She turned criticism into literature, illness into metaphor, and photography into moral crisis, then spent decades arguing with nearly everyone about what culture means and how we should live.
Susan Sontag wrote essays too fearless for comfortable reading, took positions too uncompromising for easy admiration, and left a legacy that oscillates between veneration and dismissal. The intellectual who insisted that seriousness was a virtue, that pleasure required justification, and that understanding art demanded work proved simultaneously indispensable to late 20th-century thought and impossibly difficult to emulate. Her paradox endures: a critic whose mandarin elitism championed popular forms, whose commitment to high culture embraced transgressive content, whose insistence on moral clarity often produced moral confusion.
The Making of an Intellectual
Born Susan Rosenblatt in 1933 in New York City, raised partly in Tucson and Los Angeles, Sontag constructed herself as deliberately as any of her essays. Her father died when she was five; her mother remarried, and Susan took her stepfather's surname. Precociously intelligent, she finished high school at fifteen and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she completed her undergraduate degree at eighteen. There she met Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor, married him at seventeen, and had a son, David, at nineteen. The marriage dissolved within years, though Sontag would later claim the experience taught her what she did not want from life.
Graduate work at Harvard in philosophy and then at Oxford prepared her for an academic career she never pursued. Instead, she moved to New York in the late 1950s, wrote book reviews, edited journals, and began crafting the persona that would define her: the public intellectual as glamorous figure, the critic as cultural authority, the woman who could move between high theory and popular culture without apology. Her dark hair, striking features, and theatrical presence became inseparable from her intellectual brand. She looked the part of someone who had something important to say, and her appearance granted authority to her arguments that might not have been commanded from a frumpy academic.
This self-fashioning was neither accident nor vanity but strategic positioning. In an intellectual landscape dominated by men, where women writers were channeled toward domestic subjects or confessional modes, Sontag claimed traditionally masculine territory: aesthetic theory, cultural criticism, and continental philosophy. She wrote with authority about Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, citing European thinkers with casual familiarity that signaled cosmopolitan sophistication. Her essays performed erudition while maintaining accessibility, a balance that made her both admired and resented by academic philosophers who found her readings sometimes superficial and creative writers who found her criticism bloodless.
Against Interpretation
Her 1964 essay "Against Interpretation" announced her critical project with characteristic boldness. Modern criticism, Sontag argued, had become obsessed with content over form, with what art means rather than what it is. Critics decoded symbols, excavated hidden meanings, and reduced artworks to their interpretable messages. This approach impoverished aesthetic experience, domesticating art's sensuous immediacy by translating it into acceptable content. What we needed instead was an "erotics of art," attention to how artworks function rather than what they supposedly signify.
The essay, collected with others in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), established Sontag's reputation overnight. Here was criticism that defended pleasure, celebrated form, and insisted that understanding need not mean interpretation. Her timing was perfect. The 1960s counterculture was challenging establishment values; pop art was blurring boundaries between high and low culture; French theory was arriving in America with its suspicion of interpretation and depth models. Sontag synthesized these currents into manifestos that felt both radical and authoritative.
Yet the essay's argument contained tensions Sontag never fully resolved. She championed formalism and immediate experience while writing criticism that necessarily interpreted. Her essays on camp sensibility, on science fiction films, and on pornographic literature all performed sophisticated interpretation even as they claimed to resist it. This contradiction (arguing against interpretation through interpretation) became characteristic of her work: fierce positions taken, then qualified or complicated, producing essays that felt definitive while remaining productively unstable.
The Camp Aesthetic
"Notes on Camp," published in 1964, demonstrated Sontag's ability to make the marginal central and the frivolous serious. Camp, that sensibility prizing artifice, exaggeration, and failed seriousness, had been largely invisible to academic criticism. Sontag brought it into discourse, analyzing its aristocratic origins, its relationship to homosexual culture, and its love of the unnatural. The essay's list format (fifty-eight numbered observations) allowed her to circle her subject without defining it too rigidly, to appreciate camp while maintaining critical distance.
The piece made Sontag a celebrity intellectual. Here was high criticism applied to low culture, European theory illuminating American kitsch, a heterosexual woman explaining gay male aesthetics. The essay's success reflected both its insights and the cultural moment: an emerging gay rights movement was making homosexual culture more visible; pop art had legitimized attention to commercial culture; educated readers wanted frameworks for appreciating phenomena that traditional criticism ignored.
But Sontag's relationship to camp remained ambivalent. She appreciated its subversiveness and its challenge to naturalism, yet her own tastes ran toward the austere and serious. Camp's commitment to artifice over authenticity, to style over substance, conflicted with her deeper investment in moral seriousness and truth. This tension between aesthetic pleasure and ethical commitment would define her career, producing criticism that celebrated transgressive art while insisting on culture's moral responsibilities.
Illness as Metaphor
Illness as Metaphor (1978), written after Sontag's own cancer diagnosis and treatment, marked a shift toward explicitly political criticism. The essay examined how tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th century became laden with moral meanings, with metaphors that blamed victims and mystified disease. TB was romanticized as a disease of passion and sensitivity; cancer was linked to repression and psychological failure. These metaphors, Sontag argued, harmed patients by adding moral burden to physical suffering. We needed to strip disease of metaphor, to see illness as a biological fact rather than a symbolic event.
The essay's clarity and personal urgency made it influential beyond academic circles. Patients and doctors cited it; subsequent work on AIDS and other diseases engaged its arguments. Sontag had demonstrated that criticism could intervene in public discourse about illness and death, that analyzing metaphors had practical consequences. Her follow-up, AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), extended the analysis to a disease whose metaphoric weight (plague, punishment, apocalypse) was crushing its victims beneath moral judgment.
Yet here too contradictions emerged. Sontag insisted on stripping metaphor from illness while her analysis relied on literary and cultural interpretation. She wanted illness to be purely biological while acknowledging that human experience is inevitably mediated by language and meaning. Her solution (we should resist metaphor even though we cannot eliminate it) was more practical than philosophical, characteristically privileging moral clarity over theoretical consistency.
The Problem of Photography
On Photography (1977) tackled another subject Sontag found morally troubling: the camera's transformation of the world into images. Photography, she argued, encouraged passive spectatorship rather than engagement, created aesthetic distance from suffering, and reduced complex realities to consumable pictures. The camera was fundamentally predatory, turning people into objects, moments into possessions. Even documentary photography that aimed to expose injustice risked aestheticizing suffering, making pain beautiful and therefore bearable.
These arguments, developed across six interconnected essays, raised disturbing questions about visual culture's ethics. If photographing atrocity reduces it to spectacle, should we look away? If images desensitize us to violence, is photography complicit in what it documents? Sontag's answer was characteristically severe: photography was problematic, its pleasures suspect, its claims to truth illusory. We should approach images with suspicion, recognizing how they mediate and distort reality.
The book's success established Sontag as a cultural conscience, the critic willing to condemn pleasures others celebrated. But photography professionals and theorists pushed back. Was Sontag's analysis too sweeping, condemning all photography for problems specific to certain practices? Did her focus on passive consumption ignore how images could mobilize political action? And wasn't her own cultural criticism dependent on visual literacy, on audiences trained by photography to see in particular ways?
Sontag's later Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) revised some positions from On Photography, acknowledging images' power to compel witness and action. But the shift felt less like recantation than refinement. She remained convinced that looking at images of suffering posed ethical problems, that aestheticizing pain was dangerous, and that visual culture required vigilant moral scrutiny. The positions softened, but the temperament persisted: suspicious, demanding, insisting we interrogate our relationship to images rather than consume them thoughtlessly.
The Activist Intellectual
Sontag's political commitments were as uncompromising as her aesthetic judgments. She traveled to North Vietnam during the war, visited Sarajevo during the siege, and repeatedly inserted herself into conflicts where her presence served a more symbolic than practical purpose. These interventions drew criticism: Was she grandstanding, treating war zones as backdrops for intellectual performance? Did her pronouncements about conflicts she had briefly visited claim authority that her knowledge did not warrant?
Her famous statement after 9/11 (published in The New Yorker) that the attacks resulted from "specific American alliances and actions" and that courage would be needed "to say this" provoked fierce backlash. Critics accused her of blaming America, of moral equivalence between terrorists and victims. Sontag's point (that understanding terrorism's political context was not excusing it) got lost in controversy over tone and timing. The incident illustrated both her willingness to take unpopular positions and her occasional tin ear for how provocations would land.
Yet this political engagement, however problematic in execution, reflected a genuine conviction that intellectuals bore responsibility for speaking truth to power. Sontag believed criticism could not be merely aesthetic, that understanding culture meant understanding power, that silence was complicity. This commitment made her an uncomfortable ally for various causes (she was too culturally conservative for the radical left, too politically radical for cultural conservatives), but also made her indispensable as a model of intellectual seriousness, refusing political neutrality.
The Fiction Question
Sontag's fiction never achieved the success or influence of her criticism. Four novels (The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America) and a story collection (I, etcetera) showed literary ambition and intellectual sophistication but lacked the urgency and clarity of her essays. The fiction felt, ironically, too interpreted, as though written to illustrate ideas rather than discover them through narrative. Characters served conceptual purposes; plots enacted philosophical positions; prose displayed erudition that sometimes overwhelmed emotional immediacy.
The Volcano Lover (1992), her most successful novel, used the historical triangle of Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and her husband to explore obsession, collecting, and revolutionary politics. The book's meditation on aestheticism and desire connected to Sontag's critical preoccupations, and its more accessible style reached a wider readership than her earlier experimental fiction. In America (2000) won the National Book Award, though not without controversy over its extensive uncredited use of historical sources, a scandal that revealed tensions between fiction's imaginative license and criticism's scholarly obligations.
The struggle with fiction suggested something about Sontag's mind: brilliant at analysis and argument, less comfortable with narrative's ambiguities and characters' irreducible particularity. Her essays achieved literature's effects through non-fiction means; her fiction sometimes felt like essays awkwardly dramatized. Yet the ambition to write fiction, to create as well as critique, reflected her belief that intellectuals should be artists, that criticism and creation were complementary rather than opposed activities.
The Bisexual Life
Sontag's sexuality, closeted during much of her career and confirmed only posthumously through biographies and published diaries, complicates her legacy. She had significant relationships with women, including photographer Annie Leibovitz (though Sontag never publicly acknowledged their partnership). Yet she resisted identifying as lesbian or bisexual, rarely addressed sexuality in her published work, and maintained public silence about her private life that felt increasingly anachronistic as gay rights movement progressed.
This closeting reflected both personal privacy and generational context. Sontag came of age when homosexuality meant professional destruction, when female intellectuals already faced extra scrutiny, and when any deviation from heterosexual norms could undermine authority. Her strategic silence protected her career but also limited her contribution to LGBTQ+ discourse. While gay male critics like Andrew Holleran and Edmund White were documenting gay experience, Sontag maintained distance from identity politics and communal affiliation that might have compromised her universalist intellectual stance.
Yet her "Notes on Camp" and other essays addressing marginal cultures showed deep affinity with queer sensibilities and outsider perspectives. Her championing of transgressive artists, her suspicion of naturalism and authenticity, her appreciation for artifice and performance all aligned with queer aesthetics even as she declined to explicitly connect her critical positions to sexual identity. The disjunction between public intellectual persona and private life suggests both the costs of closeting and the limitations of reading criticism biographically.
The Style Question
Sontag's prose polarized readers. Admirers found it lucid, elegant, and authoritative. Critics found it mandarin, pretentious, and bloodless. The writing certainly performed intellectual sophistication through references, abstractions, and declarative confidence. Sentences announced judgments rather than exploring uncertainties. Continental theorists appeared without introduction, as though readers naturally shared Sontag's frame of reference. The tone implied membership in the cultural elite, those who understood serious art and thought seriously about culture.
This style's appeal and limitation was its authority. Sontag wrote as though her judgments were self-evident to qualified readers, creating pressure to agree or reveal oneself as unqualified. The rhetorical strategy worked for audiences seeking guidance through cultural complexity but alienated readers suspicious of critical gatekeeping. Her pronouncements could sound like legislation rather than interpretation, brooking no disagreement because admitting uncertainty would undermine the performance.
Yet at its best, Sontag's prose achieved genuine clarity about complex subjects. Her ability to synthesize disparate sources, identify cultural patterns, and articulate unspoken assumptions made difficult ideas accessible without oversimplification. The essays worked not despite their authority but because of it: readers wanted confident navigation through aesthetic and political terrain that felt overwhelming. If the confidence sometimes exceeded the warrant, it nonetheless provided orientation in a disorienting cultural moment.
The Canon Wars
Sontag's investment in cultural hierarchy and aesthetic discrimination made her a problematic figure as multiculturalism and postcolonial theory challenged the Western canon's authority. She defended great books, insisted on qualitative distinctions between art and entertainment, and resisted reducing aesthetic judgment to political analysis. This conservatism (cultural if not political) allied her with critics defending traditional humanities against theory's incursions and identity politics' demands.
Yet her position was more complicated than a simple defense of the Western canon. She championed non-Western artists (particularly Japanese filmmakers), advocated for politically radical writers, and insisted that serious art could come from popular forms. Her criteria were aesthetic and intellectual seriousness rather than cultural origin. The problem was defining seriousness without importing Western assumptions and power relations. Could one maintain qualitative distinctions without reproducing hierarchies that marginalized non-Western, working-class, and minority cultural production?
Sontag never satisfactorily answered this question. She asserted the possibility of universal aesthetic standards while acknowledging culture's role in shaping perception. She wanted both democratic access to high culture and maintenance of standards that necessarily excluded. This tension (between egalitarian impulses and aristocratic tastes) remained unresolved, producing criticism that oscillated between populist celebration of neglected forms and mandarin insistence on discrimination and judgment.
The Final Works
Sontag's last years brought new urgency to familiar themes. Regarding the Pain of Others revisited questions about images and ethics with greater nuance than On Photography, acknowledging photography's capacity to witness and testify while maintaining suspicion of aestheticized suffering. The September 11 attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq prompted political essays opposing American militarism and defending cosmopolitan values against nationalist reaction.
Her final public appearance, at the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Festival shortly before her death from leukemia, showed the combative intellectual to the end. Asked about American culture's state, she expressed pessimism about anti-intellectualism, consumerism, and political apathy. The performance was quintessential Sontag: fierce, uncompromising, refusing to soften judgments or provide comfort. She died in December 2004 at seventy-one, leaving work unfinished but a legacy fully formed.
The Contested Legacy
Arguments about Sontag's importance began immediately and continue. For admirers, she exemplified the public intellectual as cultural conscience, combining aesthetic sophistication with political engagement, refusing to separate beauty from ethics or pleasure from responsibility. Her willingness to make judgments, to defend standards, to insist that culture matters provided a model for criticism as a vocation rather than an academic specialization.
For critics, she represented everything wrong with Mandarin intellectualism: elitist gatekeeping disguised as cultural authority, superficial engagement with continental theory, political positions more performative than substantive. Her self-fashioning as a glamorous intellectual seemed narcissistic; her pronouncements often felt more authoritative than justified; her inability to admit error or uncertainty suggested intellectual rigidity rather than confidence.
Both assessments contain truth. Sontag was brilliant and limited, influential and dated, necessary and impossible. Her essays on camp, photography, and illness remain essential; her later political writings often feel occasional and dated. Her fiction showed ambition exceeding achievement; her criticism sometimes displayed erudition exceeding insight. She opened doors for women intellectuals while maintaining distance from feminism; championed marginal cultures while defending cultural hierarchies; insisted on moral clarity while producing moral complexity.
The Living Questions
What remains vital in Sontag's work is less specific positions than the questions she insisted mattered. How should we look at images of suffering? What moral responsibilities accompany aesthetic pleasure? Can we maintain qualitative distinctions without reproducing unjust hierarchies? What does intellectual seriousness require in the age of distraction? These questions have not been answered, perhaps cannot be answered definitively, but they must be continually asked.
Her model of the public intellectual (engaged with both high culture and political conflict, writing for general audiences while maintaining intellectual rigor, refusing to choose between aesthetic and ethical commitments) seems simultaneously more needed and less viable than during her lifetime. The economic structures supporting such work have collapsed; academic specialization makes broad cultural criticism suspect; social media rewards hot takes over sustained argument. Yet the need for criticism that takes culture seriously, that insists on connections between aesthetics and politics, that demands we think carefully about how we live, remains urgent.
Sontag would have hated much about contemporary culture: its anti-intellectualism, its celebration of authenticity over craft, its confusion of sharing opinions with critical thought. She would have diagnosed social media's pathologies with characteristic severity, probably overreached in her condemnations, and refused to apologize for elitism or difficulty. This uncompromising stance, so difficult to maintain or emulate, nonetheless represents something worth preserving: the conviction that culture matters, that pleasure requires justification, that thinking is work deserving respect.
The critic who refused complicity, who insisted on difficulty, who demanded that we take both art and life seriously, left a legacy too complicated for simple celebration or dismissal. Susan Sontag was neither as important as her admirers claim nor as limited as her detractors suggest. She was what she insisted culture could be: serious without being solemn, demanding without being inaccessible, passionate about ideas without losing sight of their embodied consequences. That she frequently failed to meet her own standards makes her no less valuable as a reminder that intellectual work should aspire to more than professional competence, that criticism can be literature, that thinking about culture is itself a way of living.
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