Susan Sontag Quotes on Knowledge
Susan Sontag (1933–2004), the American essayist whose Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) supplied late-twentieth-century criticism with several of its most discussed positions, treats the principal problems of cultural knowledge as problems of the form and ethics of attention. The Against Interpretation essays attack the academic reduction of art to the deciphering of hidden meanings; On Photography analyses the photograph as a peculiar instrument of cognition that simultaneously documents and aestheticizes its object; and Regarding the Pain of Others returns to the question of how images of suffering inform — or anaesthetize — the moral imagination of the viewer.
Quotes
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“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14 -
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Reading is the quintessential passion.”
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“The truth is that Mozart , Pascal , Boolean Algebra , Shakespeare , parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton , the emancipation of women, Kant , Marx , and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous c”
Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57