She was true titan of our culture. A cancer survivor, fighting it for over 30 years while writing some of the best cultural essays, novels and non-fiction books addressing everything from AIDS to photography. She will be missed. Here’s a couple of samples of her writing:
“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”–Susan Sontag
And this from an interview on her profound book Regarding the Pain of Others:
BILL MOYERS: Let’s talk about the images in Regarding The Pain Of Others. Why don’t images that you write about and that we see, why don’t they stop war?
SUSAN SONTAG: I don’t think images can stop war, because I don’t think images just come all wrapped up with their meanings-- very apparent to us. I think the images, as I say, they’ll disgust you with war in general, but they won’t tell you which of the wars, let’s say, that might be worth fighting, like World War II, and the ones that you should bring to an end as quickly as possible or pull out of. That-- for that you have to have a politics or you have to have an ethics, or you have to have some knowledge. And that’s why you need words to go with the images.
It’s not the pictures that are going to tell us that specific message. The pictures are going to tell us how terrible war is. But they’re not going to help us-- understand why this war is wrong.
Because you know, the other people will just say, “Well, hey, war is hell.” I mean, don’t you know that? But grow up. You know, did you think war was-- pretty activity in which nobody gets killed? Of course! War is hell." So the pictures are not going to tell us to stop a particular war, a particular war. And for that we need debate, and we need a two party system, which we no longer have in this country.