The Pain of Susan Sontag

Abstract

Susan Sontag was a public intellectual who, in a non-academic way, changed contemporary views on the image and the possibilities of the image. In the last part of her life, she combined her longstanding aesthetic concerns with a deep interest in pain and suffering—particularly during civil conflict. She went to Sarajevo, and stayed some weeks, at the height of the Serbian siege and, there, refined a stringent view of what the image can do, and an equally stringent view of what intellectuals—in an honest morality born out of experiential reflection and knowledge—can do. In this sense, the possibility and authenticity of the intellectual image mirror those of the visual image. This article traces Sontag's genealogy of thought, comments on its impact and limits, but commends its challenge to the conduct of today's discipline of international relations (IR).

Notes

*An earlier version of this essay appeared in Cerwyn Moore and Chris Farrands (eds.), International Relations Theory and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues (London: Routledge, 2010). My thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, and thanks also to the guest editors of this special issue. The usual disclaimers apply.

1. The gurney shots, and some others, were reproduced in Annie Leibovitz, “My Time with Susan”, The Guardian (Weekend) (7 October 2006). The best shot of Sontag as a young woman was by Henri Cartier-Bresson, but the one by Peter Hujar is the pinup wallpaper on innumerable computers.

2. Susan Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution”, Ramparts (April 1969).

3. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”, in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967).

4. See, for example, Edward Field, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

5. This appeared in France in 1955. The English edition is Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1973).

6. Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero”, in Sontag, Against Interpretation, op. cit., p. 81.

7. This reading rather underplayed the structuralist patterns and search for the underlying accounts of thought which Levi-Strauss sought to illustrate in his work.

8. Claude Levi-Strauss, Anthropology & Myth, Lectures 1951–1982 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).

9. “Simone Weil”, in Sontag, Against Interpretation, op. cit., p. 49.

10. David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon, 1990).

12. “The Pornographic Imagination”, in Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969), p. 69.

11. The champion of which, in IR, is Mervyn Frost, Towards a Normative Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). But this is the same Hegel expounded in almost all contemporary political philosophy. See Michael O. Hardimon, Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Allen W. Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Sontag will have none of this.

13. “Trip to Hanoi”, in Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, op. cit., p. 270.

14. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). One could also include Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006).

15. Stephen Chan, “A Problem for IR: How Shall We Narrate the Saga of the Bestial Man?”, Global Society, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2003), pp. 385–414.

16. Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004).

17. Gojko Beric, Letters to the Celestial Serbs (London: Saqi Books, 2001).

18. Alain Finkielkraut, The Crime of Being Born (Zagreb: Ceres, 1997).

19. Susan Sontag, “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo”, in Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 319.

20. This was marked by her books. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1978); and the only-one-step-removed meditation, Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Allen Lane, 1989) – one step removed because the suffering, anxiety and senses of decay, bodily rebellion against the will, and death are there as in cases of cancer.

21. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Picador, 2002). This was originally published in 1980, as her third book of collected essays.

23. Ibid., p. 328.

22. Sontag, “‘There’ and ‘Here’”, in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, op. cit., p. 323.

24. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003).

27. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, op. cit., p. 113.

25. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979).

26. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998).

28. Susan Sontag, “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo”, in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, op. cit., p. 319.

29. Susan Sontag, “Answers to a Questionnaire”, in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, op. cit., p. 298.

30. David Rieff, “I'm Not Interested in Quality of Life”, The Guardian (G2) (7 December 2005).