Susan Sontag 1933 – 2004
Susan Sontag was a 20th and early 21st-century American writer, critic, and political activist, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her generation. Her essays, including Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Notes on Camp, brought continental philosophical and aesthetic concerns to a wide American readership. She wrote four novels, several plays, and several volumes of journals published posthumously by her son David Rieff. She campaigned on a wide range of political causes from Vietnam through the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where she directed a production of Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo. Although not an academic philosopher, her cultural criticism shaped the reception of contemporary art, photography, and literature for several decades.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“All photographs are memento mori.”