Susan Sontag

Based on Wikipedia: Susan Sontag

The Woman Who Made America Think About Thinking

In 1982, Susan Sontag stood before a crowd of left-wing intellectuals at a pro-Solidarity rally in New York and told them something they did not want to hear. "People on the left," she said—people like herself—"have willingly or unwillingly told a lot of lies." The audience booed. They shouted. But Sontag kept going. Communism, she declared, was simply "successful Fascism." The room erupted.

This was vintage Sontag: brilliant, provocative, and utterly unwilling to tell anyone what they wanted to hear.

For four decades, Susan Sontag was America's most formidable public intellectual—a term she herself would have found problematic and probably dissected in a forty-page essay. She wrote about photography, illness, war, pornography, fascism, and the curious phenomenon she called "camp." She traveled to Hanoi during the Vietnam War and to Sarajevo during its siege. She made enemies on both the left and the right, often simultaneously. And when she died in 2004, she left behind a body of work that continues to shape how we think about images, suffering, and the strange ways culture works.

A Childhood Spent in Books

Susan Rosenblatt was born in New York City in 1933, though she would not keep that name for long. Her parents were Jews of Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her father, Jack, ran a fur trading business in Tientsin, China—a detail that sounds almost fictional, the kind of exotic backdrop a novelist might invent. He died of tuberculosis when Susan was five, leaving her with a mother she would later describe as cold, alcoholic, and "always away."

When Susan was twelve, her mother remarried an Army captain named Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister Judith took his surname, though he never formally adopted them. It was a new name for what would become a new kind of American intellectual life.

The family moved restlessly: Long Island, then Tucson, then the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. Susan found refuge where many lonely, brilliant children do—in books. She graduated from North Hollywood High School at fifteen, already showing the intellectual precocity that would define her life.

She started college at the University of California, Berkeley, but quickly transferred to the University of Chicago. The reason? Chicago had a famous core curriculum, a rigorous program that demanded students wrestle with the great works of philosophy, literature, and history. Most undergraduates would have been intimidated. Sontag was drawn to it like a moth to flame.

At Chicago, she studied with some of the finest minds of the era: Leo Strauss, the political philosopher whose students would become known as "Straussians"; Kenneth Burke, the literary theorist; and Richard McKeon, the philosopher who taught students to read texts with almost surgical precision. She graduated at eighteen, elected to Phi Beta Kappa—the oldest and most prestigious academic honor society in America. Her best friend at Chicago was a fellow student named Mike Nichols, who would later become one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors.

A Ten-Day Courtship and Its Consequences

At seventeen, Sontag did something impulsive and, by her own later reckoning, unwise. She married Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor at Chicago, after a courtship lasting just ten days.

The marriage would last eight years and produce one son, David, who would grow up to become his mother's editor and a writer himself. But the relationship was complicated in ways that only became clear decades later.

During their marriage, Sontag conducted extensive research for Rieff's 1959 book on Sigmund Freud, titled "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist." How extensive? According to her biographer Benjamin Moser, Sontag was essentially the book's true author. She wrote the text after David's birth, and in the divorce settlement, she made what Moser describes as a grim exchange: she gave Rieff sole authorship of the book, and he gave her custody of their son.

This was not uncommon in mid-century academic marriages—wives doing the intellectual heavy lifting while husbands took the credit. But for someone of Sontag's brilliance and ambition, it must have been a particular kind of torment.

The Education of an Intellectual

After Chicago, Sontag went to Harvard for graduate school. She studied literature first, then philosophy and theology, working with scholars like Paul Tillich—the German-American theologian who had fled Nazi Germany—and Jacob Taubes, the Jewish philosopher of religion. For a time, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, author of the influential book "Eros and Civilization," lived with Sontag and Rieff while working on that very text. Imagine the dinner table conversations.

Sontag began doctoral research in metaphysics, ethics, and Greek philosophy, but she never finished the degree. In 1957, she won a fellowship to study at St Anne's College, Oxford, and traveled to England—without her husband and son.

At Oxford, she took classes with Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist, and A. J. Ayer, the logical positivist whose book "Language, Truth and Logic" had upended Anglo-American philosophy. She attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of ideas. But Oxford didn't appeal to her. After one term, she transferred to the Sorbonne in Paris.

Paris changed everything.

Sontag later said her time there was "perhaps the most important period of her life." She socialized with expatriate artists and academics, including María Irene Fornés, a Cuban-American playwright who would become her partner. In Paris, Sontag absorbed the intellectual culture of France—the films, the philosophy, the way French thinkers approached culture as something to be analyzed with the same rigor one might apply to philosophy or science. When she returned to New York in 1959, she brought that sensibility with her.

Notes on Camp

In 1964, at age thirty-one, Sontag published an essay that would make her famous. It was called "Notes on 'Camp.'"

What is camp? Before Sontag, most people couldn't have said. It was a sensibility, a way of looking at things, that existed mainly in gay subculture and avant-garde artistic circles. Camp meant appreciating something not because it was good in the conventional sense, but because it was so extravagantly, flamboyantly, gloriously bad—or strange, or excessive—that it became a kind of triumph. Tiffany lamps. Old Hollywood melodramas. Flash Gordon serials. Feather boas. The drawings of Aubrey Beardsley.

Sontag didn't just describe camp; she elevated it to a subject worthy of serious intellectual analysis. Her essay appeared in the Partisan Review, the prestigious journal of the New York intellectuals, and it caused a sensation. Here was this young woman treating popular culture—culture that serious critics had always dismissed as vulgar or trivial—with the same analytical seriousness usually reserved for Dostoyevsky or Beethoven.

The essay established Sontag as a new kind of critic, one who could move fluidly between high culture and low, between philosophy and fashion, between the art museum and the movie theater. It was the beginning of what we might now call cultural studies—though Sontag herself might have winced at that term.

Against Interpretation

Two years later, Sontag published her first essay collection, "Against Interpretation." The title essay became one of the most influential pieces of criticism of the twentieth century.

Sontag's argument was simple and revolutionary. For too long, she said, critics had approached art by trying to figure out what it "meant"—what the symbols represented, what message the artist was trying to convey, what the work was "really about." This kind of interpretation, Sontag argued, was often a way of taming art, of domesticating its strangeness, of replacing the thing itself with some neat explanation that fit comfortably into our existing categories.

Instead, she called for an "erotics of art"—a criticism that paid attention to form, to surface, to the sensory experience of encountering a work. Don't ask what it means, she suggested. Ask how it feels. Ask what it does.

This was not anti-intellectualism. Sontag was one of the most intellectually rigorous writers of her generation. But she was arguing for a different kind of intellect—one that engaged with art on its own terms rather than immediately translating it into something else.

On Photography

In 1977, Sontag published what many consider her masterpiece: "On Photography," a series of interconnected essays that explored how photographs had changed the way we see the world.

The book began with a striking observation. Photography, Sontag noted, had created an entirely new relationship between people and reality. Before cameras, you had to be present to witness something. Now, images traveled. Events that happened on the other side of the world could appear in your morning newspaper. The past could be frozen and preserved. Everything, potentially, could be photographed.

"Just about everything has been photographed," Sontag wrote. This had "altered our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view, or should view."

Consider tourism. Why do travelers compulsively take photographs? Sontag had a theory. "The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese and Americans," she observed with characteristic tartness. "Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures."

But the book went deeper than clever observations about tourists. Sontag was asking fundamental questions about knowledge and experience. Photographs give us access to places we've never been, events we never witnessed, historical moments that happened before we were born. But do they actually help us understand these things? Or do they create an illusion of knowledge that actually prevents deeper engagement?

Sontag worried that photographs, especially photographs of suffering, might desensitize us. See enough images of war, of famine, of atrocity, and they begin to lose their power to shock. The image becomes a substitute for understanding. "The problem," she wrote, "is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs."

These arguments have only become more urgent in the age of social media, when we are flooded with more images in a single day than previous generations encountered in a lifetime.

Illness as Metaphor

In 1975, Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was forty-two years old, at the height of her fame and powers. The cancer was advanced—stage four—and her doctors gave her little chance of survival.

Sontag refused to accept this prognosis. She sought out the most aggressive treatment available, eventually undergoing a radical mastectomy followed by experimental chemotherapy that was so brutal it nearly killed her. She survived.

From this experience came "Illness as Metaphor," published in 1978. It was unlike anything she had written before—personal in origin, though deliberately impersonal in style.

Sontag's argument was that our culture wraps disease in layers of metaphor that cause real harm to real patients. Cancer, in particular, had become associated with all sorts of moral and psychological meanings. It was seen as a disease of repression, of unexpressed emotions, of a "cancer personality." Patients were told, implicitly or explicitly, that they had somehow brought the disease on themselves. That their failure to express anger, or their psychological makeup, or their lifestyle, had caused the malignancy growing inside them.

This was not just false, Sontag argued—it was cruel. It added guilt and shame to an already devastating diagnosis. And it was part of a long history of treating disease as metaphor. Tuberculosis, in the nineteenth century, had been romanticized as a disease of artists and sensitive souls. Syphilis had been moralized as punishment for sexual sin.

Sontag wanted to strip illness of these metaphors. A disease, she insisted, was just a disease—a biological process, not a moral judgment or a psychological symbol. Patients should be allowed to focus on treatment and recovery without the added burden of cultural mythology.

Years later, when the AIDS epidemic emerged, Sontag returned to these themes in "AIDS and Its Metaphors," examining how that disease had accumulated its own destructive set of cultural meanings.

The Novelist

Sontag was best known for her essays, but she always thought of herself primarily as a fiction writer. This was somewhat puzzling to her readers, since her novels were never as successful or influential as her criticism.

Her first novel, "The Benefactor," appeared in 1963—experimental, elliptical, influenced by French modernism. "Death Kit" followed in 1967, equally demanding. Both received respectful reviews but never found wide audiences.

Then, in 1986, Sontag published a short story in The New Yorker that became one of the defining literary works of the AIDS crisis. "The Way We Live Now" told the story of a man dying of AIDS entirely through the voices of his friends—a chorus of witnesses, never the patient himself. It was innovative in form and devastating in effect, capturing the fear, grief, and helplessness of watching someone you love succumb to a plague that medicine could not yet treat.

Late in life, Sontag finally achieved popular success as a novelist. "The Volcano Lover" (1992) was a historical novel about Sir William Hamilton, the eighteenth-century British diplomat and art collector, his wife Emma (later famous as the mistress of Admiral Nelson), and the volcano Mount Vesuvius. It became a bestseller.

Her final novel, "In America" (2000), fictionalized the story of Helena Modrzejewska, a Polish actress who emigrated to California in the nineteenth century. It won the National Book Award—though not without controversy. Several critics noticed that passages in the novel closely resembled passages from other books about Modrzejewska, without attribution. Sontag defended herself by arguing that historical fiction inevitably draws on source materials, and that she had "completely transformed" what she borrowed. The response was mixed.

Politics and Provocations

Sontag was never one to stay quiet about politics. During the Vietnam War, she traveled to North Vietnam and wrote about her experience, enraging conservatives who saw her as giving comfort to the enemy. She traveled to Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and directed a production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" in a city under siege, using candles for stage lighting because there was no electricity.

Her political statements frequently caused outrage—often, it seemed, deliberately.

In 1967, she wrote in the Partisan Review that "the white race is the cancer of human history." The sentence provoked fury. Patrick Buchanan, the conservative commentator, compared it to something that might appear in Mein Kampf if you substituted "Jewish race" for "white race." According to some accounts, Sontag later made a sardonic semi-retraction, saying the line slandered cancer patients. And eventually, she wrote an entire book—"Illness as Metaphor"—arguing against using disease as a metaphor for anything.

At that 1982 rally for Solidarity—the Polish trade union movement that helped bring down communism in Eastern Europe—Sontag's declaration that communism was "successful Fascism" drew boos from the left-wing audience. But she pressed on, asking a pointed question: if you compared someone who had read only Reader's Digest from 1950 to 1970 with someone who had read only The Nation or The New Statesman during the same period, which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? "The answer," she said, "should give us pause."

And then there was September 11, 2001. In the issue of The New Yorker that went to press just days after the attacks, Sontag wrote a short, fierce piece that criticized the way American politicians and media were framing the tragedy. She objected to calling the terrorists "cowards"—a characterization President George W. Bush had used. Whatever else the attackers were, she argued, cowardice was not an accurate description. And she suggested that Americans should try to understand the attacks "not as a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but as an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."

The backlash was immediate and severe. Sontag was called a traitor, an America-hater, an enemy of decency. But she did not back down. She never did.

The Private Sontag

For most of her public life, Sontag was guarded about her personal relationships. She was involved with several women over the decades—including the photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom she had a relationship that lasted until Sontag's death—but she rarely spoke publicly about her sexuality.

This reticence frustrated some gay rights activists, who felt that such a prominent figure should have been more open. But Sontag resisted being categorized. She resisted being turned into a symbol or a spokesperson. She wanted to be judged on her ideas, not her identity.

She was also, by many accounts, a difficult person—demanding, imperious, capable of great cruelty. She could devastate people with a cutting remark. She was not easy to be around. Genius rarely is.

The End

In 2004, at seventy-one, Sontag was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer of the blood. Once again, she pursued the most aggressive treatment available, this time a bone marrow transplant. Once again, she refused to accept that she might die.

But this time, the treatment did not work. She died on December 28, 2004.

Her son David later wrote a memoir, "Swimming in a Sea of Death," about her final illness. It was a difficult book—unsparing about his mother's terror of death, her refusal to accept the inevitable, the grimness of her final months. Some readers found it disloyal. Others found it honest in a way that Sontag herself might have appreciated.

The Legacy

What remains of Susan Sontag?

Her books, obviously. "On Photography" and "Illness as Metaphor" and "Regarding the Pain of Others" are still read, still taught, still argued about. Her essays remain essential reading for anyone interested in how culture works.

But more than that, Sontag left behind a model of what it means to be a public intellectual—to engage with the world fearlessly, to bring the full force of one's intelligence to bear on questions both large and small, to refuse easy answers and comfortable pieties.

She was often wrong. She was sometimes cruel. She could be pretentious and self-important. But she was never boring, and she was never safe. She made people think—not just about art or photography or illness, but about thinking itself. About what it means to pay attention to the world and to take that attention seriously.

In an age of hot takes and algorithmic outrage, Sontag's example feels almost quaint. She took years to develop her ideas. She read voraciously, in multiple languages. She changed her mind when the evidence demanded it. She was not afraid to be unpopular.

"Do stuff," she once wrote in her journal. "Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead."

She took her own advice.