PRESTOPUNDIT: ROGER KIMBALL puts Susan Sontag

December 29, 2004

ROGER KIMBALL puts Susan Sontag in her grave. Quotable:

Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere. Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense. It somehow didn't matter, for example, that the whole notion of "an erotics of art" was ridiculous. Everyone likes sex, and talking about "erotics" seems so much sexier than talking about "sex"; and of course everyone likes art: How was it that no one had thought of putting them together in this clever way before? Who would bother with something so boring as mere "interpretation" -- which, Sontag had suggested, was these days "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling," "the revenge of the intellect upon art" -- when we could have (or pretend to have) an erotics instead? ..
As a writer, Sontag is essentially a coiner of epigrams. At their best they are witty, well phrased, provocative .. But Sontag's striving for effect .. regularly leads her into muddle. What, for example, can it mean to say that "the AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia" or that "risk-free sexuality is an inevitable reinvention of the culture of capitalism"? Nothing, really, although such statements do communicate an unperturbable aura of left-wing contempt for common sense.

Meanwhile, leftie LA Times book editor Steve Wasserman has the "conventional wisdom" on Sontag of the 2nd rate American "intellectuals" -- i.e. the guild of humanities professors and scribblers in the high-end "art & literature" trade.