Susan Sontag - Icon Profile | Alexandria
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was an American intellectual, writer, filmmaker, and cultural critic whose work profoundly shaped contemporary discourse on photography, illness, and the relationship between high and popular culture. Known for her penetrating essays and innovative critical approach, Sontag emerged as one of the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century, distinguished by her trademark streak of white hair and unflinching analytical gaze.
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, Sontag's intellectual journey began remarkably early, reading voraciously and graduating from high school at age 15. Her formative years at the University of Chicago, where she earned her bachelor's degree at 18 and married philosopher Philip Rieff ten days after their first meeting, set the stage for her future role as a cultural critic. During this period, she absorbed the European intellectual traditions that would later influence her distinctive critical voice.
Sontag's breakthrough came with the publication of "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), an essay that demonstrated her unique ability to analyze popular culture with philosophical rigor. Her subsequent works, including "Against Interpretation" (1966) and "On Photography" (1977), revolutionized cultural criticism by challenging conventional boundaries between high and low art. Perhaps most controversially, "Illness as Metaphor" (1978) and its follow-up "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989) examined how society's language about disease shapes both medical treatment and patient experience.
Throughout her career, Sontag remained an enigmatic figure who defied easy categorization. While publicly known for her critical essays, she considered herself primarily a novelist, publishing works like "The Volcano Lover" (1992) and "In America" (2000). Her time in war-torn Sarajevo during the 1990s, where she staged Waiting for Godot amidst the siege, demonstrated her commitment to cultural engagement beyond the written word. Today, Sontag's legacy continues to influence discussions about art, politics, and the role of the intellectual in public life, while her personal journals, published posthumously, reveal the complex inner world of a thinker who consistently challenged both herself and her audience to look deeper, think harder, and question everything.
Her life and work raise enduring questions about the relationship between art and politics, the responsibility of the intellectual in society, and the power of cultural criticism to shape public consciousness. What would Sontag make of our current digital age, where the boundaries between high and low culture have become increasingly blurred, and where the metaphors she so carefully analyzed have taken on new forms in our globally connected world?