Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag died on December 28. This year I read On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others.
Sontag aroused controversy for remarks in The New Yorker (September 24, 2001) about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. She wrote:
"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions...[I]f the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
In the 1990s Sontag travelled to the then Yugoslavia, calling for international action against the growing civil war. She visited the besieged Bosnian capital Sarajevo in 1993, where she staged a production of the play Waiting for Godot. Two days after her death, the mayor of Sarajevo announced the city would name a street after her, calling her an "author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia."
- The New York Times: Obituary, Book Reviews, Interviews & Essays
- Susan Sontag site
- Remembering an Intellectual Heroine: Christopher Hitchens' tribute from Slate
- For the love of thought: fellow critics and academics remember Sontag in The Guardian
- The Guardian obituary
- James Fenton on how Sontag changed her views on photography: Guardian
- Sontag's introduction to a literary masterpiece: Summer in Baden-Baden (Guardian)
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