Sontag, Susan (1933–2004)

As a prominent 20th-century social critic, Susan Sontag confronted a myriad of oppressive situations, from military occupations to the isolation of people with AIDS. Sontag saw social conformity in the United States and elsewhere as a dangerous flaw. She flouted both social and linguistic conventions, maintaining that art should defy analysis. Her best-known literary works include Against Interpretation and Other Essays, The Volcano Lover, In America, AIDS and Its Metaphors, and Illness as Metaphor.

Sontag studied at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Paris. She taught at the City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence, and Columbia, and was a writer-in-residence for a year at Rutgers. From 1987 to 1989, as president of the U.S. branch of the writers' organization PEN, Sontag led campaigns on behalf of persecuted writers, including the novelist Salman Rushdie.

Sontag weathered reproach for defending the work of Leni Riefenstahl—whose film Triumph of the Will exemplified Nazi propaganda—yet reconsidered her view of Riefenstahl in the 1974 essay Fascinating Fascism. And whereas Roger Kimball, in a mordant obituary penned a day after Sontag's death, faulted her essay The Pornographic Imagination for neglecting the concrete significance of pornography's role in human degradation, Sontag likened photos of atrocities to pornographic images in the 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others. Like On Photography (1976), that work also includes no photographs. In the 2004 essay Regarding the Torture of Others, Sontag suggested that Internet pornography encouraged the sexual torture of Iraqi detainees. Decades after protesting the U.S. role in Vietnam, Sontag described the United States as engaged in an “endless war” whose captives lacked basic rights; thus, declared Sontag, “the photographs are us.”

Some critics decried her sentimentalization of leftist movements, yet Sontag criticized official communism where it repressed writers and dissidents. In 1982, during Solidarity's crisis, Sontag denounced Poland's martial law as “fascism with a human face.” She repeatedly assisted the Bosnian resistance against Slobodan Milošević, and, in 1993, directed a production of Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo, of which she was made an honorary citizen.

Sontag's trip to Israel to receive the Jerusalem Award in 2001, during the occupation of Palestine, drew criticism. Yet, at the 2003 Oscar Romero Award ceremony for Ishai Menuchin, chair of the Israeli soldiers' movement of refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza, Sontag's keynote address praised Rachel Corrie, recently killed while trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian house by Israeli forces. In that address, Sontag called Israel's control of the Occupied Territories a “moral, human, and political” catastrophe for “both peoples” and urged unconditional withdrawal. Sontag condemned the view that critics of U.S. hegemony are in league with terrorism. She critiqued U.S. foreign policy in The New Yorker days after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Reproval in The New Republic followed, likening Sontag's views to those of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.