Susan Sontag
Story Stream
Susan Sontag Threatens to Upend Our Democracy January 24, 2024
In a 1985 essay on Susan Sontag, her friend the translator and poet Richard Howard noted that one of Sontag’s preferred techniques of fiction was the mise en abime—the repetition of forms and elements such that “the story is inlaid within the story.”...
The Last Jewish Intellectuals November 28, 2023
“Have you ever been given an order and just followed it? Or are you incapable of keeping your mouth shut and doing what you’re told?” Susan Sontag said to a cab driver who proposed a faster way to get downtown. His response was predictable: Get out o...
Background Poise November 10, 2023
THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH of the writer Sigrid Nunez as a young woman, sometime in her mid-twenties. It is 1977 and she has graduated with an MFA from Barnard, having studied under Elizabeth Hardwick. In the picture, Nunez is quite literally radiant—her g...
On Sontag August 07, 2023
Critics do not appear to be especially impressed by Susan Sontag’s slim posthumous collection of essays, On Women. Although she praises some of the later essays in the Guardian, Olivia Laing concludes that it is “not a very good book about women.” An...
An Activist Practice July 31, 2023
I admired Caitlín Doherty’s recent ‘A Feminist Style’, and I disagreed strenuously with almost every line of it. There is no conflict between these two sentiments, and one of the era’s most unfortunate tics is its insistence on interpreting every con...
A Feminist Style July 10, 2023
What is the problem described today by feminism? A decade ago, a generation of women – now in our late twenties and early thirties – claimed it as a primary political identity, but no longer. Among young radicals in the Anglophone world, embarrassmen...
Imagine Susan Sontag on Twitter June 02, 2023
If you are sitting around wondering what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment, a new collection of her writing and interviews from the ’70s about feminism, On Women, offers tantalizing glimmers and hints. Imagining Sontag, with her...
The Secret Life of Philip Rieff December 16, 2022
Philip Rieff is remembered today—if at all—as the one-time husband of his former student Susan Sontag, and a crankily conservative observer of American society, which he saw as violent, stupid, and doomed. The sociologist is appreciated by some thoug...
Among the Deathworks September 02, 2022
A“thin, heavy-thighed, balding man who talked and talked, snobbishly, bookishly, and called me ‘Sweet’”. These are the words of Susan Sontag, the philosopher and filmmaker whose name hangs proudly in Sarajevo’s “Theater Square of Susan Sontag” after ...
Boom and Gloom June 11, 2021
My reading year in 2020 began with Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, and ended with Helen Andrews’s equally impressive Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Ther...
Some Philosophical Responses to the Coronavirus May 15, 2020
One of the few sentences from Hegel I think I understand is “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”. When history has unfurled we will see its full significance, but not until then. But lacking a Hegelian confidence and altitude from which to interpr...
A Tale of Two Plagiarists October 14, 2019
id Susan Sontag write her then-husband Philip Rieff’s first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959)? That’s the assertion in Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, published last month by Ecco. It’s a serious accusation. As an admirer of Th...
The Complicated Life of Susan Sontag October 07, 2019
Among the memorable stories in Benjamin Moser’s engrossing, unsettling biography of Susan Sontag, an observation by the writer Jamaica Kincaid stands out indelibly. In 1982, Sontag’s beloved thirty-year-old son David Rieff endured a number of major c...
Regarding Susan October 07, 2019
Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages; famous names – Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy, W H ...
No One Held Susan Sontag in Higher Esteem Than She Did September 19, 2019
Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist a...
Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography September 18, 2019
wo volumes of Susan Sontag’s diaries, edited by her son, David Rieff, have been published, and a third is forthcoming. In the preface to the first volume, published in 2008, under the title “Reborn,” Rieff confesses his uncertainty about the project....
A Slave to Seriousness September 17, 2019
Benjamin Moser’s huge new biography of the writer Susan Sontag is a book that demands to be judged by its cover, arriving on shelves without a jot of identifying text on its jacket front. It features only a black-and-white photograph of its subject, ...
Susan Sontag Was a Monster May 17, 2019
The novelist Elias Canetti liked to say: ‘I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare: “Relax!”' – and Susan Sontag liked to cite him saying it. I, in turn, like to cite Sontag citing him, because I like to place myself in this lineage of people w...
Susan Sontag Was True Author of Ex-Husband's Book May 15, 2019
A new biography of Susan Sontag is set to claim that the American writer was the true author of her first husband Philip Rieff's seminal work Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.Out in September, Sontag: Her Life by Benjamin Moser lays out textual and an...
