Susan Sontag: Being

Susan Sontag was American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist. Explore interesting quotes on being.
Susan Sontag: 336   quotes 33   likes

“I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all”

Susan Sontag
Personality

“The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything.”

Susan Sontag

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)
Context: The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure.

People , Time

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”

Susan Sontag
People , Intelligence

“Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.”

Susan Sontag

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Time , Despair , Happiness

“Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.”

Susan Sontag

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Love , Personality

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

Source: Styles of Radical Will

Religion , Sex

“The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture one is inflicting on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the primal satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them.”

Susan Sontag

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)

Men , Time , Parting

“I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.”

Susan Sontag

Salon interview (2001)

People , Imagination , Courage

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Women , Men , People , Books

“Modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit "program." No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counter-statements, hardly anything in the way of provocation either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention.”

Susan Sontag

"About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings edited by Michael Auping (1995), p. 105,

Art , Way , Appearance , Painting

“War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.”

Susan Sontag

"Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

War , Imagination , History , Communication

“I'm sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called humanitarian aid is once again being used as a justification — or cover — for war.”

Susan Sontag

Salon interview (2001)

War , Way

“Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely creditable today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly", p. 31
On Photography (1977)

Imagination , Understanding , Universe

“As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.””

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 85
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Sense

“To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people.
But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.”

Susan Sontag

Source: Death Kit (1967), p.149

Way , Love , Making love , People