Susan Sontag Died – Moon of Alabama

December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag Died

One of my idols, Susan Sontag, died today, 71 years old, of cancer in a New York hospital.

Susan Sontag on 9/11 in The New Yorker:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

From Susan Sontag’s Friedenspreis acceptance speech:

.. what saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books, books in translation as well as those written in English.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.

Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Related Links:
Official Website
Wikipedia

Posted by b on December 28, 2004 at 18:33 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Hugs to you, Bernhard. I just got online and saw a headline on my home page. Then I came to the Moon and saw you had already noted her passing. This is what draws me back to this site.
The world has lost a great mind, and I have no doubt she will be excoriated by some for her remarks after 9-11. The New York Review of Books has been a consistent outlet for reason in this unreasonable nation over the last few years. Both she and the NYRoB were criticized for failing to lose themselves in grief while America’s leaders shed crocodile tears.
No doubt that few, if any, of them will have the integrity to admit she told painful truths while others were exploiting those sad deaths to justify yet more and maybe even worse acts of war, torture and piggish thuggery under a thin veneer of argued necessity.

Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 28 2004 20:23 utc | 1

Goodbye Mother Sontag, one who taught me to read:
There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration’s initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs — as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ”torture.” The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ”abuse,” eventually of ”humiliation” — that was the most to be admitted. ”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ”And therefore I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.”
Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ”genocide” while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks’ time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything.
from her piece on Abu Ghraib
It seems almost ludicrous to attempt to join a chorus when the dead I try to replace seem so much more enlightened. But I’m thinking Mother Sontag wanted to pass on her voice to many children. I guess it’s time to write.

Posted by: Citizen | Dec 28 2004 20:55 utc | 2

Yeah, she’s good. Illness as Metaphor is a mollifying read in any time of personal crisis.
But, could she ever win a “Hookie Award” (named after the intellectual traitor Sydney Hook?)

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 28 2004 22:48 utc | 3

There was a re-play of a three-hour interview with Susan Sontag on C-Span today. The interview took place just before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. She was a brilliant woman and a true humanist.
Condolences to all of us for losing this bright light.
This is my first posting to Moon. I’ve been drinking all of your words of wisdom, humor, outrage, and grief- Bernhard, and other former bar flies from the Whiskey Bar- for quite a long time. I just wanted to express my thanks to all of you. You all are also bright lights.

Posted by: cosmic debris | Dec 29 2004 2:50 utc | 4

As susan over at Suburban Guerilla say: It’s depressing, that only in America are intellectuals considered to be unworthy of notice – except when they die, and everyone in the media gets to pretend they’re familiar with her work.
America: The proud land of the lowest common denominator.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 29 2004 5:15 utc | 5

@Uncle $cam,
How true it is, All the philosophy, litrature, music,and yes photography, is all just pissin in the wind as far as American media drivin pop culture is concerned — keepin all the fools on square one, post adolescent anguished consumerism devoid of any reflection past the Jerry Springer trailer park slug fest we call the news — Her voice was one for those few willing to move on to a garden of full color, in a black and white world — and she is missed.

Posted by: anna missed | Dec 29 2004 9:58 utc | 6

Straight from the war_nerd:
Q: How do you define terrorism?
A: Violence by people who don’t have an air force.

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Dec 30 2004 1:18 utc | 7

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