Reflections: Susan Sontag 1933-2004.

Critic, activist, novelist, filmmaker, Susan Sontag exceeded even that elastic and amorphous category of "public intellectual" so often linked to her name. To mark Sontag's passing last December at the age of seventy-one, Artforum asked ARTHUR C. DANTO, HAL FOSTER, ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU, and WAYNE KOESTENBAUM to reflect on her achievements and legacy, which challenge us to reconsider the role of the critic today.

PASSION PLAY

Susan Sontag was, like Oscar Wilde, an aesthetician hero. They both lived by the code of Puccini's Tosca: "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore" (I lived for art, I lived for love). In one of her earlier pieces for the then-new New York Review of Books, she classified writers as husbands or lovers--steady as opposed to dangerous, providers of emotional stability in contrast to engines of unpredictable ecstasy. The piece, as I remember it, was about Camus. By her criteria she was herself a lover rather than a wife, addressing dangerous topics like pornography in edgy ways rather than building a systematic critique of aesthetic judgment (Kant or Dewey would be husbands). Her view was that we need an erotics of art, but it was not her style actually to construct such a work, in the genre of a lost text of Aristotle's (the Erotics, as a companion volume to the Poetics). Rather, she practiced criticism in the spirit of eroticism. So her most famous essay was playfully titled "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), as if it were a report--though few if any readers of the Partisan Review would have known what she was reporting on. At the same time it was a provocation, treating outrageously bad taste as a valid aesthetic value, challenging readers to loosen up. Merely to bring camp forward as an alternative to an aesthetics of good taste was a challenge, since good taste was the canonical idea on which the entire concept of aesthetics had been erected in the eighteenth century. "Taste was directed only to the external surface on which feelings play," Hegel wrote. "So-called 'good taste' takes fright at all the deeper effects [of art] and is silent when the thing at issue comes in question and externalities and incidentals vanish." But camp, though against good taste, was too ludic an aesthetic quite to be treated as among the "deeper effects" of art. It is the pursuit of stylistic extremity, like a pink tuxedo or a cape of canary feathers. It expresses a kind of heroic frivolity that defined the gay milieu in which she discovered it. "Don't you ever read just for pleasure?" she asked me once.

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We need an erotics of art, she insisted, rather than a hermeneutics: a way of responding to passion with passion rather than stifling it under the apparatus of deep interpretation, in the manner of heavy explainers. "Who any longer dares confess pleasure in the presence of art?" the art historian James Ackerman once wrote in a letter to me, thinking of the way works of art were now occasions for the dispassionate subjection to what his professional colleagues called Theory. I think Sontag's argument would have been that that cannot be why art exists. It exists to satisfy the one set of needs that is uniquely human, not to be subsumed under an agenda of structuralist scrutiny. Who else would have thought, when daily life in Sarajevo seemed beyond human endurance, that what the country needed was art? Who but she would have exposed herself to the snipers in order to enlist the embattled culture in a production of Waiting for Godot? Aesthetics has traditionally been a fairly dreary specialty in academic philosophy. The difference between it and the relationship to art that Sontag exemplified and enjoined was like the difference between sex education and the Kama Sutra. That is what made her an aesthetician hero. Her whole enterprise lay in publicly exemplifying the life of art as she felt it should be lived.

When the New York Times phoned to solicit a few words for her obituary, I was stunned by the news of her death. I could scarcely talk, let alone say something suitable. Susan and I were friends but not what one would call great friends. We had somewhat overlapping histories and were usually happy to be in one another's company when we were on some panel together or guests at the same dinner. We were often on opposite sides of an issue. I felt that the antithesis she perceived between erotics and hermeneutics was too absolute. Explanation, after all, can liberate meanings and make response possible. But when, in the days after her death, people told me about their difficulties with her ideas, I didn't want to hear about it. As often happens with a death, we realize what our true feelings are. I knew from the intensity of my grief that she was irreplaceable as only someone we love is irreplaceable. I know from the letters I received after the Times printed my comment that others felt the same kind of loss. She created a place for herself, and her uniqueness was such that the place died with her.

ARTHUR C. DANTO

Arthur C. Danto is a contributing editor of Artforum.

A READER'S GUIDE

IN the late 1960s few critics made it into middle-class living rooms in this country--maybe an Edmund Wilson, a Malcolm Cowley, a Lionel Trilling--yet Susan Sontag, hardly an august man of letters, managed to be one of them. Through a forceful combination of intellect and style, she penetrated some homes where a rebel soul might be in hiding, longing for a different relation to culture. Like other such souls born in the Eisenhower years, I encountered Sontag through her photograph on the back of Against Interpretation (1966). So this, I thought of the striking woman with a demeanor at once open and angular, her eyes trained on a world I couldn't see, is what a New York intellectual looks like. Austere like her prose but hip like her topics, Sontag was my first inkling of an avant-garde, my initial medium to an edgy alternative to the Anglophonic modernism--Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce--that had become the established stuff of high literature. Her Europeans were (at least to me) exotic, risque: Lukacs, Sartre, Camus, Leiris, Artaud, Weil, Sarraute, Pavese, Cioran, Ionesco, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Bergman ... I didn't understand the differences among them, but what I glimpsed in the photo was more important--a possible way around the given terms (traditional art versus mass entertainment) of American culture--for I, too, wanted to be "against." If Sontag could cross over to my living room, maybe I could cross over to her New York (the name of an elective affinity more than an actual place), and I was hardly alone in wishing to do so.

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The allure was not so much her appearance; that is overblown with Sontag, as if it does much to explain her stature. It was her lucidity and her ambition, precisely her "style of radical will," that was so attractive. Certainly it set up her success, which left her, like other prominent women of her generation, somewhat unmoved by feminist critiques: Smart and "serious" (her vaunted term) knew no gender for Sontag. As is often remarked, she was a popularizer, but only in part, and if she invented terms that later became cliches, that was scarcely her fault (two phrases that qualify are her plea for "an erotics of art" and her definition of camp as "dandyism in the age of mass culture"). A better appellation is "guide," which Sontag was to the end, insistent that her New Yorker readers at least hear of W. G. Sebald or Alexander Kluge; and, again, she introduced many of us to the figures discussed in Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will (1969). However, by the time of On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) we had begun to gain on her. We read the same authors, often differently, studied others, and worked alternative lines of thought: Frankfurt School critique, Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, deconstruction, discourse analysis, reception theory, and cultural studies. And we got our reports from other sources as well--from journals like Screen, October, New German Critique, and Camera Obscura, not from venues like (her) Partisan Review, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books, which remained mostly indifferent if not hostile to such work.

Yet this development also made us more specialized, more schismatic, than Sontag ever was; from first to last, she was a committed generalist, a "master synthesist" (as Margalit Fox put in the New York Times obituary). However "against interpretation" in principle, Sontag was always for it in this sense: She believed deeply in her critical mission to connect a marginal but innovative avant-garde and a distracted but supportive audience. Today both sides of this equation are less clear than they were then, and this difference makes the time of her rise appear distant to us--but then that very distance might also challenge us to renew this aspect of her vocation. In any case, Sontag worked to bridge that gap on her own terms; at the same time, in "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) and "One Culture and the New Sensibility" (1965), the two texts that made her name, she insisted that other famous divides--between avant-garde and kitsch and between high and low culture--had narrowed. It was not easy to explain an avant-garde to a public and to map the shifts in both, and sometimes Sontag showed the strain. Some of her arguments are more declared than demonstrated, with an authority claimed through assertion, though this is true of much other criticism, too (Clement Greenberg played the apodictic card like nobody else, and many of us followed suit). Here, picked more or less at random, are the first lines of a few essays from Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will: "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory." "Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness." "A new mode of didacticism has conquered the arts, is indeed the 'modern' element in art." "Every era has to reinvent the project of 'spirituality' for itself." "Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing." These are large claims, and sometimes they float away or simply pop, like balloons, but that is what they are, test balloons, and often enough they brought back true readings.

Another vaunted Sontag term is "position." The rush to position, which also sometimes seems endemic to criticism, can end up as "posture," unless it is politically grounded. This is not to question her commitment, which is amply evidenced by her trips to Hanoi and to Sarajevo, her consistent support of oppressed writers through PEN, her courageous statements about AIDS, 9/11, and Abu Ghraib, but it is to query how much it transformed her own production, which was a crucial test for at least two of her favorites, Benjamin and Barthes. A common charge is indeed that her "seriousness" is a matter of aesthetics or ethics more than politics, precisely a style of radical will. Certainly her most engaged piece, "Trip to Hanoi" (1968), is about her own consciousness more than Vietnam, which becomes the scene of a personal disorientation, even though Sontag is also torturously aware of the Orientalism in play in her text. Sometimes she did turn the treatment of a problem, political or aesthetic, into an explanation of herself. Moreover, some of her essays on fellow critics contain worries that sound autobiographical--e.g., am I, like Cioran, not original enough; like Benjamin, too saturnine; like Barthes, seduced by sensibility? In "Remembering Barthes," her moving homage to the great French critic on his death in 1980, Sontag touches on his "self-absorption" and comments that "his interest in you tended to be your interest in him." I wonder if the same was ever true of her as well.

At the same time "self-absorption" was central to her work, to its interest, even to its strength: Her very method was to replay her thoughts while reading, to dramatize her struggle toward interpretation, and sometimes changes of mind drove Sontag to rethink and to write again. She could turn her political ambivalence (many significant critics have been caught between social identifications) into critical insight, and so make good on what Adorno (a critic she did not much engage) once called "a flagrant contradiction"--that "the cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent." Beyond critical insight, however, Sontag attempted to push her ambivalence into "passionate partiality," as she wrote (in a clear echo of Baudelaire on criticism) in her preface to Against Interpretation. As she also implies there, criticism remained a literary offshoot for her, and sometimes hers does suggest the old genre of the bildungsroman. Certainly this self-absorption could be excessive (when her book of short stories I, Etcetera came out in 1978, one heard the plea "less I, more Etcetera"), and sometimes she advanced it more in denial than in default of other grounds on which to work, as she does here in her 1967 essay on Cioran: "The time of new collective visions may well be over.... But the need for individual spiritual counsel has never seemed more acute. Sauve qui peut." No collective vision, sauve qui peut (every man for himself)--in 1967?

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For these reasons I balked when the Times obituary claimed that Sontag made "a radical break" with the postwar criticism of New York intellectuals, especially those around Partisan Review. Her fondest dream was to contribute to that journal; she, too, occupied a cosmopolitan territory associated with the academy but not restricted to it (no university presses for her); and she made a living as an independent critic--a difficult thing to do today (if not easy then). More important, however much she challenged the judgments of Partisan Review writers, her language was largely consistent with theirs. Against interpretation, Sontag remained an interpreter; opposed to the opposition of form and content, she did not deconstruct it but valued style where they had valued substance. And her central terms are all old-school: "condition," "sensibility," "temperament," "style," "taste." ("Taste," she states in "Notes on 'Camp'," "governs every free--as opposed to rote--human response." For good or for bad, no one who has passed through Adorno, Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, or Foucault, let alone Bourdieu, could easily write such a sentence.) However opposed in principle to "the Matthew Arnold apparatus," Sontag also argued for the best that is thought and written in culture, as well as for a necessary connection between the aesthetic and the moral--and what could be more Arnoldian than her "seriousness"? Certainly her embrace of popular culture irritated some New York intellectuals. It betrayed their belief in modernism as a new high culture, which they also saw as a new cultural passport to social advancement: hence, in part, their enormous resentment of the counterculture of the 1960s, which mocked this ambition, and their marked shift from liberalism to neoconservatism. Yet for Sontag the embrace of pop was a testing of high/low divides, a testing that was avant-gardist, not populist. "Seriousness" was ever the criterion, even when it was mocked, as in camp; and sophistication still the goal, even when it concerned the products of mass culture.

Strong signs of her good standing as a New York intellectual (was she perhaps the last of the kind?) were the encomia delivered by the Times on her death (no less than four), in stark contrast to the grotesque smear given Derrida. Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, proclaimed her "the preeminent intellectual of our time," a valuation that depends, of course, on the definition of "intellectual," let alone of "our time." The preeminent critic? On this score she was overshadowed by Barthes, to name just one. The preeminent theorist? That is not her category. People like McGrath might smirk, but one test of intellectual preeminence is whom it is bright young people want to read, and my sense is that Sontag is not high on that list today. Perhaps she is too New York or "American": neither "French" or systematic enough in her thought, nor "German" or philosophical enough, nor "British" or social-historical enough. She did not participate in the great returns to Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud that did prepare "a radical break with traditional postwar criticism"; and she also did not enlist in the great adventures of the sign, the psyche, and sexuality that were so formative to "the preeminent intellectual[s] of our time." Perhaps the strength of her work--the focus on European avant-gardes--was also its limitation.

In every cultural interregnum there are a few figures on whom old and new generations can agree: Mahler was such a figure in fin de siecle Vienna; Sontag was one in the last few decades, indulged by old New York intellectuals as a willful prodigy, yet valued by young Euro-besotted intellectuals as a countercultural voice. But as such she also served as a buffer between the two, and was celebrated in part for this compromise position. In this light she is less a new model than a transitional figure between "the critic" and "the theorist": the critic liberal in culture and politics, with one foot in (memories of) the Old Left and one foot in the loft, the theorist radical at least in philosophy, with one foot in (memories of) the New Left and one foot in the academy.

HAL FOSTER

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of Prosthetic Gods (MIT Press, 2004).

A LIFE IN PICTURES

You can photograph anything now.
--Robert Frank (1)

When Susan Sontag wrote about photography, photographers, or image culture in its broadest sense, even those with no special interest in these topics took notice. One of her accomplishments as a public intellectual was to make photography--understood as a phenomenon rather than a specific technology--a subject worthy of serious critical attention. "It all started with one essay," she wrote in the opening pages of On Photography (1977), "about some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images; but the more I thought about what photographs are, the more complex and suggestive they became." (2) The essays comprising the book, mostly reviews of photography volumes and exhibition catalogues, were originally written for the New York Review of Books beginning in 1973 and slightly edited for their reprinting. Sontag's writing on the medium did, of course, exceed the borders of the object itself--with such a purview how could it not? But here lies the fundamental importance of her work. Like all significant modern criticism, it conforms to Baudelaire's famous injunction: "To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons." (3)

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On Photography provoked considerable controversy when it was first published, nowhere more so than among the ranks of photographers (especially art photographers). The general (and aggrieved) sense was that Sontag had pronounced herself "against" photography and that she had, in effect, blamed the messenger for the bad news that yes, Virginia, we do all live in a society of the spectacle, with all the alienation, historical amnesia, and diminished ethical faculties that such a society both breeds and disseminates. Whether such an accusation was warranted, doubtless this indignant response was heightened by Sontag's literary tone, a tone unmistakably that of the moralist as opposed to the more neutral analyst. Dispassionate and usually impersonal, On Photography is characterized by the flat assertion ("Like sexual voyeurism [the act of photographing] is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening" (4)); the trenchant aphorism ("To collect photographs is to collect the world" (5)); and the hortatory ("The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is" (6)).

Such bold and authoritative pronouncements are difficult for the scholar or specialist to match, as experts are apt to be more knowledgeable about (and comfortable with) the photographic trees than the photographic forest. The risk run by the generalist is that of factual error (and Sontag's periodizations of photographic practice in On Photography are sometimes open to question) or a lack of nuance that sometimes flattens or simplifies photography's history. But this is finally a quibble; it was a mark of Sontag's intellectual self-confidence, no less than her great gift for synthesis, that enabled her to assimilate the most significant arguments of Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu--to name only some of the continental thinkers whose writing informed hers--and to make various aspects of their analyses her own. Indeed, the citations in the final chapter of On Photography, "A Brief Anthology of Quotations," are an homage to Benjamin's Arcades Project, his unfinished study of nineteenth-century Paris constructed entirely of textual fragments.

Whether Sontag's writing on photography was to any degree influenced by the most important Anglophone criticism of the 1970s on the medium--John Berger, Victor Burgin, Rosalind Krauss, Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, John Tagg--is difficult to say. They are never cited, but much of what Sontag writes is entirely consistent and compatible with their arguments. Always keenly attuned to the seismological tremors of the zeitgeist, Sontag began her considerations of the medium in the early 1970s, when photography again became discursively visible, making it an object of critical and theoretical investigation. In this respect, revisiting Sontag's earlier writing on photography reminds us that despite its incalculable effects in the 150 years since its debut, photography has rarely been the subject of general--I am tempted to say philosophical--investigation, except at a few critical moments. The recognition of photography as something requiring critical analysis was evident during its first decade of existence, when the task was to try and understand what it was, what it did, how it should be thought of. It was another seventy or eighty years before photography (as technology, medium, machine, apparatus, etc.) became again a discursive object--an object of investigation in and of itself--as Bazin, Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Valery, and others made their contributions to the subject. (7) And it was yet another three decades before photography as such emerged again as a subject of theory. Undoubtedly, it was her work on the subject that helped defamiliarize what had long been so ubiquitous as to be effectively invisible. In other words, Sontag understood that it was the ubiquity of photography both as a cultural practice and as an atmospheric surround that required address, rather than any one of the specific photographic practices that were its tributaries.

It was another twenty-five years before Sontag returned to the subject of photography, in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2002). Here, she reengaged her central concern with the atrophying effects of photographic images and the ethical stakes of photographic reception. Sontag's insistence on these stakes in the viewing of imagery of slaughter and catastrophe, like the more general critique in On Photography, can seem simplistic, but this hardly invalidates her arguments. Morality, moreover, is not the same as moralism, just as religiosity must be distinguished from religious faith and belief. (Or so it is said.) Sontag may have seized the moral high ground in debates about the place of photography in our culture, but is this not entirely to her credit? Moreover, in her last writing on the medium, where it was the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib that were her subject, ethical and moral claims were inseparable from the nature of the images.

Somewhat uncannily, this return to photography at the end of her life parallels that of Barthes, one of Sontag's major influences and models. Barthes's own considerations of photography began early in his career in several lapidary newspaper essays (e.g., "The Great Family of Man"), continued in essays written under the influence, so to speak, of semiotic analysis (e.g., "The Photographic Message," "The Rhetoric of the Image"), and concluded with his somber final book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie, 1980). Like Barthes, Sontag understood her critical purview to include aspects of the common culture as well as more elite cultural productions. Similarly, too, neither Barthes's nor Sontag's writings on photography were composed

from the perspective of expert, connoisseur, practitioner, or academic specialist. One might well argue that freedom from the prolixity of specialized knowledge is arguably a necessity if one takes on board such an amorphous, boundless subject. Whether there is, in fact, such an entity as photography as such, which, should it exist, would then be subject to ontological definition, is open to debate. But such a presupposition would appear to inform the writings of both Barthes (especially in Camera Lucida) and Sontag. Both, moreover, were preoccupied with photography's effects on subjectivity and consciousness, although it was Barthes who was more attentive to photography's complex orchestration of political, psychosexual, and social ideologies, or what he termed the doxa.

Her frequent reference to Plato's allegory of the cave notwithstanding--it serves as the title of the first chapter of On Photography, is invoked in the book's first sentence, (8) and echoes throughout her writing--Sontag was by no means an iconoclast. Film, for example (and Sontag was herself an occasional filmmaker) seemed not to pose for her the same issues as the still image, which in both her early and late writing raised the specter of a form of ethical neurasthenia, deadening empathetic capacities, inoculating its spectators to real violence, colonizing, if not lobotomizing, its consumers.

Despite this elision, there seems little to refute Sontag's conviction that photographic imagery (because of the way it works and how it is used) has become a surrogate for lived experience, a pseudoknowledge, a form of social control, a thoroughly ritualized practice of appropriation, objectification, reification, and commodification. (I would add fetishization, but Sontag rarely brought feminist questions to bear on her political or cultural diagnostics.) And there is no greater testimonial to Sontag's importance as public intellectual, human rights activist, and--in the most honorific sense--moralist than her last words on the subject. In her devastating New York Times Magazine account of the implications of the Abu Ghraib pictures--the camera culture of our very own gulag--Sontag traced the hidden links between the ostensibly "public" domain of the news media and the most personal and intimate relations one can have to the image. In this respect the medium--dematerialized, digital not analog, circulating instantly and globally (as private porn and public news)--raises new issues about the politics of viewing: "Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers--recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities." (9)

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In recognizing that the most troubling truth of the Abu Ghraib videos and photographs lay--self-evidently--in their having been made in the first place, Sontag emphasized their public function: Such photographs, she maintained, were always intended to be viewed by others, as was the case with twentieth-century photographs of lynchings (a genre of photography ignored in standard photographic histories). "Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it," she wrote. "The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of these pictures make us spectators too." (10)

Sontag recognized that the digital photographic documentation produced by the soldiers and reservists was not "merely" the evidence of the sanctioned sadism of the young, working-class, mostly rural prison guards and soldiers, nor a demonstration that sexual abuse and s/m scenarios are staple features of torture, nor a signal of a "breakdown" in the chain of command. Nor, she argued, were these pictures mere evidence of an administration run so amok it attempts to legally justify, as well as countenance, "abuse." More basically, the pictures, as she observed, make a profound statement about the workings of power. "The photographs," she insisted, "are us." They are us because "they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration's distinctive policies." (11)

Sontag's writing on photography in all its breadth is effectively a discursive mapping of how photo culture operates within civic, social, and political life. In this respect, perhaps those who resented her being "against" photography were not entirely misguided in their characterization. Other than her wanly expressed call for an "ecology of images" (in On Photography), Sontag implied that there was no solution to the problems posed by photomechanical or digital-image culture. Amalgamated as it is to the macro and micro mechanisms of late capitalism and its technologies of manipulation, mobile as a viral infection (a metaphor Sontag herself would deplore), image culture does not on the evidence appear to propagate antiwar, antiviolent, democratic, egalitarian, or other humane attitudes. War photography, she remarked, especially the representation of civilian slaughter, can be used by all sides of any given conflict. But she strongly affirmed the value of the historical--visual--evidence of historical crime. The Auschwitz image archive was for Sontag a distinctive criterion, a kind of infernal benchmark with which to gauge the political and ethical efficacy of the photographic record.

Today, criticism and theory--even the politically committed criticism and theory that was Sontag's territory--nests quietly, for the most part, in academic preserves, and few available arenas exist beyond them. And so, while the death of a public intellectual, young or old, is always untimely, the loss of Sontag's polemical voice in media res (or so it seems) is especially unfortunate. Sontag's writing was at its best when confronting hypocrisy and mendacity and worse, cutting like a laser through lard, as in her scathing discussion of Leni Riefenstahl's rehabilitation ("Fascinating Fascism"). Reflecting, for example, on the vogue for commemorative museums in our capital, Sontag mordantly observed that the United States has no museum of the history of slavery: "To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there and from which the United States--a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history--is exempt." (12)

All this said, it is virtually impossible to judge to what degree the writing of Sontag or others of her stature and influence might have on actual, concrete political circumstances. Nor can we judge the effect of the cumulative photographic record itself. If the lynching photographs cause a visceral shock for those who view them, is that not all we can fairly demand of the photographic record? Photographs do not substitute for all the other ways in which history is recorded, documented, dreamed, or otherwise represented. From the first, Sontag acknowledged this: Photographs as such, as discrete pictures, were usually irrelevant to political comprehension, much less outcomes, and were no substitute for historical memory or historical explanation. But as an aggregate archive (and the recent indictments of Augusto Pinochet and Edgar Ray Killen) should also remind us, it is the patient work of those who demand justice that animates the evidence from the past. For Benjamin, it was this "redemptive" work on photography that sparked the dialectical moment: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again." (13) Photographs of our war, our war crimes, and, yes, our torture may later contribute to a wider reckoning. The pictures, like all pictures, will yet circulate in other contexts, take on other meanings, have other instrumentalities. The picture of the hooded Iraqi prisoner, balanced precariously, abjectly, on the box, electric wires dangling from his arms, has made its way to many places and has become, as pundits like to say, an "iconic" image. Indeed. Photography, as Sontag knew but never explicitly said, is the inescapable terrain of our haunted past, our haunted present, and doubtless, our haunted future.

NOTES

1. Susan Sontag, "A Brief Anthology of Quotations," in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 187.

2. Ibid., front matter, n.p.

3. Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1846," in Baudelaire: Oeuvres completes (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1961), 877. My translation.

4. Sontag, On Photography, 12.

5. Ibid., 3.

6. Ibid., 24.

7. Significantly, these texts were published in the centenary period.

8. "Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." Susan Sontag, On Photography, 3.

9. Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others," New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004. 27.

10. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 91.

11. Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others," 26.

12. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 88.

13. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 257.

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU

Abigail Solomon-Godeau is professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

PERSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Susan Sontag, my prose's prime mover, ate the world. In 1963, on the subject of Sartre's Saint Genet (her finest ideas occasionally hinged on gay men), she wrote, "Corresponding to the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world." Cosmophagic, Sontag gobbled up sensations, genres, concepts. She swallowed political and aesthetic movements. She devoured roles: diplomat, filmmaker, scourge, novelist, gadfly, essayist, night owl, bibliophile, cineaste ... She tried to prove how much a human life--a writer's life--could include. Like Walter Benjamin, she was entranced by multiplicity; and, like him, she was an aphorist at heart, honing pluralities down to terse sentences not without Jamesian evasions and excesses. Again, Sontag on Sartre's Genet: "Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again." Thus in her Yeatsian tower she wrote, wrote, wrote; reiterating, she made writing's asocial motion pornographic--a subject on which she dilated in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination." Remember, she was no stranger to Mapplethorpe's milieu.

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Transference: In the early 1990s, the night before I gave a lecture on Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, I dreamed that she reclined, wearing a pink miniskirt, on her living-room couch. I've had dozens of Sontag dreams, in which she represents intellectuality's phantasmagoria, prose's succulence, quality's fearsomeness, and aphorism's bite.

The first time I saw Sontag in person, she was speaking at a Samuel Beckett homage in the 1980s. Listening to her eloquent presentation, I whispered to my boyfriend, "Susan Sontag's got a crush on me." I meant the reverse: "I have a crush on Susan Sontag." Instinctive, preposterous substitution: For an instant, Sontag besotted, I ate the world.

My essays would not be mine without the influence of her prose's Mercurochrome aesthetic, her stern, self-conscious, tense sentences.

The ends of her novels are the best parts. Closure sharpened Sontag's scalpel. The last three sentences of The Volcano Lover: "They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all." The last two sentences of Death Kit: "Diddy has made his final chart; drawn up his last map. Diddy has perceived the inventory of the world." The last sentence of The Benefactor: "You may imagine me in a bare room, my feet near the stove, bundled up in many sweaters, my black hair turned grey, enjoying the waning tribulations of subjectivity and the repose of a privacy that is genuine." And here are the concluding lines of her 2001 essay "Where the Stress Falls": "Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, jumpy punctuation, mercurial sentence rhythms. Devising more subtle, more engorged ways of knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping at bay. It's a matter of adjectives. It's where the stress falls." Dig the word engorged. Like Jean Rhys, Sontag kept rules and torments at bay by generating stressed prose--magnifying, through emphasis and engorgement, the opportunities for attentiveness.

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In her first novel, The Benefactor, published in 1963, a year before "Notes on 'Camp,'" she wrote the following sentence: "I am a homosexual and a writer, both of whom are professionally self-regarding and self-esteeming creatures." Admittedly, this line occurs in the voice of her character, Jean-Jacques. But Susan wrote the sentence, not Jean-Jacques. I am a homosexual and a writer. Each of her books and essays contains a similar coded declaration. Sontag "came out" in her own way, forcibly, repeatedly. Her seeming refusal of queer identity may have enraged others (e.g., Adrienne Rich's 1975 quarrel with Sontag--supposedly on the subject of Leni Riefenstahl but covertly on the subject of feminist and lesbian identification--on the letters page of the New York Review of Books), but in retrospect Sontag's reticence seems picturesque, contrarian, and human. And it did not preclude admiration for Gay Lib, even if her theory of sexuality emphasized the saturnine, not the cheerful. Listen to her admiration (in a 1972 essay) of poet and social critic Paul Goodman's erotic forthrightness: "I admired his courage, which showed itself in so many ways--one of the most admirable being his honesty about his homosexuality in Five Years, for which he was much criticized by his straight friends in the New York intellectual world; that was six years ago, before the advent of Gay Liberation made coming out of the closet chic. I liked it when he talked about himself and when he mingled his own sad sexual desires with his desire for the polity." Sad sexual desires? Allow Sontag that adjective's aptness.

Sontag spoke up on hot-spot issues (Bosnia, 9/11, racism, Vietnam) and was indiscriminately pilloried by Right and Left for her quirky, vatic pronouncements. Like her idol Antonin Artaud, she wanted to be a creature of passion, not reason: Her positions, even when logically worded, subtly dismantled sensibleness. Responsible intellectual statements weren't her forte; her temperament demanded rash, provisional utterances. In a 1975 interview, published in Salmagundi, she defended the intellectual's right to be partial: "People who reason in public have--and ought to exercise--options about how many and how complex are the points they want to make. And where, in what form, and to what audience they make them." After her death, only a few obituaries referred to her as a feminist. In the Salmagundi interview, she defended her sexual politics: "I'd like to see a few platoons of intellectuals who are also feminists doing their bit in the war against misogyny in their own way, letting the feminist implications be residual or implicit in their work, without risking being charged by their sisters with desertion. I don't like party lines. They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose." Though Sontag and Rich argued in print, they had much in common; as essayists, they knew how to be intimately magisterial, definitively tentative. And Sontag, like certain other sisters, among them Joan Didion and Avital Ronell, threw away security and pusillanimousness for the sake of daredevil phrases.

Sontag's credo: move on. The phrase comes from her grief-ennobled, expansive essay on her friend Roland Barthes: "The aesthete's radicalism: to be multiple, to make multiple identifications; to assume fully the privilege of the personal.... The writer's freedom that Barthes describes is, in part, flight. The writer is the deputy of his own ego--of that self in perpetual flight before what is fixed by writing, as the mind is in perpetual flight from doctrine. 'Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.' Barthes wants to move on--that is one of the imperatives of the aesthete's sensibility." Move on, Sontag urged. Leave the field untilled. Switch projects. Change hemispheres. Make a film. Direct a play. Write a novel. Fly to Hanoi. Nonspecialist, she refused restriction, scorned the limiting identity of expert. She would rather have been considered a collector, connoisseur, sad pervert--anything but an academic.

Sontag achieved her customary tone of passionate detachment by refusing academic thoroughness. As a writer she was solely self-commanded, not taking editorial orders, obeying allegiance only to her own momentary or abiding enthusiasms: Fassbinder, Robert Walser, Marina Tsvetaeva, bunraku, Alice James ... So what if she stopped endorsing a certain strain of countercultural American art and experience (Jack Smith, Happenings, drugs, science fiction), and turned toward sober European and Asian pleasures? She loved fragments; her finest fictions and essays use the fragment as heuristic device and as musical measurement. In this predilection, she was influenced by Benjamin and Barthes, though I imagine that these writers merely confirmed her native inclinations. And, like Benjamin and Barthes, she respected philosophy and social criticism as forms of writing: Though she never (to my knowledge) referred to Derrida, they shared a genealogy, a set of assumptions--above all, a respect for any text's unruly, tricky self-contradictions. Sontag is usually cited for her content rather than her form or style, and yet her paragraphs and sentences bear close and admiring scrutiny as exemplars of experimental writing: Avatar of move on, she sought prose forms that would permit maximum drift and detour.

Fiction was one escape ramp; she used it to flee the punitive confines of the essay. And she used essays to flee the connect-the-dots dreariness of fiction. Her essays behave like fictions (disguised, arch, upholstered with attitudes), while her fictions behave like essays (pontificating, pedagogic, discursive).

At no other writer's name can I stare entranced for hours on end--only Susan Sontag's. She lived up to that fabulous appellation. No wonder Joseph Cornell loved her. He made a collage (The Ellipsian, 1966) incorporating a photograph of her, and courted her, in his fashion. Attuned to synchronicity, he believed that Henriette Sontag, nineteenth-century opera diva, led to the modern Susan. The second Sontag must have savored her own iconicity, a notoriety ensured by her severe good looks and by a style of intelligence (intelligence as style) that seemed a mode of locomotion (how to get through Western Thought without stopping for traffic lights) as much as a project--one of her favorite words. Stardom was one project she pursued. See her 1963 essay on Resnais's Muriel, especially this footnote: "In this film (but not in Marienbad) Seyrig has the nourishing irrelevant panoply of mannerisms of a star, in the peculiarly cinematic sense of that word. That is to say, she doesn't simply play (or even perfectly fill) a role. She becomes an independent aesthetic object in herself. Each detail of her appearance--her graying hair, her tilted loping walk, her wide-brimmed hats and smartly dowdy suits, her gauche manner in enthusiasm and regret--is unnecessary and indelible." Here is Sontag's brief theory of stardom: unnecessary and indelible. Those antithetical adjectives recall the concluding line of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Bight": "All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful." Another Bishop poem about placelessness gave placeless Sontag--Hollywood? Hanoi? Sarajevo? Manhattan?--the epigraph for her last collection, Where the Stress Falls. Sontag belongs with Bishop in that constellation of brilliant aesthetes, mostly women, whose public positions on sexual eccentricity were, shall we say, complex.

Adventurous as Tarzan, Sontag consecrated her life to the task of being exemplary; consciousness, for her, was a grand experiment, a spiritual vocation, like Simone Weil's. Such lives leave always a sense of the unfinished. Naturally, Benjamin's incomplete Arcades Project ghosts Sontag's work, not least her 1973 autobiographical short story, "Project for a Trip to China," the only thing she wrote about her longing for her dead father.

"Authority, idiosyncrasy, velvetiness--these are what make a star": from Sontag's In America (2001). I wonder what Sontag means by "velvetiness." Velvety complexion? Velvety aura? Velvety effect on beholders? Is velvet the zone the spectator steps into when watching a film? Is velvet the trance state of the reader who experiences identification? Does velvet--as an emotion--precede initiation into the echo chamber of I, Etcetera, the replication booth of Sontag admiration?

So far I've failed to mention cancer, AIDS, photography, atrocity--four of her major subjects. She was comfortable staring at apocalypse. She cut her critical teeth on the Six Million and the Atom Bomb. From horrors, she learned what mattered.

In 1968 she described Jean-Luc Godard's art as "a cinema that eats cinema." Cosmophagic, cinematophagic, bibliophagic, Sontag's literature ate literature--and ate itself. No wonder she enjoyed Bataille, Leiris, Sade, and other savants of the mind consuming itself; and no wonder she had a nose for intertextuality. She alluded to it when defending herself against silly charges of plagiarism: "There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions."

Sontag was a shameless apologist for aesthetic pleasure. Accordingly, I revere her essays not only for what they say but for how they say it. The essay, in Sontag's hands, became perilously interesting, governed by caprice masquerading as commentary. Her capriciousness, like foppish fiction-maverick Ronald Firbank's, turned on the dime of the sentence, that unit of fidelity to the "now," to contemporaneous duration. Sentence maven, she enmeshes me still: In her prose's hands I'm a prisoner of desire, yearning for a literary art that knows no distinction between captive and captor. Such art can be sadomasochistic in its charm, its coldness, and its vulnerability.

She died on December 28, 2004. A few days later, I began rereading Andre Breton in private tribute to Sontag, who loved French seriousness, even when it was surreal. On January 1, 2005, imitating Sontag, I saw a new print of Antonioni's L'Avventura screened at MOMA. Daily, Sontag's spirit exhorts me: Move on! Eat the world! In 2005, everything I do, say, read, and write will be an oblique elegy to her attainments and postures. My Susan Sontag Commemoration Project begins here.

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WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet and critic. (See Contributors.)