Susan Sontag (born Susan Rosenblatt)

1. Introduction

Susan Sontag (born Susan Rosenblatt, 1933–2004) was an American essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and public intellectual whose work helped define late‑20th‑century debates about art, media, illness, and war. Although she did not hold a permanent academic post in philosophy, her writings are widely treated as philosophically significant for the way they link aesthetic experience to ethical and political judgment.

Across four decades, Sontag examined how images, styles, and metaphors organize modern experience. She became especially known for:

• A challenge to dominant modes of literary and cultural interpretation, arguing that overemphasis on hidden meaning can blunt the force of aesthetic form.
• A pioneering analysis of photography and visual culture that framed the camera as a technology shaping memory, power, and moral distance.
• A critique of the metaphorization of illness, exploring how diseases like cancer and AIDS become sites of stigma and political struggle.
• Reflections on war, human rights, and totalitarianism, grounded in first‑hand observation of conflicts and oppositional movements.

Her essays circulate at the intersection of philosophy, literature, critical theory, and journalism, and are frequently used as entry points into complex theoretical debates for a broader public. Supporters emphasize her role in popularizing avant‑garde and European thought in the United States, while critics sometimes question the systematicity or consistency of her positions. Nevertheless, Sontag is widely regarded as a central figure in the intellectual history of the postwar era, especially for scholars of aesthetics, media studies, feminist and queer theory, and the ethics of global spectatorship.

2. Life and Historical Context

2.1 Biographical Outline

Sontag was born in New York City in 1933 to a Jewish family engaged in the garment trade. After her father’s early death, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles in 1945, coming of age in a city shaped by Hollywood and postwar migration. Early, intensive reading and voracious filmgoing marked her adolescence. At 16 she entered the University of Chicago, graduating at 18, and later pursued graduate studies at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. From the early 1960s she lived primarily in New York City, where she became a highly visible critic and public intellectual. She died there in 2004 from complications related to leukemia.

2.2 Historical Milieus

Sontag’s intellectual life unfolded against several overlapping contexts:

2.3 Position within Intellectual Fields

Sontag moved between literary circles (e.g., Partisan Review), avant‑garde film and theater, and emerging academic theory in New York and Europe. She participated in Cold War debates about communism and anti‑communism, later aligning herself with dissident movements in Eastern Europe and with anti‑nationalist positions in the Balkans. Her life trajectory—Jewish American, educated in Great Books curricula, immersed in European capitals—situated her as a cosmopolitan figure navigating tensions between American mass culture and European high modernism.

3. Intellectual Development and Influences

3.1 Educational Formation

Sontag’s formal studies exposed her to a wide range of philosophical traditions. At the University of Chicago she encountered the Great Books canon, including Greek philosophy, German idealism, and modern literature, in an environment emphasizing close reading and debate. Graduate work at Harvard in philosophy and theology introduced her to both analytic philosophy and continental thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Brief periods at Oxford and the Sorbonne further acquainted her with British analytic approaches and with structuralism and postwar French thought.

3.2 Major Intellectual Influences

Scholars typically identify several clusters of influence:

3.3 Phases of Intellectual Development

Commentators often distinguish several phases (closely tracking her major works):

• A formative period (1933–1963), where she absorbed philosophical and literary traditions and began writing criticism.
• A phase of aesthetic radicalism (1960s–early 1970s), focused on style, camp, and the critique of moralistic criticism.
• A media and war phase (1970s–1980s), centered on photography and political violence.
• A metaphor and illness phase (late 1970s–1990s), tied to her own cancer diagnosis and the AIDS crisis.
• A late ethical and political phase (1990s–2004), emphasizing memory, nationalism, and the ethics of spectatorship.

Some scholars argue that her positions evolve substantially across these phases, especially in her rethinking of images and war; others emphasize continuities in her concern with how cultural forms shape moral perception.

4. Major Works and Themes

4.1 Overview of Principal Works

She also wrote novels, plays, and directed films, but the works above are most central to discussions of her thought.

4.2 Recurrent Themes

Across these writings, several themes recur:

• Mediation by cultural forms: Sontag emphasizes that people encounter reality through images, styles, and narratives that shape what they can see and feel.
• Aesthetics as ethical training: She repeatedly links the cultivation of perception to moral responsiveness, arguing that how one attends to artworks parallels how one attends to others’ suffering.
• Ambivalence toward modernity: Her work alternates between celebration of modernist innovation and suspicion of mass‑media saturation and spectacle.
• Metaphor and stigma: She interrogates how figurative language around illness and war can naturalize prejudice or justify violence.
• Universalism and particularity: In political writings she often appeals to universal human rights while acknowledging the different historical positions of viewers and victims.

Some commentators see a shift from the more affirmative tone of early essays on style and the avant‑garde to a more somber, skeptical tone in later work on war and illness; others read the corpus as a continuous effort to understand how representation structures moral life.

5. Aesthetics, Camp, and the Critique of Interpretation

5.1 “Notes on ‘Camp’” and the Concept of Camp

In “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), Sontag describes camp as a sensibility that delights in artifice, exaggeration, and stylization. Rather than defining camp strictly, she offers a numbered list of “notes,” suggesting that camp:

• Treats seriousness as a form of play.
• Prefers style over content; the manner of presentation becomes central.
• Revalues what mainstream culture dismisses as bad taste or failed seriousness.

Many scholars see this as one of the first major attempts to theorize queer aesthetics for a broad readership. Some LGBTQ+ critics later argued that Sontag underplays the specifically queer social worlds that developed camp, while others credit her with making such practices visible within high‑culture discourse.

5.2 Against Interpretation

In the title essay of Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag criticizes what she sees as an overdominance of hermeneutics—approaches that mine artworks for hidden content, whether psychoanalytic, Marxist, or symbolist. She contends that such methods can become:

• A defense against the unsettling force of art’s formal and sensuous impact.
• An imposition of pre‑existing conceptual schemes onto heterogeneous works.

Her famous proposal is:

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“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

— Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Proponents interpret this as a call to re‑center embodied, affective response and close attention to form. Critics argue that Sontag risks dismissing valuable political or historical analysis, or that her own essays inevitably practice a kind of interpretation even while criticizing it.

5.3 Aesthetic Radicalism and the Avant‑Garde

In Styles of Radical Will and related essays, Sontag defends avant‑garde and experimental art (e.g., Beckett, Godard, Cage) as crucial for renewing perception and resisting cultural complacency. She is particularly drawn to works that foreground silence, fragmentation, or difficulty. Some commentators emphasize her role in legitimizing film, photography, and popular forms as objects of serious reflection; others note that her admiration for difficulty aligns her with high modernist elitism.

Across these writings, Sontag positions aesthetics not as a separate, ornamental domain but as a primary site where modern sensibility and judgment are formed.

6. Photography, Media, and the Ethics of Spectatorship

6.1 Core Arguments in On Photography

In On Photography (1977), Sontag explores how cameras transform the world into images and how this affects knowledge and power. She characterizes photography as:

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“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography

She argues that photography:

• Objectifies and collects: turning people and events into portable, ownable images.
• Creates a “chronic voyeuristic relation” to the world, encouraging detachment.
• Normalizes suffering by repeated exposure to images of war and disaster.
• Shapes tourism and memory, as people travel and remember through photographs.

Some theorists praise this work as foundational for visual culture and media studies. Others contend she overgeneralizes from press and art photography and underestimates photography’s participatory or empowering uses.

6.2 Rethinking Spectatorship in Regarding the Pain of Others

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag revisits and partly revises her earlier claims. She emphasizes that responses to images of suffering depend on viewers’ histories, ideologies, and physical distance:

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“No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”

— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Key themes include:

• Limits of images: Photographs cannot, she argues, provide full understanding of political contexts; they require narratives and analysis.
• Ambivalent effects: Images may provoke compassion or cynicism, mobilization or paralysis; there is no guaranteed moral outcome.
• Ethics of display: She considers whether images of the dead and wounded honor victims or exploit them.

Commentators divide on whether this later work corrects an earlier pessimism or maintains a fundamentally skeptical stance toward the transformative power of images. Some media theorists use the pair On Photography / Regarding the Pain of Others as a case study in how intellectual positions shift with changing technologies and conflicts.

7. Illness, Metaphor, and the Body

7.1 Illness as Metaphor

Written after her own cancer diagnosis, Illness as Metaphor (1978) analyzes how diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer become loaded with metaphorical meanings—e.g., as expressions of character, repression, or moral failure. Sontag opens by describing illness as a parallel citizenship:

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“Illness is the night‑side of life, a more onerous citizenship.”

— Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

She argues that:

• Military and moral metaphors (“battle,” “invasion,” “punishment”) stigmatize patients.
• Such metaphors can obscure environmental or social causes by personalizing blame.
• A “clean,” non‑metaphorical language of illness would reduce fear and shame.

Medical humanists and bioethicists widely credit this work with helping to found critical studies of medical discourse. Some theorists, however, question whether fully eliminating metaphor is possible or desirable, suggesting that metaphors can also support coping and activism.

7.2 AIDS and Its Metaphors

In AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Sontag extends her analysis to the AIDS epidemic, emphasizing how Cold War and invasion imagery framed the disease:

• AIDS is portrayed as an “alien” invasion or pollution of the body and nation.
• Associations with sexuality, particularly gay and marginalized communities, intensify stigma.
• Wartime rhetoric (“plague,” “enemy within”) justifies intrusive surveillance or moralizing policy.

Some queer and AIDS activists found in Sontag’s critique a tool for challenging prejudicial public discourse; others argue that she does not fully address how affected communities reappropriate metaphors for resistance.

7.3 The Body, Identity, and Embodiment

Across these texts, Sontag treats the body as both a biological and social reality. Illness produces a second, often unwanted identity and reorganizes one’s relation to time, community, and self‑representation. Philosophers of embodiment draw on her work to analyze how:

• Societies inscribe moral narratives onto diseased bodies.
• Clinical and media representations of illness shape patients’ self‑understanding.

Debates continue over how far Sontag’s stance—skeptical of metaphor—can be reconciled with later theories that highlight the productive and identity‑forming aspects of illness narratives.

8. Politics, Human Rights, and Anti-Totalitarian Thought

8.1 Early Left Engagement and Later Revisions

Sontag’s political essays traverse Cold War, post‑colonial, and post–Cold War debates. In the 1960s she aligned with segments of the New Left, criticizing U.S. foreign policy and supporting anti‑imperialist movements. Over time, however, she became sharply critical of left‑wing apologies for authoritarian regimes, especially in Communist states. A widely cited moment is her public acknowledgment that many Western intellectuals, including herself, had underestimated the repression of Communist governments; she later described communism as a form of “fascism with a human face,” a phrase that drew both support and controversy.

8.2 Human Rights and Dissidence

Sontag increasingly framed her politics in terms of universal human rights and solidarity with dissidents. She visited Vietnam during the war, engaged with Eastern European dissident circles, and was active around censorship and persecution of writers. Commentators note her affinity with cosmopolitanism, stressing moral obligations that transcend national borders.

Some critics, however, argue that this universalism risks downplaying structural economic inequalities or adopting a Western vantage point; others see her as part of a broader shift from revolutionary rhetoric to human‑rights discourse in late 20th‑century liberal and left thought.

8.3 War, Nationalism, and Sarajevo

Sontag’s engagement with the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s—where she staged Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and wrote about the conflict—illustrates her concern with nationalism and ethnic violence. She criticized what she regarded as Western passivity toward atrocities in Bosnia, interpreting the conflict as a test of Europe’s commitment to pluralism.

Her later essays relate nationalism to the manipulation of memory and images, themes that converge in Regarding the Pain of Others. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, she published comments critical of aspects of U.S. government rhetoric; these interventions sparked debate about the role and responsibilities of public intellectuals during crisis.

8.4 Anti-Totalitarianism and Its Critics

Sontag’s anti‑totalitarian stance places her alongside figures who opposed both right‑wing dictatorships and left‑wing authoritarianism. Admirers argue that this stance exemplifies consistent defense of individual freedom and cultural autonomy. Critics contend that, at times, her focus on political repression overshadowed analysis of global capitalism or neo‑imperial structures. The resulting debates position her as a key reference point in discussions about the limits and possibilities of intellectual engagement with state violence.

9. Methodology and Style of Criticism

9.1 Essayistic Method

Sontag’s primary vehicle was the essay, which she used to explore rather than conclusively systematize ideas. Her method is often described as:

• Comparative, drawing parallels across literature, film, photography, and philosophy.
• Allusive, weaving references to canonical and avant‑garde works without extensive apparatus.
• Diagnostic, identifying symptomatic cultural patterns rather than constructing formal theories.

Supporters see this as a strength, enabling her to make complex ideas accessible and to model a form of criticism that is both rigorous and responsive to lived experience. Some philosophers, however, view her approach as insufficiently systematic or under‑argued by academic standards.

9.2 Close Attention to Form and Sensibility

Consistent with Against Interpretation, Sontag’s criticism often begins from the sensuous experience of artworks—their tone, rhythm, and style—before addressing content or ideology. She treats criticism as an art of description that can itself be inventive. Her prose is noted for its aphoristic clarity:

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“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

— Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

This style has been praised for intellectual audacity and memorability but also criticized for occasional overstatement or lack of nuance where empirical evidence would be expected.

9.3 Position Between Academia and Public Sphere

Sontag operated largely outside permanent academic structures, publishing in venues such as Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and mass‑market books. Her work thus occupies a middle ground between scholarly research and journalism.

Some academics credit her with expanding the public reach of theoretical debates; others suggest that her distance from disciplinary norms led to misreadings or partial appropriations of specialized work.

9.4 Self-Reflexivity and Revision

Sontag periodically revisited and revised her own positions, most notably on photography and war. This self‑reflexivity is interpreted by some commentators as a methodological openness to changing historical circumstances; others see tensions or inconsistencies, particularly between early celebrations of style and later ethical concerns about spectacle. Either way, the trajectory of her writing is frequently studied as an example of how critical methodologies evolve in response to shifting media and political landscapes.

10. Reception, Critique, and Influence on Philosophy

10.1 Contemporary Reception

From the 1960s onward, Sontag attracted substantial attention in Anglophone and European intellectual circles. Many contemporaries welcomed her as a mediator of European thought and avant‑garde culture for American audiences. Her essays on camp, interpretation, and photography quickly became widely cited.

At the same time, she faced criticism from multiple directions:

• Some traditionalists objected to her elevation of popular culture and camp.
• Certain Marxist and feminist critics argued that her early emphasis on form and aesthetics underplayed class, gender, and race.
• Others considered her political stances, especially on communism and later on Bosnia and 9/11, as overly moralistic or insufficiently grounded in geopolitical analysis.

10.2 Philosophical Influence

Philosophers and theorists in several fields have engaged with her work:

Some scholars treat Sontag primarily as a popularizer of ideas developed elsewhere (e.g., structuralism, semiotics), while others argue that her synthesis and ethical inflection amount to original contributions.

10.3 Critiques of Limitations

Recurrent critiques include:

• Eurocentrism and canon focus: Emphasis on European and North American high culture, with relatively little engagement with non‑Western traditions.
• Underdeveloped treatment of race and gender: While later work addresses these more directly, many commentators note their limited role in her early frameworks.
• Pessimism about media: Media theorists sometimes oppose her skeptical view of photography to more optimistic accounts of participatory or activist media.

Despite these critiques, her texts remain staples on syllabi and reading lists, often serving as provocations against which newer theories are articulated.

10.4 Ongoing Debates

Current scholarship continues to debate:

• Whether Sontag’s call for an “erotics of art” can be reconciled with politically engaged criticism.
• How her evolving views on photography map onto digital and networked media.
• The extent to which her stance on metaphors of illness aligns with contemporary interest in narrative and identity in medicine.

These debates indicate a sustained, if often critical, engagement with her work in philosophical and theoretical discourse.

11. Legacy and Historical Significance

11.1 Place in Intellectual History

Sontag is widely regarded as one of the most visible Anglophone public intellectuals of the late 20th century. Historians of ideas often position her at the crossroads of:

• Postwar American liberal and radical thought.
• The reception of French theory and European modernism in the United States.
• The emergence of visual culture and medical humanities as academic fields.

Her essays are frequently used as benchmarks for understanding how questions about art, media, and ethics shifted from the 1960s through the early 2000s.

11.2 Institutional and Disciplinary Impact

Within universities, Sontag’s writings are taught across disciplines—literature, philosophy, film and media studies, art history, gender and sexuality studies, and public health humanities. Scholars credit her with:

• Helping to legitimize photography and film as central topics for philosophical reflection.
• Providing early frameworks for analyzing illness discourse and stigma.
• Modeling a form of criticism that is simultaneously cosmopolitan, intermedial, and ethically concerned.

Some observers, however, note that her influence has been more pronounced in critical and cultural theory than in philosophy as narrowly institutionalized.

11.3 Public Intellectual Model

Sontag’s career is often cited in discussions of the public intellectual: a figure who addresses broad audiences on matters of culture and politics. Commentators highlight her willingness to intervene in contentious debates and to appear in global conflict zones. For some, she exemplifies a model of engaged, cosmopolitan critique; for others, her prominence raises questions about celebrity, authority, and representation in cultural life.

11.4 Continuing Relevance

In debates about digital imagery, humanitarian intervention, and pandemic discourse, Sontag’s analyses of spectatorship and metaphorization of illness continue to be invoked, sometimes affirmatively, sometimes as positions to be revised. Scholars and activists revisit her work to understand:

• How new media technologies intensify or alter the dynamics she described.
• How metaphors around diseases like COVID‑19 repeat or depart from earlier patterns.
• How critical discourse can balance attention to form, politics, and global responsibility.

Her legacy thus remains active, not as a settled doctrine but as a body of arguments and sensibilities that subsequent generations test, adapt, and contest.