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Tue 28 Dec, 2004 04:57 pm
Quote:Sontag was among the first to raise a dissenting voice after September 11, 2001, in a controversial New Yorker magazine essay arguing that talk of an "attack on civilization" was "drivel."
A tall and imposing figure with white-streaked, long black hair and a severe demeanour, Sontag was a fixture on the New York intellectual scene. She played herself in Woody Allen's 1983 comedy "Zelig", and directed four films of her own.
She ignited a firestorm of criticism when she declared that the September 11 attacks were not a "cowardly attack" on civilization but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions".
With much of America still too shocked to consider such views, she was vilified in some quarters. An op-ed piece in the Boston Globe contended the comments confirmed what many already thought about her: "high IQ, but a few quarts low on compassion and common sense."
Sontag has since been an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush over his response to the September 11 attacks and particularly the U.S. war in Iraq.
In May this year she wrote an essay in the New York Times about the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, arguing that the shocking photographs of the abuse would likely becoming the defining images of the war.
The piece prompted an editorial writer at the Financial Times to describe her as "the liberal lioness ... the pride of hand-wringing elitist liberalism".
Novelist E.L. Doctorow described her as "quite fearless".
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It's strange to me that this thread had only one reply.
Susan Sontag was an important thinker, both for politics and for cultural matters.
It seems too bad that her dissenting view on recent events is what apparently marks her demise.
Her essays on Camp were an interesting eye-opening approach to the New Vulgarity that has swept the world. She was also important in the anti-Vietnam war movement.
I met Sontag when I was 17 and about to enter the University, at an open seminar in Mexico City.
She was with trostkyte guru Ernest Mandel and radical Robin Blackburn, from the London School of Economics.
I remember they debated furiously about "development", with Blackburn being on the "industrialization is the only way out of poverty" line and Sontag on the "if growth is not ecologically sustainable, it doesn't lead to a better quality of living". Blackburn had more appeal to Mexican radicals. A very small group met the next day with Sontag, and talked about feminism, pot, and the links between political and cultural change. She was a bright, obviously very articulate woman, and I guess she correctly found us a little bit too close to Marx.
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