Susan Sontag Quotes

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

... courage is as contagious as fear.

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent — war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. Appetite is supposed to be immoderate. The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty — of the indefinite expansion of possibility. Virtually every kind of advocacy claims to offer first of all or also some increment of freedom. Not every freedom, to be sure. In rich countries, freedom has come to be identified more and more with “personal fulfillment” — a freedom enjoyed or practiced alone (or as alone). Hence much of recent discourse about the body, reimagined as the instrument with which to enact, increasingly, various programs of self-improvement, of the heightening of powers.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

در زمانه‌ای زندگی می‌کنیم که تراژدی یک فرم هنری نیست، بلکه شکلی از تاریخ است. نمایش‌نامه‌نویسان دیگر تراژدی نمی‌نویسند. اما آثار هنری‌ای داریم (که هماره به این نام خوانده نمی‌شوند) که تراژدی‌های تاریخی بزرگ زمانه‌ی ما را بازتاب می‌دهند یا در صدد حل آن برمی‌آیند
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از آن‌جا که رخداد تراژیک اعلای دوران ما کشتار شش میلیون یهودی اروپایی است، یکی از جالب‌ترین و تاثیرگذارترین آثار هنری ده سال گذشته محاکمه‌ی آدولف آیشمان در سال 1961 بود
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همان‌طور که هانا آرنت و دیگران اشاره کرده‌اند، اگر بخواهیم دقیقا بر مبنای ملاحظات حقوقی سخن بگوییم، مبنای حقوقی محاکمه‌ی آیشمان، مربوطیت تمامی شواهد ارایه شده و مشروعیت برخی از روندهای به کار رفته، می‌توانند محل سوال باشند. اما حقیقت آن است که محاکمه‌ی آیشمان نه تنها با معیارهای حقوقی محض سازگاری نداشت، بلکه نمی‌توانست چنین باشد. او در نقشی دوگانه ظاهر می‌شد: به عنوان خاص و عام، به عنوان مردی سرشار از گناهی مشخص و مهیب، و به عنوان یک رمز یا نشانه که کل تاریخ ضدسامی‌گری را که با این شهادت غیرقابل‌تصور به نقطه‌ی اوج خود رسید نمایندگی می‌کرد
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به این ترتیب این محاکمه موقعیتی برای تلاش در جهت فهم‌پذیر کردن امر فهم‌ناپذیر به شمار می‌آمد. به این منظور، در حالی که آیشمان خونسرد با عینک روی چشمانش درون قفس شیشه‌ای ضدگلوله‌اش نشسته بود- با لبان فروبسته، و با این همه شبیه یکی از مخلوقات در حال فریاد و با این حال مسکوت نقاشی‌های فرانسیس بیکن- نوعی سوگواری دسته‌جمعی عظیم در صحن دادگاه به اجرا درآمد. انبوهی از واقعیت‌ها در مورد امحا یهودیان روی هم تلنبار شد؛ فریاد عظیم رنجی تاریخی ثبت و پیاده شد. کارکرد این محاکمه همانند کارکرد نمایش‌های تراژیک بود: فراتر و برتر از حکم و مجازات؛ نوعی پالایش یا کاتارسیس
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I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope.

"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Writing is a mysterious activity.

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words,

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

La actitud realmente seria es aquella que interpreta el arte como un medio para lograr algo que quizá sólo se puede alcanzar cuando se abandona el arte

Erkeklerin kendilerini erkekliklerini kanıtlamak zorunda hissettiklerini, oysa kadınların kadın sayılmak için kadınsılıklarını doğrulamak zorunda olmadığını hiç fark ettin mi? Bunun neden böyle olduğunu biliyor musun? İzin ver de, bir annenin ve bir kadının bilgeliğiyle bunu sana açıklayayım. Kadın olmak, insanların olması gerektiği gibi, sevgi ve huzur dolu olmaktır (...) oysa erkek olmak doğal olmayan, doğanın asla niyetlenmediği bir işe girişmek demektir. Erkek olma çabası, sürekli bozulan makineyi aşırı derecede zorlar (...) şiddet, cüretkarlık, hilekarlık, erkeğin kendini kanıtlamak için giriştiği bütün bu kibir dolu acınası bahaneler 'erkekçe eylemler' sayılıp değer verilir. Bunlar olmazsa o erkek olamaz. Tabii ki olamaz!

La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental.

There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the "reality" of a disease. That reality has to be explained. (It really means; or is a symbol of; or must be interpreted so.) For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.