Styles of Radical Will

by Susan Sontag

This collection of essays contains some of the most important pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, including the classics The Aesthetics of Silence, a brilliant account of language, thought and consciousness, and Trip to Hanoi, written during the Vietnam War. Here too is an excoriating account of America’s identity and future, a robust and surprising discussion of pornography and other richly rewarding writings on art, film, literature and politics.

Susan Sontag has written four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and five books of essays, among them Against Interpretation, On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and most recently, Where the Stress Falls. Her books are translated into twenty-eight languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.

Susan Sontag died in December 2004.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Art, Criticism, Theory, Literary Criticism

274 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.

Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.

Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.

Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sontag’s heyday as an intellectual pinup occurred before I was even born—but I get it. Her critical voice seems the perfectly oracular emanation of the book-lined apartments of the self-consciously "edgy" tastemaking intelligentsia, the dandified apartments perched above the garbage and graffiti of 1970s Manhattan, so ambivalently described by Edmund White, a ragamuffin freelancer awkward in those fair courts. (White preferred to flop in roachy squalor by day and suck off truck drivers down at the docks by night, and avoided romantic involvement with Sontag coeval Richard Howard because he didn’t want a joint subscription to the opera, "didn’t want to grow a little paunch and discuss Roland Barthes with the same man who was fucking me.”) She's got her Gauloise, the latest New York Review of Books, a stack of Gallimard new releases...





I didn’t read the essays on Godard and Bergman, because I haven’t seen any of the films mentioned therein—though I “read and like” Goodreads reviews of books I haven’t read, might never read, so perhaps the explanation is that I’m lazy and just don’t care about Godard and Bergman. “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “The Pornographic Imagination” are meaty and re-readable; she deeply discusses the secularization of spirituality and the nearly religious "total" ambitions of modernism. Her high-handed chastisement of American critics for not reading more Sade and Bataille is a Greatest Hit. “Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran” won’t blow any minds, but it’s good she promoted him so brilliantly to American audiences, back in the day. “What’s Happening in America (1966)” is shrill and jejune—its famous line: “the white race is the cancer of history”—but “Trip to Hanoi” is not. This seventy-page monster essay, which I feared might be the literary cousin of Jane Fonda’s truthfist mugshot, makes up for a barrenness of characterization and descriptive color with plenty of fearless moral-intellectual self-scrutiny. And as I peruse “What’s Happening in America (1966)” I do find some admirable things, like her remark that modern American life “brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.” Perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders perfectly evokes a kind of intellectual ambition rare among today’s bookish. In The Farewell Symphony Edmund White talks about coming home drunk from cruising bars and sitting up with one eye closed to focus on some Adorno or a Bartok score. In City Boy he says that his generation of “strident self-transcenders” and defensively arty provincial pilgrims to NYC was always studying for a test that never came:

In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarmé failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his. If my eyes swooned shut while I read The Sweet Cheat Gone, Proust’s pacing was never called into question, just my intelligence and dedication and sensitivity. And I still entertain these sacralizing preconceptions about high art. I still admire what is difficult, though I now recognize it as a “period” taste and that my generation was the last to give a damn. Though we were atheists, we were, strangely enough, preparing ourselves for God’s great Quiz Show; we had to know everything because we were convinced we would be tested on it—in our next life.

[E. G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I
--The Aesthetics of Silence
--The Pornographic Imagination
--"Thinking Against Oneself": Reflections on Cioran

II
--Theatre and Film
--Bergman's Persona
--Godard

III
--What's Happening in America (1966)
--Trip to Hanoi

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.

Read this into the night. After suffering through the first few essays, I finally found purchase in the piece on Godard. (the preceding sections on theater and film and then Bergman's Persona were enchanting but failed to steer). I deliberately chose the word suffer rather than struggle. The arguments were oblique by design. She chose texts that were outside the current milieu of the late 1960s--many of which have slipped into obscurity or worse since.
This was weaponized snobbery.
I was bored. That isn't to suggest that this was "empty", but just unappealing, and perhaps somewhat jejune from my advanced age and dotage.

A fine volume on film could have been achieved with the three noted essays. Her reading of Godard is impressive. She had a heady ability to parse the myriad layers, the coding , the parody, the realization that JLG wants the viewer to be aware at all times that this is a film: a fraud, a product.

The volume ends with the painfully honest account of her 1968 visit to Hanoi. This is a brilliant analysis and a wonderfully human portrait of a people at war.

[Anima · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘10
Silence is a metaphor for a cleansed,non-interfering vision, appropriate to artworks that are unresponsive before being seen, unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny. The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn’t demand from the spectator his “understanding,” his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, it asks that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.
...’
‘16
“There is something strange in the acts of writing and speaking,” Novalis wrote in 1799. “The ridiculous and amazing mistake people make is to believe they use words in relation to things. They are unaware of the nature of language—which is to be its own and only concern, making it so fertile and splendid a mystery. When someone talks just for the sake of talking he is saying the most original and truthful thing he can say.”
Novalis’ statement may help explain an apparent paradox: that in the era of the widespread advocacy of art’s silence, an increasing number of works of art babble. Verbosity and repetitiveness are particularly noticeable in the temporal arts of prose fiction, music, film, and dance, many of which cultivate a kind of ontological stammer—facilitated by their refusal of the incentives for a clean, anti-redundant discourse supplied by linear, beginning-middle-and-end construction. But actually, there’s no contradiction. For the contemporary appeal for silence has never indicated merely a hostile dismissal of language. It also signifies a very high estimate of language—of its powers, of its past health, and of the current dangers it poses to a free consciousness. ‘

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening piece, The Aesthetics of Silence, is one of the smartest things I've ever read about the development of a modern artistic sensibility. It's probably one of the smartest things I've ever read period. She just completely hits her stride and makes one brilliant observation after another after another. A lot of people are put off by Sontag. Maybe it's the declarative way she writes. It might be patronizing if it didn't so consistently force the reader to confront what modern culture is and what it is still becoming. And the rest of these are all pretty damn good. The one on film and theater seems a bit dated, and I'm not sure I buy wholesale into her endless love of Jean Luc Godard. But even when you disagree with her, it's usually on her terms. And the last piece about her going to Hanoi is the perfect counterpoint to the uber-confident tone in the opener. She does a magnificent job of showing how a mind steeped in western european/american culture is suddenly forced into a more intellectually modest project of observing when thrust down (however briefly) into a radically different cultural/linguistic milieu, where talking about philosophy and literature suddenly takes a second seat to just trying to communicate about basic human experience. It's hard to talk about travel without resorting to the usual cliches about "changing your perspective", Sontag shows how genuine, humbling, and personally frustrating that cliche is.

[Andrew]

Oh, Ms. Sontag, a lot of your ideas are so thoroughly out of fashion but your writing is still as elegant and as intellectually dazzling as ever.

Let's start with that essay about pornography. Intriguing, I suppose, but when she says, for instance, that porn cannot parody itself, it becomes increasingly apparent that she wrote this in those innocent days before Brazzers and co. came onto the scene. Or let's look at the "What's Happening in America" essay, a screed written by a pissed-the-fuck-off Susan Sontag that reads more like second-rate agit-prop than the work of the refined aesthetic imagination I expect Sontag to have.

Now for the good. There's the initial essay "The Aesthetics of Silence," which is as glittering an essay as you could imagine on a difficult topic. Or there's her essay on Godard, which, as someone who became more and more disenchanted with Godard the more I watched of his work, even made me think I should go back and reevaluate. And she closes with the truly fantastic "Trip to Hanoi," which is not only a hell of a piece of journalism, it's a whole discussion on the way we think about other cultures, our own cultures, and-- this is rare for Sontag -- she finds herself completely humbled, as she struggles to make sense of daily life in North Vietnam and her own position as a Western leftist. Really top-shelf stuff.

[Bagus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Styles of Radical Will is Sontag’s second collection of essays, first published in 1969, which mainly discusses art, film and pornography. Although, there is a lengthy essay which takes up one-fourth of the book that is radically different from other Sontag’s essays that I’ve read so far, namely Trip to Hanoi. Apart from its different form as a travelogue of Sontag visiting North Vietnam in May 1968 with two other American companions, it also evokes Hegel’s maxim about the problem of history as the problem of consciousness. Sontag views her two-week sojourn to North Vietnam as ‘what was ostensibly a somewhat passive experience of historical education became an active confrontation with the limits of my own thinking.’ Like a research corpus, her trip to Hanoi proved the distance between Vietnam that the American radicals had shaped in their minds with the reality of daily life experienced by average North Vietnamese during the war. Similar to Sontag, I also discovered that what happened to me when I stayed in Vietnam for the first time in 2017 didn’t end with my return to my country, it is still going on.

Trip to Hanoi is a unique travelogue, coming from the perspective of an American radical opposing the war. The first few pages of Sontag’s observation have the nature of YouTube video travelogues of people visiting North Korea, with local minders parroting the same information over and over, speaking mostly in declarative sentences, making it virtually impossible to hold discourse, as though everyone she encountered had been assigned a role to play in entertaining her visit. But she expressed her curiosity. Perhaps it was merely just the old conviction of the inadequacy of language? As what is best expressed in Iris Murdoch’s debut novel Under the Net, which explores the theme of language’s inability to represent truth as by explaining or retelling something, we have distanced ourselves from the immediacy of experience. Behind the cloak of “baby talks”, there are complexities in the North Vietnamese society that she encountered. It’s not merely a struggle between two opposing ideologies (Marxism-Leninism vs capitalism) or anti-colonial struggles alone. There is a different sense of understanding history between Sontag and her Vietnamese minders, about which she says, ‘I want their victory. But I don’t understand their revolution.’ The industrious character of the Vietnamese people is one thing that Sontag admires (and I admire too), which perhaps had allowed history to take the sides of Hanoi instead of the Thieu-Ky government during the war.

Apart from the travelogue, I find the two other parts which contain analyses of art and film also equally enlightening, considering Styles of Radical Will is not as widely read as Sontag’s other books. Sontag’s critique of pornography in The Pornographic Imagination, above all, changed my perspective on pornography. Could we see pornography as an art or as a branch of literature? (Although we might need to analyse it differently for porn in the digital era with its addictive quality, Sontag’s analysis mainly touches on pornography in the sense of its application in literature in describing erotic experience). It argues the role of pornographic literature as something that drives a wedge between one’s existence as a full human being and one’s existence as a sexual being. Among others, her warning seems to have a prophetic quality: ‘It may be that without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people.’ But above all else, could we also say the same about any form of art and knowledge itself? (And the possibility of their destructive quality for humans).

In the second part, Sontag also entertained my mind through her discussions on film, mainly in distinguishing the features between theatre and film, as well as discussing Godard’s films. Thinking about theatre and film, I came to remember Brecht’s worries during the early days of cinema in the 1920s Weimar Republic. German drama at that time was in terminal decline, its place usurped by the cinema. He viewed it as essential for the institution of the theatre to adapt in order to meet the challenge while arguing that theatre was superior to cinema and it should be viewed like a “sporting spectacle”. For Brecht, theatre captures the essence of human interaction.

In a similar vein, Sontag warns about the common misperception of framing the history of cinema as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models, as though theatre is a medium. ‘Theatre deploys artifice while cinema is committed to reality,’ Sontag writes. The two are different in the sense that theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space, whilst cinema has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. Cinema is an object, whilst theatre results in performance. To draw a conclusion about whether cinema is art or a successor to the theatre itself, one has to realise first that art is a mental act, a result of consciousness. Their relation to each other has similar striking features between painting and photography. Painting doesn’t disappear with the advent of photography; instead, it allows the creation of a new form of painting: abstraction. Although, Sontag’s analysis merits a wider form of application to analyse the relations between art and technology, and in what forms they could be complementary (such as allowing new forms of art to appear) or threaten their existence (or in a more blunt sense, "robbing" art of its audience).

I just simply like Sontag’s writings. While I don’t fully comprehend them sometimes, they are good for critical thinking exercises. Among others, Trip to Hanoi makes this book interesting since it touches upon Sontag’s analysis beyond her usual corpora, viz. art, literature, and film. We could assess Sontag’s political views which go against the current of her time, as a radical opposing American involvement in the Vietnam War in May 1968.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could never get into her fiction for some odd reason, but as an essayist, she stands alone. It is sort of like having coffee with someone who knows everything, and you are totally fascinated by this person.

Most of the essays are from the late 60's or early 70's - and all of them are great. It is not even an issue if you agree with her or not - it is how she attacks or gets on a subject and it's always interesting. Of course, it seems we have the same taste, so that helps I guess!

[Benjamin Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Sontag is thinking about a lot of things... including pornography. I didn't think that the pornography essay dated so well. The rest of the book especially the North Vietnamese essay and the Godard Essay I particularly liked. Those are the last two and they're probably my favorites because it took me nine months to read it. Best digested slowly anyway as they are separate essays. Highly recommended, I love how Susan Sontag thinks and writes.

[jakbogakocham · Rating 4 out of 5]

aktualna pomimo prawie sześćdziesięciu lat od publikacji

[joshua sorensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

a real roller coaster of ideas. sontag is so antiquated in sone respects, she more or less argues for the west wing's version of patriotism as a near-certain net cultural good (lmao), but then she comes out with something that remains prescient now. miss you queen!

[Jakub Brudny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Po przeczytaniu tego zbioru jestem już pewien, że Sontag jest jedną z moich ulubionych autorek i zdecydowanie ulubioną eseistką. Aby jak najlepiej zrozumieć co czytam, obejrzałem kilka filmów, sprawdziłem prace wymienianych tu fotografów, przeczytałem życiorysy wielu artystów i... jestem jej wdzięczny. Naprawdę genialne eseje

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to go ahead and do a categorization of the essays like I did for Against Interpretation

Essays I liked:
1. The Pornographic Imagination
2. Theater and Film
3. Bergman's Persona
4. What's Happening in America
5. Trip to Hanoi

Essays I was confused by:
1. The Aesthetics of Silence
2. "Thinking against Oneself"

Essays I simply could not get through:
1. Godard

For me there's always a divide between the accessible and the esoteric with Sontag; that was certainly the case with the pieces in the second category. For the third, I found myself wondering–okay, but what's the point?

In the first category, however, are some truly excellent essays. "The Pornographic Imagination" is ahead of its time and presents a fascinating connection between eroticism and death. "Theater and Film" is a clearly written summary of the limitations, boundaries and possibilities of the titular art forms. "Bergman's Persona," unlike the essay on Jean-Luc Godard, presents an interesting theory about the film and, most importantly, made me want to watch it. "What's Happening in America" is sharp, incisive and interesting to look back on from almost 60 years in the future.

"Trip to Hanoi" is the crown jewel of this collection. Over the course of 70 pages she develops such a clear picture of a people–you would have thought she studied the North Vietnamese for years. Her reflections on the differences between American and Vietnamese culture are balanced and respectful. It's well worth the read.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this to read the essay "Trip to Hanoi."

While reading it, it occurred to me that liberal-leftist utopia-fantasy states are geographically distant, (The Spanish Republic, The Soviet Union, Mao/Che/Cuban "revolutionary space," Chiapas Uprising) while conservative-traditionalist utopia-fantasy states are historically distant (the Greek City states, the Christian Roman Emperors, the Eisenhower-Ozzie-Harriet Era).

[Invektyva]

tak mogę uczyć się na egzaminy, cudowna

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 5 out of 5]

What's Happening in America (1966)

Everything that one feels about this country is, or ought to be, conditioned by the awareness of American power: of America as the arch-imperium of the planet, holding man’s biological and well as his historical future in its King Kong paws. Today’s America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy in California and John Wayne chewing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing. The main difference is that what’s happening in America matters so much more in the late 1960s than it did in the 1920s. Then, if one had tough innards, one might jeer, sometimes affectionately, at American barbarism and find American innocence somewhat endearing. Both the barbarism and the innocence are lethal, outsized today.
First of all, then, American power is indecent in its scale. But also the quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth; and the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.
Gertrude Stein said that America is the oldest country in the world,. Certainly its most conservative. It has the most to lose by change (sixty percent of the world’s wealth owned by a country containing six percent of the world’s population). Americans know their backs are against the wall: “they” want to take all that away from “us.” And, I think, America deserves to have it taken away.
Three facts about this country.
America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of White Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, coloured population in order to take over the continent.
America had not not only the most brutal system of slavery in modern times but a unique juridical system (compared with other slaveries, say in Latin America and the British colonies) which did not, in a single respect, recognize slaves as persons.
As a country – as distinct from a colony – America was created mainly by the surplus poor of Europe, reinforced by a small group who were just Europamude, tired of Europe (a literary catchword of the 1840s). Yet even the poorest knew both a “culture,” largely invented by his social betters and administered from above, and a “nature” that had been pacified for centuries. These people arrived in a country where the indigenous culture was simply the enemy and was in the process of being ruthlessly annihilated, and where nature, too, was the enemy, a pristine force, unmodified by civilization, that is, by human wants, which had to be defeated. After America was “won,” it was filled up by new generations of poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have at the beginning of the industrial era. And the country looks it.
Foreigners extol the American “energy,” attributing to it both our unparalleled economic prosperity and the splendid vivacity of our arts and entertainment. But surely this is energy bad at its source and for which we pay too high a price, a hypernatural and humanly disproportionate dynamism that flays everyone’s nerves raw. Basically it is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neurosis. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.
Needless to say, America is not the only violent, ugly, and unhappy country on this earth. Again, it is a matter of scale,. Only three million Indians lived here when the white man arrived, rifle in hand, for his fresh start. Today American hegemony menaces the lives not of three million but of countless millions who, like the Indians, have never even heard of the “United States of America,” much less of its mythical empire, the “free world.” American policy is still powered by the fantasy of Manifest Destiny, though the limits were once set by the borders of the continent, whereas today America’s destiny embraces the world. There are still more hordes of redskins to be mowed down before virtue triumphs; as the classic Western movies explain, the only good Red is a dead Red. This may sound like an exaggeration to those who live in the special and more finely modulated atmosphere of New York and its environs. Cross the Hudson. You find out that not just some Americans but virtually all Americans feel that way.
Of course, these people don’t know what they’re saying, literally. But that’s no excuse. That, in fact, is what makes it all possible. The unquenchable American moralism and the American faith in violence are not just twin symptoms of some character neurosis taking the form of a protracted adolescence, which presages an eventual maturity. Thy constitute a full-grown, firmly installed national psychosis, founded, as are all psychoses, on the efficacious denial of reality. So far it’s worked. Except for portions of the South a hundred years ago, America has never known war. A taxi driver said to me on the day that could have been Armageddon, when America and Russia were on collision course off the shores of Cuba : “Me, I’m not worried. I served in the last one, and now I’m over draft age. They can’t get me again. But I’m for letting ‘em have it right now. What are we waiting for? Let’s get it over with.” Since wars always happen Over There, and we always win, why not drop the bomb? If all it takes is pushing a button, even better. For America is that curious hybrid – an apocalyptic country and a valetudinarian country. The average citizen may harbour the fantasies of John Wayne, but he as often has the temperament of Jane Austen’s Mr. Woodhouse.
But to answer some of the questions:

1.
I do not think that Johnson is forced by “our system” to act as he is acting: for instance, in Vietnam, where each evening he personally chooses the bombing targets for the next day’s missions. I think there is something awfully wrong with a de facto system which allows the President virtually unlimited discretion in pursuing an immoral and imprudent foreign policy, so that the strenuous opposition of, say, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee counts for exactly nothing. The de jure system vests the power to make war in Congress – with the exception, apparently, of imperialist adventures and genocidal expeditions. These are best left undeclared.
However, I don’t mean to suggest that Johnson’s foreign policy is the whim of a clique which has seized control, escalated the power of the Chief Executive, castrated the Congress, and manipulated public opinion. Johnson is, alas, all to representative. As Kennedy was not. If there is a conspiracy, it is (or was) that of the more enlightened national leaders hitherto largely selected by the Eastern-seaboard plutocracy. They engineered the precarious acquiescence to liberal goals that has prevailed in this country for over a generation – a superficial consensus made possible by the strongly apolitical character of a decentralized electorate mainly preoccupied with local issues. If the Bill of Rights were put to a national referendum as a new piece of legislation, it would meet the same fate as New York City’s Civilian Review Board. Most of the [people in this country believe what Goldwater believes, and always have. But most of them don’t know it. Let’s hope they don’t find out.

2.
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. So committed are only a minority of white Americans, mostly educated and affluent, few of whom have had any prolonged social contact with Negroes. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

3.
I think that this administration’s foreign policies are likely to lead to more wars and to wider wars. Our main hope, and the chief restraint on American bellicosity and paranoia, lies in the fatigue and de-politicization of Western Europe, the lively fear of America and of another world war in Russia and the Eastern European countries, and the corruption and unreliability of our client states in the Third World. It’s hard to lead a holy war without allies. But America is just crazy enough to try to do it.

4.
The meaning of the split between the Administration and intellectuals? Simply that our leaders are genuine yahoos, with all the exhibitionist traits of their kind, and that liberal intellectuals (whose deepest loyalties are to an international fraternity of the reasonable) are not that blind. At this point, moreover, they have nothing to lose by proclaiming their discontent and frustration. But it’s well to remember that liberal intellectuals, like Jews, ten to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that those in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the “establishment.” As Russian Jews knew they had at least a chance with the Czar’s officials but none at all with marauding Cossacks and drunken peasants, liberal intellectuals more naturally expect to influence the “decisions” of administrators that thy do the volatile “feelings” of masses. Only when it becomes clear that, in fact, the government itself is being staffed by Cossacks and peasants, can a rupture like the present one take place.
When (and if) the man in the White House who paws people and scratches his balls in public is replaced by a man who dislikes being touched and finds Yevtushenko “an interesting fellow”, American intellectuals won’t be so disheartened. The vast majority of them are not revolutionaries. Wouldn’t know how to be if they tried. Mostly a salaried professoriat, they’re as much at home in the system when it functions a little better than it does right now as anyone else.

5.
Yes, I do find much promise in the activities of young people. About the only promise one can find anywhere in this country today is the way some young people are carrying on, making a fuss. I include both their renewed interest in politics (as protest and as community action, rather than as theory) and the way they dance, dress, wear their hair, riot, make love. I also include the homage they pay to Oriental thought and rituals. And I include, not least of all, their interest in taking drugs – despite the unspeakable vulgarization of this project by Leary and others.
A year ago Leslie Fiedler, in a remarkably wrongheaded and interesting essay titled “The New Mutants,” called attention to the fact that the new style of young people indicated a deliberate blurring of sexual differences, signaling the creation of a new breed of youthful androgens. The longhaired pop groups with their mass teenage following and the tiny elite of turned-on kids from Berkeley to the East Village were both lumped together as representatives of the “post-humanist” era now upon us, in which we witness “radical metamorphosis of the Western male, a “revolt against masculinity,” even “a rejection of conventional male potency.” For Fiedler, this new turn in personal mores, diagnosed as illustrating a “programmatic espousal of an anti-puritanical mode of existence,” is something to deplore. (Though sometimes, in his characteristic have-it-both-ways manner, Fiedler seemed to be vicariously relishing this development, mainly he appeared to be lamenting it.) But why, he never made explicit. I think it is because he is sure such a mode of existence undercuts radical politics, and its moral visions, altogether. Being radical in the older sense (some version of Marxism or socialism or anarchism) meant to be attached still to traditional “puritan” values of work, sobriety, achievement, and family founding. Fiedler suggests, as have Philip Rahv and Irving Howe and Malcolm Muggerridge among others, that the new style of youth must be, at bottom, apolitical, and their revolutionary spirit a species of infantilism. The fact that the same kid joins SNCC or boards a Polaris submarine or agrees with Conor Cruise O’Brien and smokes pot and is bisexual and adores the Supremes is seen as a contradiction, a kind of ethical fraud or intellectual weak-mindedness.
I don’t believe this is so. The depolarizing of the sexes, to mention the element that Fiedler observes with such fascination, is the natural, and desirable, next stage of the sexual revolution (its dissolution, perhaps) which has moved beyond the idea of sex as a damaged but discrete zone of human activity, beyond the discovery that “society” represses the free expression of sexuality (by fomenting guilt), to the discovery that the way we live and the ordinarily available options of character repress almost entirely the deep experience of pleasure, and the possibility of self-knowledge. “Sexual freedom” is a shallow, outmoded slogan. What, who is being liberated? For older people, the sexual revolution is an idea that remains meaningful. One can be for or against it; if one is for it, the idea remains confined within the norms of Freudianism and its derivatives. But Freud was a puritan, or “a fink,” as one of Fiedler’s students distressingly blurted out. So was Marx. It is right that young people see beyond Freud and Marx. Let the professors be the caretakers of this indeed precious legacy, and discharge all the obligations of piety. No need for dismay if the kids don’t continue to pay the old dissenter-gods obeisance.
It seems to me obtuse, though understandable, to patronize the new kind of radicalism, which is post-Freudian and post-Marxian. For this radicalism is as much an experience as an idea. Without the personal experience, if one is looking in from the outside, it does look messy and almost pointless. It’s easy to be put off by the youngsters throwing themselves around with their eyes closed to the near-deafening music of the discotheques (unless you’re dancing ,too), by the long-haired marchers carrying flowers and temple bells as often as “Get Out of Vietnam” placards, by the inarticulateness of a Mario Savio. One is also aware of the high casualty rate among this gifted, visionary minority among the young, the tremendous cost in personal; suffering and in mental strain. The fakers, the slobs, and the merely flipped-out are plentiful among them. But the complex desires of the best of them: to engage and to “drop out”; to be beautiful to look at and touch as well as to be good; to be loving and quiet as well as militant and effective – these desires make sense in our present situation.
To sympathize, of course, you have to be convinced that things in America really are as desperately bad as I have indicated. This is hard to see; the desperateness of things is obscured by the comforts and liberties that America does offer. Most people, understandably, don’t really believe things are that bad.. That’s why, for them, the antics of this youth can be no more than a startling item in the passing parade of cultural fashions, to be appraised with a friendly but essentially weary and knowing look. The sorrowful look that says: I was a radical, too, when I was young. When are these kids going to grow up and realize what we had to realize, that things never are going to be really different, except maybe worse?
From my own experience and observation, I can testify that there is a profound concordance between the sexual revolution, redefined, and the political revolution, redefined. That being a socialist and taking certain drugs (in a fully serious spirit: as a technique for exploring one’s consciousness, not as an anodyne or a crutch) are not incompatible, that there is no incompatibility between the exploration of inner space and the rectification of social space. What some of the kids understand is that it’s the whole character structure of modern American man, and his imitators, that needs re-hauling. (Old folks like Paul Goodman and Edgar Z. Friedenberg have, of course, been suggesting this for a long time.) That re-hauling includes Western “masculinity,” too. They believe that some socialist remodeling of institutions and the ascendance, through electoral means or otherwise, of better leaders won’t change anything. And they are right.
Neither do I dare deride the turn toward the East (or more generally, to the wisdoms of the non-white world) on the part of a tiny group of young people –however uninformed and jejune the adherence usually is. (But then, nothing could be more ignorant than Fiedler’s insinuation that Oriental modes of thought are “feminine” and “passive,” which is the reason the de-masculinized kids are drawn to them.) Why shouldn’t they look for wisdom elsewhere? If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is the painfully truth; few of us want to go that far. It’s easier, much easier, to accuse the kids, to reproach them for being “non-participants in the past” and “drop-outs from history.” But it isn’t real history Fiedler is referring top with such solicitude. It’s just our history, which he claims is identical with “the tradition of the human,” the tradition of “reason” itself. Of course, it’s hard to assess life on this planet from a genuinely world-historical perspective; the effort induces vertigo and seems like an invitation to suicide. But from a world-historical perspective, that local history which some young people are repudiating (with their fondness for dirty words, their peyote, their macrobiotic rice, their Dadaist art, etc.) looks a good deal less pleasing and less self-evidently worthy of perpetuation.
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone –its ideologies and inventions –which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now thre

[karo · Rating 5 out of 5]

pierwsza część była prześwietna, szczególnie esej o wyobraźni pornograficznej. sontag jest jedyna w swoim rodzaju tym co robi i obserwowanie jej świadomości jest tak satysfakcjonującym i pochłaniającym przeżyciem
(4,5)

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What's Happening in America" is the germ of the idea that Rorty so forcefully attacks in "Achieving Our Country," but I like both of them. Ultimately Sontag doesn't seem to care much about making her ideas public or having public currency in any way; in fact, she is starting to head in the direction of making them less and less palatable to just about anybody. Her analysis of Bergman's "Persona" is some of the best film criticism I've ever read. "Trip to Hanoi" feels more than a little undercooked.

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

الكتاب يضم مجموعة من المقالات النقدية في الفن والادب والفسلفة والسينما والسياسية التي كتبت في منتصف الستينات. تكتب زونتاغ بتركيز وكثافة وعمق فلسفي يثير الاعجاب رغم ان استغراقها النقدي والفلسفي يثير الملل احيانا. اروع ما في الكتاب هو المقال الاول عن جماليات الصمت. تحلل زونتاغ صمت الفنان وما يعنيه الصمت في الفن المعاصر. تقول زونتاغ ان الصمت "فيه بلاغة وثورة. قد يكون احتجاجا من الفنان وفصما لعرى العلاقة والاتكال على الجمهور المتطفل". وفي رأيها الصمت هو ليس بالضرورة انعدام التواصل بين الفنان والجمهور. فالصمت الفعلي هو صمت يشعر به المتلقي مثل مقطوعة جون كيج ٤٣٣. أو اعمال جاكسون بولوك او كاندنسكي التجريدية او افلام بونويل السريالية، او اعمال بيكيت وكافكا المفتوحة والتي لا تخضع للتأويل المباشر. بمعنى آخر صمت الفنان هو تمرده على الاساليب الفنية المستهلكة التي فقدت قدرتها على الصدمة وايقاض المتلقي. وهي تقتبس الشاعر ملارميه "وظيفة الشعر هي ان تستخدم الكلمات لتنظيف الواقع المزدحم بالكلمات باختلاق الصمت حول الاشياء". فهي تؤكد ان احد مظاهر الصمت في الادب ان تكون اللغة هي غاية نفسها، كما يؤكد نوفاليس "عندما يتحدث شخص ما لغرض الحديث فقط فهو يقول الشيء الاكثر اصالة واكثر صدقا". وهي تستنتج بالقول "في عصر صمت الفن نجد العديد من الاعمال الفنية تثرثر او تتكلم باستغراق حتى الصمت".

المقال الثاني يتطرق الى ادب البورنوغرافيا، حيث نجد زونتاغ تدافع عن الاهمية الادبية لبعض هذه الاعمال. فهي تخص بالذكر "قصة و" للكاتبة الفرنسية بولين رياجه، رواية باتاي "العين" و "مدام ادواردا" بالاضافة الى ادب المركيز دي ساد. وهي تعزو عدم اهتمام النقاد بهذه الاعمال الى التحيز الاخلاقي للحضارة الغربية التي رغم علمانيتها ظلت تعاني من وطأة عدم الاهتمام بما هو جسدي او مادي بسبب جذورها المسيحية. فالاثارة الجنسية في الادب هي تجربة انسانية لا تختلف في جوهرها عن تجربة مثيرة يبحث عنها القاريء في الادب البوليسي او ادب المغامرة او الخيال العلمي.

المقال الثالث "التفكير ضد الذات" يتحدث عن المفكر الرومان��-الفرنسي سيوران الذي انتقد الفكر الفلسفي ذاته باعتباره نمطا مرضيا من الوعي البشري الذي لايتماشى مع الواقع ويحاول فرض رؤية تاريخية وغائية على الاشياء.

في الجزء الثاني من الكتاب تتحدث زونتاغ عن فن السينما، تبدأ بمقالة تحلل فيها الفروقات بين السينما والمسرح وخصوصا علاقتهما بالزمان والمكان. يتلو ذلك تحليل مسهب لفيلم انغمار برغمان الشهير بيرسونا. وبعد ذلك هنالك مقال رائع عن المخرج الفرنسي جان لوك غودار.

في الجزء الاخير من الكتاب تتحدث زونتاغ عن السياسية الامريكية. فهي تنتقد الهيمة الامريكية، وتعتبر ان الولايات المتحدة مصيرها الدمار وهي تتمنى ان لا تجر الكوكب باسره معها الى الهاوية. هنالك وصف مكثف لرحلتها الى هانوي خلال الستينات حيث تكتب تأملاتها عن الاحداث بصراحة وتلقائية. فزونتاغ المعارضة للحرب والعنف الامريكي ضد فيتنام تعيش صدمة الفروقات الحضارية التي تصيبها بالاحباط فتقول "انهم مؤدبون الى درجة فظيعة، كل شيء هنا تحت السيطرة، كل شيء مخطط له بعناية، اتمنى ان يقوم احدهم بسلوك غير حصيف، ان يتحدث عن مشاعره، ان نتحدث بلغة المشاعر وليس بلغة العقل". وهي تضيق ذرعا بالدعاية الشيوعية ولغة الشعارات الفجة. ولكنها تجد الكثير لتعجب به في ذات الوقت فالفيتناميون يتميزون بالنشاط والجد والحيوية ولهم قدرة هائلة على تنظيم حياتهم اليومية في ظل القصف الامريكي المتواصل.

[Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proper cracker of a read. The essay on Godard was especially interesting - helping me to express what I’ve picked up on watching his movies, and also challenging how I’ve watched and thought about them.

The Hanoi diaries are more clearly a product of the age, interesting in how they’ve tested her own understanding of society and ‘intellect’.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the essay 'The Aesthetics of Silence', written in 1967, in the context of researching Cage and East-West concepts of silence in contemporary music. So I will only write about that.
Sontag is always incisive, and this essay is fascinating as an historical document. However, I have to agree with Darla Crispin's essay 'Some Noisy Ruminations on Susan Sontag's 'Aesthetics of Silence'' that Sontag only considers her argument through a Western cultural context. Sontag is talking about the annihilation of the artist as the ultimate negation, the ultimate silencing. In the art in the 1960's this was an important consideration, reflecting down to the most basic questions of the artist's role in society.
To consider silence (in art) in an Eastern context offers other possibilities-- that silence can be active, that silence is not just the stopping of action.

[Raffael Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Susan Sontag's timeless collection of essays is a fascinating and deep intellectual experience. She touches and elaborates on so many crucial topics concerning aesthetic sensibility and the development of art in the 60s and 70s with an enviable and profound knowledge in and aptitude for what she is writing that reading her essays turns into a delighting and enriching experience matched by very few essayists from both her time and ours. I've particularly admired her essay writing for a long time and about this collection here, The Aesthetics of Silence and the one about Bergman's films are my favourites, as they are two enlightening masterpieces of this genre that truly bespeak Sontag's artistic sensibility and aesthetic understanding. A real must-read for those who enjoy this kind of literature.

[Vel Veeter]

In this collection of essays, what stands out to me is that there are no stars here. Unlike both Against Interpretation (where there are two stars, plus many other good essays) and On Photography (where the whole book is a star), this book has some good essays (on silence, her response to questions about the US and Vietnam), and some essays that either feel endless repetitive or clearly of a time and place, but less relevant away from the moment.

Namely, what stands out to me to be an ok essay, but also that stays firmly in place in the 1969 when it's written, is the long essay on Godard. In addition, the essays on pornography also feels like part of a process of thinking on the subject, but not one that really has much to it when the book is done.

Overall, this feels like a lot of follow ups to better books, searching and climbing, but failing to establish itself.

[Sorin Hadârcă · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 'Trip to Hanoi' is great both as travel writing and as an essay: so subtle, so speaking from the heart. For this chapter alone this book climbs to the top of my favorites. The other essays mark the boundaries of the cultural landscape speaking from its periphery: end of words, end of reason, end of desire and many other intriguing ends.

[Julio Pino · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Jesus, they've got tapes of me discussing STLES OF RADICAL WILL with this broad!"---Woody Allen
Ms. Sontag's late Sixties collection of essays shock the reader repeatedly with her appreciation of Godard, Cioran, and porn and denunciation of contemporary politics; "We've got a president who scratches his balls in public...the white race is the cancer of humanity."

[Rodrigo Ferrari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comecei "A Vontade Radical" já sabendo que eu ia gostar da leitura e da escrita da Susan Sontag. Na verdade, foi praticamente impossível para mim não amar tudo que ela escreveu nos ensaios. De início, ela analisa a estética do silêncio e eu, introvertido do jeito que sou, me senti profundamente conectado com as palavras dela, em particular, nesse trecho:

Plenitude - experimentar todo o espaço como preenchido, de forma que as ideias não possam entrar - significa impenetrabilidade. Um indivíduo que permanece silencioso torna-se opaco ao outro, o silêncio de alguém inaugura uma série de possibilidades de interpretação desse silêncio, de imputação de discurso a ele.

Para quem vê o silêncio como um elemento de autoconhecimento - como eu - se entender nessa passagem é inevitável. Estar à vontade no nosso próprio silêncio e sentir plenitude nele é mais que confortável, é uma forma de se expressar. Talvez seja isso que Susan Sontag quis dizer nesse ensaio, tão bonito que eu quase reli quando o terminei.

Os ensaios sobre arte me deixaram igualmente intrigado. Apesar de ter visto e revisto Persona do Ingmar Bergman infinitas vezes e refletido bastante, ela apresentou um ponto de vista do filme que muito acrescentou a interpretação que eu já tinha na minha cabeça, o que causou muito impacto e mim, visto que Persona é um dos meus filmes favoritos da vida.

Um outro ponto de impacto pessoal foi quando eu li a análise da filmografia do Godard que é tão bem escrita que decidi dar mais uma chance ao diretor - não conseguia gostar dele - e obviamente, por causa das palavras da Susan, passei a respeitá-lo e apreciar ainda mais os seus filmes. Para mim, ele serve perfeitamente como introdução para a obra do diretor.

No último ensaio do livro, Susan conta a sua experiência em Hanói na época da Guerra do Vietnã e seu relato é poderoso e muito bem escrito. Foi nesse texto que concluí que a sua escrita é única e muito inteligente. Sua descrição dos vietnamitas, do país e da cultura deles desmistifica tudo que sabemos do Vietnã e nos faz decolonizar nossa visão deles. É um texto incrível e atual que me incentivou a estudar mais sobre essa guerra.

Todo o meu respeito e admiração por Susan Sontag. Sua inteligência e a habilidade com as palavras que ela demonstra ter nos ensaios influenciou bastante no meu entendimento sobre arte e filosofia. Recomendo demais! Já é uma das melhores leituras de 2020, sem dúvidas.

[Amelia Hargreaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant woman with an opinion about everything under the sun. Average score of 4.25 rounded to 5 because I am positive and gracious 😊 but here are some thoughts/quotes I found intriguing

The Aesthetics of Silence 4/5

The Pornographic Imagination 4/5
“In some respects, the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity far fewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography's definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to "excite" in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to ‘convert.’”

“Thinking Against Oneself”: Reflections on Cioran 3.5/5

Theatre and Film 5/5
“If the painter's job really had been no more than fabricating likenesses, then the invention of the camera might indeed have made painting obsolete. But painting is hardly just "pictures" any more than cinema is just theatre democratized and made available to the masses”

Bergman’s Persona 5/5
#need to revisit this film

Godard 4/5

What’s Happening in America 4/5

Trip to Hanoi 4.5/5
“For instance, it seems to me a defect that the North Vietnamese aren't good enough haters. How else to explain the odd fact that they actually appear to be quite fond of America? One of the recurrent themes of Dr. Thach's conversation with us was his fervent admiration for America's eminence in technology and science. (This from a cabinet minister of the country being ravaged by the cruelly perfect weapons produced by that very science and technology.)”

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We need a new idea. It will probably be a very simple one. Will we be able to recognize it?” In her second essay collection, Styles of Radical Will, Sontag seems to develop the structural prototype for later collections like Where The Stress Falls, in addition to offering up the kind of provocative and evocative writing for which she is so well known. Splitting her eight essays across three distinct parts, Sontag again covers such a range of ideas, exploring ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, and philosopher-essayist Emil Cioran in part one; ‘Theatre and Film’, Ingmar Bergman’s film *Persona*, and the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard in part two; and both the state of America and its legacy in Hanoi in the third and final part. These last two essays stand out: in ‘What’s Happening in America (1966)’, Sontag writes that “America deserves to have it taken away”, offering up a scathing critique of America — it makes some points and it takes some leaps, but altogether lands, while the final essay, ‘Trip to Hanoi’, is a sprawling reflection on the war in Vietnam and Sontag’s ambivalence for “American empire” (though her views of the Vietnamese people and state are hardly enlightened). While the middle part on film is interesting (if sweeping about theatre), it’s the first part, mostly the first essay, that makes for the most illuminating reading: “Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself”, with the project of art akin to that of “the great religious mystics”, ie an “absolute state of being” attained through self-erasure. “Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say *that*.”

[Nick Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his excellent biography of Susan Sontag, Benjamin Moser wrote, “If Styles of Radical Will is often impressive, it can hardly be called fun.” I think this is a fair assessment. Styles of Radical Will includes some of Sontag’s most complex and driest essays, giving credence to her reputation for slipping into pedantry by stuffing too many concepts into one sentence. (Do not read this book without having read one of Sontag’s more accessible works first - On Photography , or Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors )

In particular, reading the opening essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” reminded me of my experience with the phenomenology texts my philosophy teacher naively tried to make us read in high school: practically every sentence had me pause in (unsuccessful) search for its meaning. While I am sure it is a remarkable work of art criticism – Zadie Smith loves it, so I’ll defer to her – Sontag is flying here on an intellectual plane that is just too high for a viscerally middlebrow person like me. The same goes for “'Thinking Against Oneself'”, the piece on Emil M. Cioran. Cioran, a French-Romanian existentialist philosopher, is such a stereotypically Sontagian subject that at times, the piece feels almost like self-parody. The seminal essay on pornography is somewhat more accessible, although I am reasonably confident that at least half of its meaning went completely over my head.

With that being said, the fantastic – and, dare I say, “fun” – pieces of film criticism in the middle of the book make reading Styles of Radical Will well worth the effort. The essays on Bergman’s Persona and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s output are incredibly illuminating and sharp and give the reader a new appreciation not just for the films under discussion, but for film as a whole, so contagious is Sontag’s love of cinema. These essays are not just an invitation to watch these films but a plea to take film seriously as an art form. I would recommend watching Persona and at least a couple of Godard’s films before delving into these pieces, although there is certainly something to be said about watching them after absorbing Sontag’s insights.

The final section of the book includes two of Sontag’s most controversial essays. These are notable in that outside of her 1970s feminist writing, they would be her only explicitly political works until 9/11 and the Iraq War. The first piece, “What’s Happening in America”, includes the infamous line “The white race is the cancer of human history” which Sontag later disavowed. The second, “Trip to Hanoi”, about a two-week visit to North Vietnam that the author undertook in May 1968 at the height of the war, has not aged very well either but is fascinating in multiple ways. Most strikingly, it is one of the only pieces of reportage Sontag ever wrote. 1968 was arguably the peak year of the New Journalism movement – Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night were all published that year – and this first-person piece, aptly published in Esquire, gives an interesting snippet of what a “New Journalist Susan Sontag” might have looked like. The author herself said that “Trip to Hanoi” was “the first time I ever wrote about myself at all.” Much of the criticism she incurred for this essay is justified. Yes, Sontag, like most leftists of her generation, was radicalized beyond the point of reason by Vietnam. Yes, her justified hatred of her country’s prosecution of the war led her to largely ignore the horrors committed by the North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong. Yes, she humbly admitted her ignorance and inability to “explain” Vietnam early in the piece, only to make a battery of peremptory declarations – based more on personal observations than on any serious sociological or historical analysis – a few pages later. Yet I can’t help but have a somewhat forgiving attitude towards Sontag’s histrionics, rooted as they were in righteous outrage at America’s imperial madness in Southeast Asia. If nothing else, this essay does the job of capturing the mood of a time and place, only this place is the American university campus rather than Vietnam as Sontag had intended. Also, I may well just be a sucker for first-person political reportage. Just reading about Sontag landing at an American airfield in Laos was enough to get me onboard. Oh well, I like what I like.

Styles of Radical Will may not be vintage Sontag but it is a worthy addition to her catalog. A truly intellectually-minded person will probably take great pleasure in reading “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “'Thinking Against Oneself’”. For the rest of us, the essays on film have everything that one can expect from Sontag’s writing: brilliant insights from one of the 20th century’s great polymaths which open our minds to the possibilities of art and invite us to think deeper and to demand more of ourselves, if not as artists or intellectuals, then at least as individuals with a capacity to appreciate art as more than just entertainment to be consumed.

[Skylar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Against Interpretation might be Sontag's greatest contribution (essay or collection), but Styles of Radical Will has a tighter construction of its essays, none of which seem to be anything less than good relative to the occasional dip in Against Interpretation. My favorites of her selection of "styles" are "The Pornographic Imagination," her Bergman and Godard film criticism, and the especially remarkable self-critique of "A Trip to Hanoi." My transgressive temperament finds the first a compelling defense of pornography (reread for this collection since it was included with Bataille's Story of the Eye) while Godard, a favorite director of mine, gets a fairly accurate, if entirely outdated, analysis in innovating cinema. Much of her North Vietnam essay also remains a compelling dialectic between wanting to understand others while held firmly by a cultural identity in constant crisis due to its horrendous affliction upon others (one need only see the defense of Israel today as the unending hegemonic power in effect). Sontag continues to bear a significant intellect, however seemingly arrogant, behind her well studied criticism, and On Photography likely will be another compelling read.