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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Books

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On photography

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On Women

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Death Kit

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I, etcetera

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“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.”

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Book:On photography
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“One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don’t believe it’s true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.”

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Book:Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
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“Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves—how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.”

SelfAnxietyTransitionDifferent Selves
Book:As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
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“We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.”

SuccessDemocracyGreatnessAchievementAmbitionGloryIdealsPerfectionEssenceEqualityJealousyMediocrityHeroesInferiorityIntimidationEgalitarianismPettinessOverachievers
Book:The Volcano Lover
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“No such thing as a temptation. A temptation is a desire, a lust like any other - but one that we regret afterwards + wish undone (or that we know beforehand we will regret after). So it`s no excuse to say, ``I didn`t mean to do it. I was tempted + I couldn`t resist.`` All one can honestly say is, ``I did it. I`m sorry I did it.`` - Reborn”

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Book:Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
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“Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.”

WarCapitalism
Book:Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
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“Herkesin bildiği fotoğraflar, artık bir toplumun hakkında düşünmeyi seçtiği ya da düşünmeyi seçtiğini ilan ettiği şeylerin bütünleyici bir parçasıdır. Toplum bu fikirleri 'hafıza' olarak adlandırır ve onların toplamı da uzun vadede bir 'kurgu'ya dönüşür. Daha kesin bir dille konuşursak, kolektif hafıza diye bir şey yoktur -kolektif hafıza, tıpkı kolektif suç kavramı gibi aynı düzmece fikirler familyasının bir parçasıdır. Ama kolektif eğitim diye bir şey vardır. Bütün hafızalar bireyseldir, başka bir şeye indirgenemez; kişinin kendisiyle birlikte ölüp gider. Kolektif hafıza denen şey, hatırlatıcı değil koşullandırıcı bir olgudur: Bu nokta önemlidir ve bu, zihnimizin deposunda kilitli görüntülerle birlikte, olayların nasıl meydana geldiğinin öyküsüdür. İdeolojiler, anlamlı ortak fikirleri özetleyip kapsül haline getirerek öngörülebilir düşünce ve duyguları harekete geçiren, kanıtlayıcı görüntü arşivleri, temsili görüntüler biriktirirler. Poster olmaya uygun fotoğraflar (bir atom bombası denemesinin bıraktığı mantar bulutu, Washington D.C.' de Lincoln Anıtı'nda konuşan Martin Luther King, Jr. ve ayda yürüyen astronot, vb.) ses yankılarının görsel karşılıklarıdır. Onlar sayesinde -en az posta pulları kadar etkili bir hatıra olarak- Önemli Tarihsel Anlar'ı yad ederiz; gerçekten de, sadece zafer anlarını yansıtan fotoğraflar (atom bombasının resmi) posta pulu haline gelirler. Ne şans ki, Nazi ölüm kamplarından tek bir imzalı fotoğraf çıkmamıştır.”

WarPoliticsViolence
Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power.”

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Book:Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays
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“One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.”

DiseaseMetaphorPlagueChauvinism
Book:Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
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“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.”

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Book:Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
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“The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.”

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Book:Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
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“It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”

BooksBook QuotesSusan SontagRegarding The Pain Of Others
Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

BooksBook QuotesSusan SontagRegarding The Pain Of Others
Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.”

BooksBook QuotesSusan SontagRegarding The Pain Of Others
Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.”

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Book:Where the Stress Falls: Essays
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“Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you.”

CultureSocietyPrejudiceSouthRegionsSuperiorityStereotypesPerceptionsClichésNorth And SouthSouthernersNorthNortherners
Book:The Volcano Lover
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