Susan Sontag - Intellectual Heroine or Inellectual Heroin?
The late Susan Sontag was an author of decay, of intellectual malaise. In a Slate obit, Christopher Hitchens gives her a glowing elegy, Susan Sontag - Remembering an intellectual heroine.
Sontag's essay "On Camp," celebrates a vision in which aesthetics triumph over morality. This vision “neutralises moral indignation”. Sontag told us that camp divorces beauty from truth. She maintained that aesthetic pleasure was morally inert (although by appreciation of the beautiful she maintained we are morally edified). A more recent essay “An Argument about Beauty” was no more enlightening. She wrote of “the beautiful [being] colonized by moral judgments”, as if ethics were an invading army raping and oppressing the poor put-upon aborigine that is beauty. She was a vanguard of radical chic and the drivel that proceeded from such a sensibility.
Sontag was deservedly excoriated for her comments in The New Yorker about the attacks on the U.S. of September 11th, 2001:
"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...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Ironically, years earlier when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for Salman Rushdie's death because of purported sacrilege in “The Satanic Verses,'' Sontag protested vigorously. Apparently, to Sontag books were more important than people.
In the 1960s she stated with regard to Vietnam War: ``the white race is the cancer of human history.'' No doubt the five million Vietnamese who fled the atheism and oppression of communists would disagree with her (not to mention the two million slaughtered in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge). The white race that fought with the Vietnamese against the puppet government of the Chinese and the Soviets were not “white devils”. Only fuzzy brained knee jerk anti-Westernism could lead to such a foolish pronouncement.
Hitchens claims that Sontag saw more than most the future defeat of communism. Hitchens also claimed that its defeat was “inscribed in its negation of literature”. What the communist bloc was most notably lacking was not literature but faith. And with all due respect to Ms. Sontag, it is fair to say that more than most the rise and the fall of communism was inscribed at Fatima.
Former New York City mayor Ed Koch not long ago declared that "Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell for her outrageous assaults on Israel. I will no longer read her works."
It has been noted that the supposed gigantic intellect who was Sontag did not create many original ideas but largely rehashed postwar, continental, postmodern claptrap. She, like many who think they are dismantling a current tyranny when in fact they are adding bricks, unwittingly or otherwise, to the edifice of a future tyranny, did so because of muddled thinking. One thing Sontag could have kept in mind which would have tended to straighten out her thoughts, the final lines of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”
Don’t let it be said that I would only speak ill of the dead. Sontag did have an appreciation of great literature and sought to introduce others to it. Although I have read a number of her essays I have not read, and do not intend to read, “In America” for which she won the National Book Award. I will pray for her soul.
Sontag's essay "On Camp," celebrates a vision in which aesthetics triumph over morality. This vision “neutralises moral indignation”. Sontag told us that camp divorces beauty from truth. She maintained that aesthetic pleasure was morally inert (although by appreciation of the beautiful she maintained we are morally edified). A more recent essay “An Argument about Beauty” was no more enlightening. She wrote of “the beautiful [being] colonized by moral judgments”, as if ethics were an invading army raping and oppressing the poor put-upon aborigine that is beauty. She was a vanguard of radical chic and the drivel that proceeded from such a sensibility.
Sontag was deservedly excoriated for her comments in The New Yorker about the attacks on the U.S. of September 11th, 2001:
"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...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Ironically, years earlier when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for Salman Rushdie's death because of purported sacrilege in “The Satanic Verses,'' Sontag protested vigorously. Apparently, to Sontag books were more important than people.
In the 1960s she stated with regard to Vietnam War: ``the white race is the cancer of human history.'' No doubt the five million Vietnamese who fled the atheism and oppression of communists would disagree with her (not to mention the two million slaughtered in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge). The white race that fought with the Vietnamese against the puppet government of the Chinese and the Soviets were not “white devils”. Only fuzzy brained knee jerk anti-Westernism could lead to such a foolish pronouncement.
Hitchens claims that Sontag saw more than most the future defeat of communism. Hitchens also claimed that its defeat was “inscribed in its negation of literature”. What the communist bloc was most notably lacking was not literature but faith. And with all due respect to Ms. Sontag, it is fair to say that more than most the rise and the fall of communism was inscribed at Fatima.
Former New York City mayor Ed Koch not long ago declared that "Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell for her outrageous assaults on Israel. I will no longer read her works."
It has been noted that the supposed gigantic intellect who was Sontag did not create many original ideas but largely rehashed postwar, continental, postmodern claptrap. She, like many who think they are dismantling a current tyranny when in fact they are adding bricks, unwittingly or otherwise, to the edifice of a future tyranny, did so because of muddled thinking. One thing Sontag could have kept in mind which would have tended to straighten out her thoughts, the final lines of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”
Don’t let it be said that I would only speak ill of the dead. Sontag did have an appreciation of great literature and sought to introduce others to it. Although I have read a number of her essays I have not read, and do not intend to read, “In America” for which she won the National Book Award. I will pray for her soul.
posted by BarbariansAtBay at
4:38 PM
