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December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Author and critic Susan Sontag has died at the age of 71. Sally Greene discusses Sontag's life and legacy at Greenespace. Greene wrote about Sontag for The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Sontag became notorious for her reaction to the 9/11 attacks. She argued that hijackers had political and military objectives and that the attacks were not simply irrational acts of inscrutable malice. Predictably, her critics misconstrued her remarks as a defense of the hijackers.

Sontag wasn't apologizing for the hijackers, of course. She was arguing that evil is an ineffective explanatory device. If you caricature your enemy as crazy or evil, you do yourself a disservice. If you know your enemy's beliefs and desires, you can predict his behavior. Sontag's remarks enraged the right who assailed her as a treacherous radical.

(It is ironic that the FBI profiler is a latter day folk hero. Americans love fiction and non-fiction about brilliant forensic psychologists who crack a baffling crime by "getting into the head" of a serial killer. I have never heard anyone argue that profiler shows generate sympathy for serial killers by acknowledging that they act for reasons.)

I hope Sontag's later years weren't blighted by knee-jerk jingoists.

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Comments

I grew up in the late sixties, when WNET provided much of the National PBS feed, and Mailer, Vidal, Sontag, Buckley were television personalities.

Just an nostalgic old fogey, but I can't help but feel the quality of discourse has declined since those days.

Styles of Radical Will may not be her best book, but it was personally important to me, at a particular time and place, as motivation and comfort. I owe the lady a debt.

Beautifully put. It's truly a shame the legacy of this esteemed mind has been soured (at least at this time) by political malice and opportunism.

Susan Sontag R.I.P.

Christopher Hitchens remarked in his obit for her that Sontag displayed almost courage as he did in Sarajevo and that "She adored trying new restaurants and new dishes."

Susan Sontag was courageous and inspiring. She was in Sarajevo with Juan Goytisolo; they worked to help a group of people there put on a production of Waiting For Godot, I think it was. Amazing.

Those people who attacked her for her comments about the hijackers are the cowardly ones.

See this remembrance by her graphic designer.

Hitchens actually says that in Sarajevo he felt "faint-hearted long before [Sontag] did." She wrote of her experience there for the New York Review of Books, in an essay titled "Godot Comes to Sarajevo," which should be read for a number of reasons: as a memoir of what life was like in that besieged city during the war; as a study in theatrical direction; and as a testament to humanity's absolute need of art in even the most terrible circumstances.

Enjoy your blog Lindsay. Keep it up. DAN

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, this is the basis of freedom of speech after all. People who disparaged Sontag ought to bear this in mind.

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