Chat with Susan Sontag

Essayist & Activist

About Susan Sontag

In 1964, she walked into a tuberculosis ward in New York and began writing notes that would become 'Illness as Metaphor', a searing dismantling of how language pathologizes suffering, turning cancer into moral failure and AIDS into divine punishment. Her camera wasn’t a tool for documentation but a weapon against the tyranny of the image: in 'On Photography', she exposed how mechanical reproduction seduces us into mistaking representation for reality, turning war into spectacle and grief into aesthetic commodity. She refused the essay as ornament; each one was a scalpel, cutting through Cold War pieties, camp’s double consciousness, and the false neutrality of art criticism. Her 1967 trip to Hanoi, embedded with North Vietnamese journalists during bombing raids, produced not propaganda but agonized witness, 'Trip to Hanoi' remains one of the few Western accounts that treats revolutionary rhetoric as both urgent and unstable. She didn’t interpret culture; she diagnosed its symptoms, and prescribed attention as the first act of resistance.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Susan Sontag:

  • “How did your experience in Hanoi reshape your view of political witnessing?”
  • “What did you mean when you called photography 'a powerful instrument for depoliticizing experience'?”
  • “Why did you argue that 'camp is a solvent of morality' in 'Notes on Camp'?”
  • “In 'Illness as Metaphor', why did you insist on stripping disease of its literary baggage?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Susan Sontag ever identify as part of the Beat Generation?
No, she explicitly distanced herself from the Beats. While she admired Kerouac’s energy and Ginsberg’s candor, she criticized their anti-intellectualism and romanticized spontaneity. Her 1965 essay 'The Aesthetics of Silence' contrasts Beat immediacy with her own commitment to rigorous, historically grounded interpretation. She shared their countercultural impulse but rejected their dismissal of theory, discipline, and European modernism.
What was Sontag’s relationship to feminism in the 1970s?
She resisted being labeled a feminist theorist, though her work deeply informed feminist thought. 'Against Interpretation' challenged patriarchal hermeneutics; 'On Photography' analyzed the gendered gaze. Yet she declined to sign the 1972 'Women's Strike for Equality' manifesto, arguing that identity politics risked reducing art to biography. Her ambivalence reflected a broader tension between political solidarity and intellectual autonomy.
How did Sontag’s illness with cancer influence her later writing?
Her 1975 diagnosis catalyzed 'Illness as Metaphor', written while undergoing treatment. She dissected how metaphors like 'invasion' or 'battle' frame illness as moral failing, especially for women and gay men. The book emerged from fury at being told to 'fight bravely' rather than receive clear medical information. It became foundational for disability studies and medical humanities, shifting discourse from metaphor to material conditions.
Why did Sontag oppose the term 'postmodern'?
She called it 'a lazy label' obscuring real historical shifts. In interviews, she argued that calling contemporary art 'postmodern' implied an end to meaning-making, whereas her project was precisely to reassert seriousness, moral clarity, and the ethical weight of form. She preferred 'late modern', a term acknowledging continuity with modernism’s commitments to critique, complexity, and responsibility toward truth.
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Topics

EssaysCultural CritiqueBeat Influence

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