing, from which she drew analogies to other groups. Moreover, Sontag traced her personal interest in photographs of suffering (what she called an “inventory of horror”) back to seeing images of the Holocaust at the age of twelve. She wrote that “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life— ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts”: before seeing the images and after ( On Photography 19-20).

Sontag’s relationship to the Jewish community received much attention in light of her selection as the Jerusalem prize laureate for 2001, particularly as Shimon Peres’s claim that “[F]irst she’s Jewish, then she’s a writer, then she’s American” ran counter to her own self-definition. Furthermore, Sontag’s willingness to accept an award that is “given to writers whose works reflect the freedom of the individual in society” from Israel—a country frequently criticized for violating those same individual rights—raised significant political protest, most notably from left-wing Jewish women’s organizations who saw her acceptance of the prize as “a tacit legitimization of the occupation.” Lashing out at this suggestion, Sontag used the occasion of the award ceremony to criticize Israel’s actions in the territories, accepting the prize “in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truth.” This response, in turn, raised the ire of the right, who attacked her criticism of Israel as the words of a “perfect example of a self-hating Jew.”

Thus, while the “particular” was clearly a matter of concern for Sontag and her critics, Sontag refused to limit herself to any single critical perspective. In her acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, she explained, “If literature has engaged me as a project, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories of concern.” What she wrote of Roland Barthes applied well to her own project: “The point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure” (“On Roland Barthes,” xvii).

Sontag, who had suffered from cancer intermittently for thirty years (she had been told after her original diagnosis in 1975 that she had a ten percent chance of surviving for two years), died of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia on December 28, 2004, two weeks shy of her seventy-second birthday. Leibovitz photographed Sontag’s final days, as she was caring for her, and published images of Sontag on her deathbed in the book A Photographer’s Life:1990-2005 (2006), to some controversy. This would be but the first in a series of posthumous biographical and autobiographical works about Sontag. These include her journals, edited by her son and published in two volumes ( Reborn covers 1947-1963 and As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh covers 1964-1980), a play, Sontag: Reborn (2013), based on the journals, an authorized biography, and a documentary film. Sontag has continued to inspire reexamination in as many forms as she herself engaged in.

Of the woman who once described a writer as one who should be “interested in everything,” the New York Times wrote: “What united Sontag’s output was a propulsive desire to define the forces—aesthetic, moral, political—that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she hoped to understand what it meant to be human in the waning years of the twentieth century.”

Selected Works

Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 1966.

Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.

Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978.

“Pilgrimage.” New Yorker (December 21, 1978): 38–54.

Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.

A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.

AIDS and Its Metaphors . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

“Why Are We in Kosovo?” New York Times Magazine , May 2, 1999.

Women , photographs by Annie Leibovitz, essay by Susan Sontag. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999.

“The Talk of the Town,” by Susan Sontag et al. The New Yorker, September 24, 2001.

Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

Regarding the Pain of Others . London: Penguin, 2003.

“Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times, May 23, 2004.

Novels and Short Story Collections

The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963.

Death Kit. New York: New American Library, 1967.

I, Etcetera. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978.

“The Way We Were,” The New Yorker , 1986.

The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.

In America. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993.

Films and Filmscripts

Duet for Cannibals (1969).

Duet for Cannibals: A Screenplay (1970).

Brother Carl (1971).

Brother Carl: A Filmscript (1974).

Promised Lands (1974).

Unguided Tour (1983).

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 , ed. David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries, 1964-1980 , ed. David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012.

Angelos, Moe. Sontag: Reborn. New York: The Builders Association, 2013.

Aronowitz, Stanley. “Sontag versus Barthes for Barthes’ Sake.” Village Voice Literary Supplement (November 1982): 1+.

Brooke-Rose, Christine. “Eximplosions.” Genre 14:1 (Spring 1981): 9–21.

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Primacy of the Reader.” Mississippi Review 6, No. 2 (1983): 289–301.

Cole, Teju. “What Does It Mean to Look at This?” NYTimes , May 24, 2018.

Contemporary Authors. Vol. 25. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research Co., 1989).

Emre, Merve. “Misunderstanding Susan Sontag.” The Atlantic , Sep. 9, 2019.

Fox, Margalit. “Susan Sontag, Social Critic with Verve, Dies at 71.” NYTimes , Dec. 28, 2004.

Hentoff, Nat. “Celebrity Censorship.” Inquiry 5, No. 10 (June 1982): 8.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37.

Holdsworth, Elizabeth McCaffrey. “Susan Sontag: Writer-Filmmaker.” Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (April 1982), Ohio State University, 1991.

Hollander, Paul. Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 1928–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Howe, Irving. “The New York Intellectuals.” Commentary 46 (October 1968). Reprinted in Selected Writings 1950–1990 , by Irving Howe, 267-268. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

Kalaidjian, Walter B. “Susan Sontag.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism , edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Kendrick, Walter. “In a Gulf of Her Own.” The Nation (October 23, 1982): 404.

Kennedy, Liam. Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Kramer, Hilton. “Anti-Communism and the Sontag Circle.” New Criterion 5, No. 1 (September 1986): 1–7.

Kramer, Hilton. “The Pasionaria of Style.” The Atlantic 50, No. 3 (September 1982): 88–93.

Kaplan, Alice. Dreaming in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Kates, Nancy. Regarding Susan Sontag . New York: Women Make Movies, 2014.

Light, Steve. “The Noise of Decomposition: Response to Susan Sontag.” Sub-stance 26 (1980): 85–94.

Linkon, Sherry Lee. “Susan Sontag.” Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ann R. Shapiro et al. New York: Greenwood, 1994.

Lopate, Phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Manson, Aaron. “Remembering Susan Sontag.” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 1 (2005): 1–4.

Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Moser, Benjamin. “The Pictures Will Not Go Away’: Susan Sontag’s Lifelong Obsession with Suffering.” The Guardian , Sep. 17, 2019.

Nelson, Cary. “Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag.” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1980): 707–729.

Nelson, Deborah. Tough Enough . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Podhoretz, Norman. Making It (1967). Cited in Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion , by Liam Kennedy, 133. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Poague, Leland, ed. Conversations with Susan Sontag . Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Rich, Frank. “Stage: Milan Kundera’s ‘Jacques and His Master.’” NYTimes , January 24, 1985, C19.

Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Shapiro, Ann R. ed. et al., Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook . New York: Greenwood, 1994).

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How to cite this page

Grauer, Tresa and Dory Fox. "Susan Sontag." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women . 23 June 2021. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on April 22, 2024) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/sontag-susan>.

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Susan Sontag’s 54-year-old essay on “camp” is essential reading

What do  Swan Lake , Tiffany lamps, and “ Broccoli ” feauring Lil Yachty all have in common? Ostensibly, nothing. But a thread runs through them all: the cultural trope known as “camp.”

Camp also happens to be the theme of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s much-anticipated costume exhibition, the New York City museum announced this week. “ Camp: Notes on Fashion ” will be unveiled on May 6 at the annual Met Gala, an event underwritten by Gucci and led by Vogue editor-in-chief and Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour. The gala will be co-chaired this year by the singer and actress Lady Gaga, the tennis star Serena Williams, Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, and singer Harry Styles (who recently posed in  a very camp livestock-filled Gucci campaign ).

Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, will explore how the “camp sensibility” can be traced back to the French court under Louis XIV, who gathered the decorated Parisian nobility at Versailles. In that palace of high camp, “everything was pose and performance,” as  Hamish Bowles puts it in Vogue . And Bolton told the New York Times  that we live now in the midst of another camp explosion: “Whether it’s pop camp, queer camp, high camp or political camp—Trump is a very camp figure—I think it’s very timely.”

The exhibition is inspired and informed largely by Susan Sontag’s brilliant 1964 essay,  “Notes on ‘Camp,'”  a treatise written over 50 years ago that managed to predict the bizarre features of today’s cultural scene to an uncanny degree.

What is “camp,” anyhow? Let Susan Sontag explain

The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.

This is probably most-cited definition of Camp in Sontag’s essay, and it is how she introduces her readers to the elusive “Camp sensibility.”

Though in modern usage “camp” is often used as synonymous to “kitschy” or “flamboyant.” Sontag’s definition is far more nuanced. ”Camp is esoteric,” she explains, “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques… I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.”

Sontag’s “random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp” are illustrative of the aesthetic, and worth reading in full, but they include Tiffany lamps, “the old Flash Gordon comics,”  Swan Lake , and “stag movies seen without lust.”

Of Sontag’s 58 “jottings” on the topic, here are a few that feel especially useful today:

25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (“It’s too much,” “It’s too fantastic,” “It’s not to be believed,” are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.

41. 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.

27. What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp–what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful… Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions.

While Sontag is the main inspiration for the exhibit, the Met will not restrict itself entirely to her definitions. Failed seriousness is a major theme, but it’s important to note that not all examples of camp are supposed to be serious; indeed, as Bolton told the Times, “when [something] is ‘campy,’ it is more self-conscious, but we are going to look at both.”

Is camp another way of saying “gay”?

“[T]he history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste,” Sontag writes. “But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste?”

What arose in the absence of true aristocrats, Sontag wrote in 1964, was “an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.”

Indeed, considering the level of  vitriol around homosexuality  in the 1960s, it’s easy to imagine the appeal of camp, which embraces a kind of performance of identity. But the association of camp with gay culture led to the over-simplification of the term, which eventually fell out of favor after it began to mean “flamboyant” or even was used to mean “gay-seeming” in a derogatory way.

While the Met exhibit is presenting the more nuanced definition of camp that Sontag outlines, the term still has a demeaning connotation to some, even among the connoisseurs and creators of camp. Just last year, writer Amelia Abraham described an interview she did with the unquestionably camp filmmaker John Waters in Vice: “I mentioned the word ‘camp’ offhand and he sounded shocked. ‘Camp!’ he exclaimed—’I don’t know anyone that would ever say the word camp out loud, it’s like an 80-year-old gay man in a 1950s antique shop under a Tiffany lampshade.'”

Fashion is camp

Today’s most prevalent trends—from the rise of ugly footwear to the downright freaky ensembles that designers have sent down the catwalk over the past several years—reek of camp. “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much,'” Sontag writes.

Some of the most consistent over-the-top fashion is coming from Balenciaga under Demna Gvasalia and Gucci under Michele, and both will be represented in the Met exhibit. Balenciaga—with its platform crocs,  fanny packs, and  Comic Sans-printed dresses —is openly subversive, so much so it has been accused of “trolling” consumers.

Likewise, in an ode to the absurd, Gucci sent models down the runway holding their own severed heads in 2017:

Alessandro Michele also presented an aesthetically campy collection this year:

Camp’s irony tenant is also exemplified by Virgil Abloh for Off-White, with his use of quotation marks, which allow him “ to operate in a mode of ironic detachment , ”  the designer explained in a 2017 interview in 032 magazine:

John Galliano, the iconic camp-maker now at Margiela, was busy doing camp at Dior 15 years ago:

As Riccardo Slavik wrote for Collectible Dry in 2017, Galliano’s spring 2004 collection was “a perfect example of Fashion Camp, a show that fused Ancient Egypt, extreme volumes, Cleopatra-in-space drag queen makeup and total impracticality in an iconic way, totally disregarding any thought of sales or wearability… it is camp because it both succeeds and fails so spectacularly .”

Other designers in the exhibit include Charles Frederick Worth and Miuccia Prada, as well as Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons (who was herself the subject of the Costume Institute’s exhibit and gala two years ago).

Donald Trump is camp 

With his lurid golden bathrooms, bombastic reality TV persona, gaudy properties, and affinity for trashy celebrity, Donald Trump was a caricature long before he became US president. As Bolton suggests in calling Trump a “very camp figure,” his mannerisms, vulgarity, and personal style have infused our times.

Indeed, Sontag could have had the current US president in mind when she wrote these lines in 1964: “The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.”

Music is camp

The picture of Lady Gaga in her infamous “meat dress” is a study in camp, and just as high camp was the pop star’s recent water-taxi arrival at the Venice Film Festival to promote A Star is Born— as a “platinum Aphrodite borne on the waves, black stilettos skimming the sea foam,” according to the New York Times . The pop star and actress carries off these performances with a devastatingly deadpan delivery, recalling again Sontag’s words: “In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.”

Both autotune and mumble-rap have been raked over the coals by serious vocalists and lyricists. But excessive autotune (like that of the rapper T-Pain) is perfectly camp: grave in its attempt but intentionally absurd in its execution.

Similarly camp is the anthem “Believe” by Cher, who arguably pioneered the use of autotune:

Meanwhile mumble-rap, a style of rap marked by its incomprehensible—literally “mumbled”—lyrics has been derided for its lack of serious content. But arguably, by prioritizing style over content, mumble-rap becomes “so-bad-it’s-good” camp.

The singer and entrepreneur Rihanna also deserves an honorable mention in the pantheon of camp musicians, particularly for her Met Gala looks of the past several years:

Sneakers are camp 

Fashion’s recent embrace of gleefully, garishly ugly sneakers is a triumph of camp. The trend began around 2015 and took serious hold in early 2017, when Vetements released a hideous $650 version of Reebok’s Instapump Fury.

Today, most high-end designers have released their own takes on the absurd, chunky sneaker, from Louis Vuitton to Prada to Margiela.

But the undisputed  king of the ugly sneakers  is Balenciaga’s Triple S:

Sontag might as well have had a pair of these monstrosities laced to her feet when she wrote: “The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating… Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism.”

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Susan Sontag, Essayist and So Much Else

A new film on susan sontag gives an intimate look at her passions..

Susan Sontag captured by photographer Peter Hujar in 1975.

© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel

How to capture a life? A problem of biographical projects, especially those involving subjects who left behind multiple books and interviews and hours of film footage, is that ten edits of the same story will yield ten different lives. This raises a further question with which every biographer must contend, even for lives much less complex and ecstatic and varied than Susan Sontag’s: How much space should be given over to the messy details of the private life—the love affairs, the children, the fraught relationships with family—how much to the public life, and beyond that, how much to the environment and the era by which that life was shaped?

Nancy Kates’s new documentary film,  Regarding Susan Sontag —a fascinating, moving, and often gorgeous entry into the canon of works produced about Sontag since her death—doesn’t neglect the time and the social forces that shaped Sontag’s life, but, for the most part, the narrative that emerges is deeply personal. It’s a close portrait of a woman who was, in the words of her son, “interested in everything”: Wittgenstein, but also sci-fi B movies; John Cage, but also Fred Astaire.

“She wanted to have everything at least three ways,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in his memoir,  Hitch-22 ,

. . . and she wanted it voraciously: an evening of theater or cinema followed by a lengthy dinner at an intriguing new restaurant, with visitors from at least one new country, to be succeeded by very late-night conversation precisely so that an early start could be made in the morning.

Sontag was born in New York City in 1933, raised in various suburbs—on Long Island, near Tucson, the San Fernando Valley—and when she enrolled at Berkeley as a teenager, she felt she’d found home, standing in line and hearing Proust’s name pronounced correctly for the first time. When she recounts this on video decades later, you can still see the ecstasy of that moment in her face.

She transferred to the University of Chicago, where she married a professor whom she’d only known for ten days. She had a child, went to Oxford on a philosophy fellowship, divorced; fell in and out of love with women and men in Paris and New York; wrote novels, stage plays, and essays on subjects ranging from photography to illness to horror movies. She was brilliant, beautiful, and forceful. She established herself as a cultural critic and a public intellectual, and became excessively famous. By the time of her death—of cancer, in 2004—she had left an indelible and sometimes controversial mark on American culture.

Sontag with her son, David Reiff, in 1967.

Everett Collection

In the edition of the  New Yorker   that appeared a week after 9/11, the Talk of the Town section was given over to a number of short essays by prominent writers, Sontag among them, reflecting on the atrocity. The other writers offered subdued, anguished reflections on the horror of watching the attack unfold, on its aftermath. They wrote of human connections, of grief, of their shock and disorientation as they tried to find bearings in this baffling new world in which we’d all suddenly landed. Sontag, on the other hand, came out with knives drawn. “Where is the acknowledgement,” she wrote,

that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

At a moment when the prevailing sentiment was grief, she’d already moved on to critiquing the language, and she came across as insensitive at best. An early clip in  Regarding  finds her defending her position on ABC, a representative of the Heritage Foundation interrupting and talking over her to explain that Sontag is “an offensive writer,” part of the “‘blame America first’ crowd,” whose “version of patriotism is ‘blame America, blame America.’”

When she eventually succeeds in getting a word in edgewise, she explains that her point in the  New Yorker  wasn’t that America was to blame, her point was that “this sort of build-up of moralistic words to describe this horrendous atrocity was not helping us to understand and reach an intelligent response, political and military, which I’m absolutely in favor of. I’m not a pacifist.”

It was an argument, in other words, for precision and intelligence in our use of language. In the cacophony of interruptions that follows, Kates cuts to an editorial that Sontag wrote as a teenager, in the North Hollywood High School newspaper:

The battle for peace will never be won by calling anyone whom we don’t like a Communist. If we do this, we shall some day realize that in the effort to preserve our Democratic way of life, we have thrown away its noblest feature: the right of every person to express his own opinion.

This is one of the great pleasures of  Regarding , these glimpses of the early life, Kates’s grace in connecting these glimpses to the life and the career that followed. Peter Haidu, a scholar in medieval studies, remembers the teenaged Sontag well. “She sat me down on her bed,” he recalls, “and ran through the argument of the  Critique of Pure Reason , Kant’s  Critique of Pure Reason . She must have been fifteen.”

It’s a given that Sontag was possessed of an extraordinary mind; a strength of  Regarding  is its depiction of an equally extraordinary will. She was who she was—Susan Sontag the icon, as opposed to, say, Susan Sontag the very-well-read-but-unpublished housewife—because she willed herself out of one life and into another. Then another, and another.

In one of the film’s most compelling interviews, shot in Sontag’s later years, a reporter pries gently into the early chronology: college at fifteen, marriage at seventeen, a child at nineteen. “These numbers suggest what?” she asks. Sontag replies:

Eagerness to grow up. I hated being a child. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I wanted to stay up all night. . . . I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to meet people who were interested in what I was interested in.

I couldn’t do what I wanted to do . In  Regarding , this problem seems as relevant to Sontag’s marriage as it was to her childhood. “Marriage,” she wrote in her journal, “is based on the principle of inertia.” An unfortunate conception of marriage for anyone, but particularly disastrous for a person whose internal equilibrium seemed to require constant motion. In 1957, Sontag left her husband and son in the United States—she made arrangements for five-year-old David to be cared for by her husband’s parents—and crossed the Atlantic to study philosophy at Oxford. “I think,” her sister Judith says of this decision, “she just wanted to do what she wanted to do. That’s really all there is to it.”

“She was constantly discovering things and becoming a new person,” the French scholar Alice Kaplan notes in the film, “and that was her essential avant-gardism. You can either suspect it or really, really admire it.”

Or both. It’s possible to admire it on one level and, on another, suspect a certain lack of attention to the effect of those reinventions on the people around her. “She was never able to know what goes on in another person,” her former girlfriend Eva Kollisch said. “I mean the sensitivity that we exercise in everyday life all the time, you know, like ‘what are you thinking, what are you feeling, where are you in this?’ Susan was not sensitive. She was not a sensitive person.”

But Kates’s depiction of Sontag’s decision to leave is nuanced. Sontag may have wanted to do what she wanted to do, but, as Alice Kaplan points out, American parenting in the mid fifties was very different from American parenting today. Some things that seem unfathomable now were less so back then, and vice versa. Moreover, the model of passing off one’s children to other people was a familiar arrangement: Susan and Judith had been raised by relatives until Susan was six and Judith was three, their parents being occupied by the fur-trading business in China.

Consider for a moment this passage from Jenny Offill’s exquisite recent novel,  Dept. of Speculation , in which a married female writer considers the path not taken:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

It is absolutely possible to be an artist and to be married. It’s difficult to be both an art monster, in Offill’s splendid phrasing, and a responsible spouse. And it seems a fairly safe assumption that being both an art monster and a wife would have been virtually impossible in the mid fifties.

Reflecting on the collapse of his marriage with Sontag, in a story that appeared in the  New York Observer  a year after her death, Philip Rieff said, “I think what I wanted was a large family and what she wanted was a large library.”

Sontag visits the Czech Republic in 2001.

Photo by Rossano B. Maniscalchi/Rossano B. Maniscalchi © Alinari/Alinari Archives/Alinari via Getty Images

It’s at this point in the film, when Sontag’s desire for freedom takes her to Oxford and then Paris and then New York, when the contours of her adult life become apparent, that the problem of biographers to which I alluded at the beginning comes into focus. How to edit a fathomless sea of archival material? Or, to put it differently, Which story to tell?

Sontag once wrote, “What makes me feel strong: being in love, and work.”  Regarding  follows these two polestars through the course of Sontag’s life. Kates alights upon the important love affairs—she has found extraordinarily compelling interviewees in Harriet Sohmers Zwerling and Eva Kollisch—and the important works: “Notes on Camp,” On Photography,  The Imagination of Disaster , a few of the others.

Is it a failing of the film that we hear about Susan cheating on Harriet with Irene Fornés but hear nothing of, say, her impassioned defense of Salman Rushdie in the fraught period following his death sentence? Or that while David Rieff is spoken of frequently by the women who were close to his mother, we hear from David himself only fleetingly, in extremely brief interview snippets, mostly having to do with his mother’s illnesses? Or that some of the more explosive moments in Sontag’s public life—her infamous 1967 essay in  Partisan Review , for example, where she proclaimed that “the white race” is “the cancer of human history”—are given only the most cursory mention?

I think there are no right answers here, only different films. If  Regarding Susan Sontag  has a weakness, it’s in an occasional overindulgence in visual gimmickry and special effects. Sometimes the effects are lovely, other times lacking in subtlety: When Sontag is diagnosed with cancer, for instance, the gravitas isn’t heightened by a shot of her photograph being gradually buried by pouring sand.

But Kates and her colleagues have assembled some remarkable footage, and in content and approach  Regarding  is sound. There’s an occasional skimming-the-surface quality to it, but I don’t know how a film that compresses a life into an hour forty minutes could possibly be otherwise. A few of the major works; a few of the major loves; there isn’t time for much more than that.

An interesting quirk of Sontag’s career, well-explicated in  Regarding , is that as famous as she became, she was never known for exactly what she wanted to be known for. The essays made her famous, but she thought of herself as a novelist, always. In the mid nineties, she told Charlie Rose that she wished she’d spent more time writing novels. It’s not clear that this would have been a particularly good idea—Kates seldom passes up an opportunity to point out that the novels’ critical receptions were, to put it politely, mixed—but it’s a wistful note in the film.

Reading Sontag’s essays, all these decades later, the content is often interesting, but equally notable is the supreme self-assurance on display, the calm explication of the way things are. She was more self-conscious in the privacy of her personal journals, but in public her confidence was remarkable. Much later in life, she noted of her 1960s essays that “they were very insolent, like a young person’s work.” Confidence is a privilege of the young—I don’t know about you, but I was never more confident in my understanding of the way the world worked than when I was seventeen or eighteen years old—but she wrote those essays in her thirties, which is young but not  that  young.

One of the film’s more entertaining interview segments, recorded in the same era, opens as Sontag has apparently just been asked if she’s aware of the critical reception of her first film,  Duet for Cannibals : “Yes,” she says, a little irritated, “I know, I read the reviews.” A clipped, vaguely British syntax. In those days she sometimes slipped into that wonderful and regrettably now-lost transatlantic accent.

“Have you any comments?”

“I think they’re wrong.”

The confidence wasn’t a byproduct of youth; the confidence was something essential to Sontag, and it seems to me that it was inextricable from her will. There were moments when it curdled into arrogance. Her 1992 interview with Christopher Lydon, excerpted in  Regarding , is painful to watch. She is imperious, dismissive, and needlessly insulting. She makes no effort to hide her contempt.

“She represents grandiosity, I think,” the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum suggests a moment later, “and it is a little comic, and there is an aspect of camp. Susan Sontag  is camp. Her seriousness is a kind of camp, because it’s a bit of a pose, it’s mannered and stylized. But that’s part of the fun of the package of Susan Sontag.”

But she doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. And there’s something a little horrifying, isn’t there, in the thought of turning unknowingly into a camp version of oneself?

In 1989, a crowd in Birmingham, England, responds to a fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie for his novel Satanic Verses; Sontag publicly denounced the hatred, the Ayatollah, and cowardice.

© Abbas/Magnum Photos

Of that terrible moment when the Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, Christopher Hitchens wrote:

Susan Sontag was absolutely superb. She stood up proudly where everyone could see her and denounced the hirelings of the Ayatollah. She nagged everybody on her mailing list and shamed them, if they needed to be shamed, into either signing or showing up. ‘A bit of civic fortitude,’ as she put it in that gravelly voice that she could summon so well, ‘is what is required here.’ Cowardice is horribly infectious, but in that abysmal week she showed that courage can be infectious, too. I loved her. This may sound sentimental, but when she got Rushdie on the phone—not an easy thing to do once he had vanished into the netherworld of ultraprotection—she chuckled: ‘Salman! It’s like being in love! I think of you night and day: all the time!’ Against the riot of hatred and cruelty and rage that had been conjured into existence by a verminous religious fanatic, this very manner of expression seemed an antidote: a humanist love plainly expressed against those whose love was only for death.

I’ve quoted this long passage in its entirety not only because I admire Sontag’s courage during the Rushdie affair and think it should be highlighted, but because Hitchens’s final sentence brushes up against what seems to me to be the essence of Kates’s film:  Regarding  is a portrait of an immensely passionate life.  What makes me feel strong: being in love, and work . The two aren’t always extricable, and this is what  Regarding  conveys so beautifully. This was a woman who was driven by humanist love, by a lifelong allegiance to the kingdom of books—“my household deities, my space ships”—and ideas. All she wanted was everything: to see every film, read every book, have every experience; to understand civilization, to understand war, and fall in love. To talk to everyone interesting, to stay up all night.

Emily St. John Mandel's  latest novel, Station Eleven , is forthcoming from Knopf in September 2014. She lives in New York City.

Funding information

Development for  Regarding Susan Sontag  received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and funding from Cal Humanities. It will be shown on HBO on December 8, 2014.

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Was liest du gerade? / Bücher-Podcast : Schäubles Memoiren und Susan Sontags Frauen

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Ein Politikerleben voll shakespearehafter Dramen steht auf Platz eins der Spiegel- Bestsellerliste: Wolfgang Schäuble war ein Nachkriegskind, verhandelte 1989 die deutsche Wiedervereinigung, überlebte ein Attentat und war fortan der erste Spitzenpolitiker im Rollstuhl. In dieser Folge von Was liest du gerade? sprechen Maja Beckers und Alexander Cammann über Schäubles kurz vor seinem Tod fertiggestellte Autobiografie Erinnerungen und über die Frage: Wozu eigentlich Politikermemoiren? Können sie überhaupt richtig gut sein? 

Außerdem geht es um Bernd Brunners Buch Unterwegs ins Morgenland , eine faszinierende Sammlung mit Geschichten von Pilgern, Wissenschaftlern und Abenteurern, die sich seit dem Mittelalter aufmachten ins Heilige Land, ins historische Palästina. Wie stellte man sich in Europa, aber nicht nur dort, das Heilige Land vor und wie war es wirklich? Was ist das für ein Märchenlandgefühl, das die Reisenden hier befiel, und wie wichtig war die Idee des Heiligen Landes für Christen, Juden und Muslime?

Der Klassiker diesmal: Mit Über Frauen ist gerade eine verblüffende Essaysammlung von Susan Sontag über diverse Aspekte des Frauseins erschienen. Erstmals erschienen in den 1970er-Jahren, geht es um Schönheit, um weibliches Altern, um die falsche Verehrung für Leni Riefenstahl – in jedem Fall fruchtbar für aktuelle Debatten von Karrierefeminismus bis Schönheits-OPs und Ageism.

"Der erste Satz" stammt diesmal aus dem Buch Zugemüllt des Philosophen Oliver Schlaudt. Er ist zu den dreckigsten Orten Deutschlands gereist – vom Chemiewerk bis zum Abwasserkanal – und hat dort das seltsam paradoxe Verhältnis beobachtet, das unsere Gegenwart zur Sauberkeit hat.

Sie erreichen das Team von Was liest du gerade? unter [email protected] .

Literaturangaben:

Oliver Schlaudt: Zugemüllt. Eine müllphilosophische Deutschlandreise, C. H. Beck, 364 Seiten, 22 Euro

Wolfgang Schäuble: Erinnerungen. Mein Leben in der Politik, Klett-Cotta, 656 Seiten, 38 Euro

Bernd Brunner: Unterwegs ins Morgenland. Was Pilger, Reisende und Abenteurer erwarteten und was sie fanden, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 320 Seiten, 28 Euro

Susan Sontag: Über Frauen. Übersetzt aus dem Englischen von Kathrin Razum, Hanser, 208 Seiten, 23 Euro

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