Susan Sontag
American writer and critic (1933–2004), author of Against Interpretation, On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor — a central figure of postwar American intellectual life whose Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, Benjamin Moser, reads her whole career as circling a single, unresolved deficit.
Moser’s claim, made in his own biography of Sontag and revisited in conversation with Tyler Cowen, is that Sontag’s best work concerns ‘the ways we try, and fail, to see’ — a description he applies to both On Photography and Against Interpretation alike. He argues her deepest insight was ultimately into her own perceptual failure, most acutely in her personal relationships, which she recognised in herself and tried, largely without success, to correct through sheer force of intellect. Her diagnosis of a culture flooded with images it does not know how to process — recurring on the word ‘hygiene’, and the idea of cleaning ‘the rusty pipes in your brain’ — anticipated today’s arguments about AI and disinformation by fifty years. On her likely legacy, Moser resists a flat answer: his own biography, though widely reviewed and prize-winning, sold to a narrow, intensely committed readership rather than a broad one, and he calls her reputation ‘spiny’ and ‘cactus-y’, demanding real effort from the reader rather than offering easy consumption.
In the wiki
- Benjamin Moser on the Dutch Masters, Brazil, and Cultural Icons — Moser, Sontag’s Pulitzer-winning biographer, discusses her defining subject (perceptual failure), her recurring vocabulary of ‘hygiene’, the narrow but devoted readership his biography found, and why Camille Paglia — who stayed in the academy partly to guard against the ‘aristocratic excesses’ Sontag embodied — never became ‘the next Sontag’.
See also
- Benjamin Moser — her biographer, who discussed her with Tyler Cowen
- The Upside-Down World — Moser’s book on the Dutch masters, which he says shares its theme of visual failure with his Sontag biography
- Clarice Lispector — the other writer whose biography Moser wrote, discussed alongside Sontag in the same conversation