Susan Sontag(1933 — 2004)
Susan Sontag
États-Unis
8 min read
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a major American intellectual of the 20th century — essayist, novelist, and activist. Known for her reflections on photography, illness, and war, she profoundly shaped contemporary critical thought.
Frequently asked questions
Famous Quotes
« Photography is essentially an act of non-intervention. »
« To be educated is to learn to read slowly. »
Key Facts
- Born in 1933 in New York, she published the essay 'Notes on Camp' in 1964, which made her famous
- In 1977, she published 'On Photography', a landmark work on the image
- In 1978, 'Illness as Metaphor' analyzed the social representations of cancer and tuberculosis
- She directed theater productions in Sarajevo during the siege in 1993, a powerful act of commitment
- She died in 2004 from leukemia and remains an essential figure in American critical thought
Works & Achievements
A landmark essay published in Partisan Review that theorizes the aesthetic of camp — a taste for artifice, exaggeration, and kitsch. This text established Sontag as a major intellectual figure from the very start of her career.
A collection of critical essays in which Sontag champions a sensory approach to art against reductive interpretation. The book remains a touchstone in cultural studies and literary criticism.
A major work examining society's relationship with photographic images: their power, their limits, and their effects on our perception of reality. It continues to exert a profound influence on visual studies.
An essay drawn from her own experience with cancer in which Sontag deconstructs the cultural representations of illness — tuberculosis, cancer, and later AIDS. A foundational text in medical humanities and social studies.
A continuation of her previous essay, applied to the AIDS epidemic. Sontag challenges the moral and social stigmas attached to the disease at a moment of acute crisis.
A historical novel awarded the National Book Award, inspired by the life of Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska. It reflects Sontag's belief in fiction as a tool for intellectual exploration.
An essay in which she revisits 'On Photography' and interrogates the moral impact of war images on viewers. Published in the midst of the Iraq War, it could not have been more timely.
Anecdotes
At sixteen, Susan Sontag enrolled at the University of Chicago, admitted thanks to her exceptional precocious intelligence. There she discovered philosophy and European literature, forging an intellectual curiosity that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
In 1968, Sontag traveled to Hanoi in the midst of the Vietnam War to bear witness to American bombing raids. Her report, published as 'Trip to Hanoi', was an act of courageous political commitment at a time when criticizing American foreign policy invited fierce hostility.
During the Siege of Sarajevo in 1993, Sontag traveled to the besieged city and staged Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' with local actors, performing by candlelight due to power outages. This powerful symbolic gesture was a demonstration of solidarity in the face of barbarity.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1975, Sontag survived against all odds and drew from the experience her essay 'Illness as Metaphor', in which she dismantles the cultural prejudices surrounding certain diseases. She suffered a new cancer in 1998 before succumbing to leukemia in 2004.
Her essay 'On Photography' (1977), compiled from articles published in the New York Review of Books, was an intellectual shock felt worldwide. It was the first major theoretical work to question the power and limits of the photographic image in contemporary society.
Primary Sources
Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.
Illness is not a metaphor, and the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.
The question of whether photographs of people killed and mutilated should be shown—and in what circumstances—remains a genuine moral question.
A writer is someone who pays attention to the world. Being a writer is practicing, with particular attentiveness and particular devotion, the art of reading the world.
Key Places
Sontag spent most of her adult life in New York, particularly in the West Village and Chelsea. The city was the center of her intellectual life and artistic commitments.
She enrolled there at 16 and received a rigorous philosophical education that lastingly shaped her critical thinking and her taste for sweeping intellectual synthesis.
Sontag spent extended periods in Paris during the 1950s, frequenting the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and immersing herself in French philosophy — Sartre, Beauvoir, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss.
In 1993, at the height of the siege of the city, she staged a production of 'Waiting for Godot' there. This symbolic act resonated around the world and embodied her belief in culture as a form of resistance.
She traveled there in 1968 during the Vietnam War, under American bombing, to bear witness to the reality of the conflict and publish a committed travel account.
