Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American writer, essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and public intellectual whose work exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century cultural criticism. Renowned for her analytical rigour and stylistic clarity, she addressed literature, art, photography, illness, politics, and war, often challenging complacent assumptions about culture and moral responsibility. Sontag’s essays, in particular, reshaped modern criticism by insisting on seriousness, ethical engagement, and intellectual independence.
Emerging as a major voice in the 1960s, Sontag became synonymous with the figure of the public intellectual who bridges academic thought and popular culture. Her work continues to be widely studied in literature, media studies, philosophy, and cultural theory.

Early life and education

Susan Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt on 16 January 1933 in New York City and spent much of her childhood in Arizona and California. Her father died when she was young, and her early years were marked by frequent relocations and intellectual precocity. Sontag demonstrated exceptional academic ability, entering the University of California, Berkeley, at the age of fifteen before transferring to the University of Chicago.
At Chicago, she studied philosophy, literature, and social thought, developing an early interest in European intellectual traditions. She later pursued graduate studies at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she was exposed to continental philosophy, including existentialism and structuralism. These intellectual influences would later shape the interdisciplinary scope of her writing.

Emergence as a public intellectual

Sontag’s rise to prominence occurred in the early 1960s, when her essays began appearing in influential American journals. Her breakthrough came with the publication of Against Interpretation (1966), a collection that established her as a leading cultural critic.
Unlike traditional literary critics, Sontag resisted purely interpretative or symbolic readings of art. She argued that excessive interpretation dulled aesthetic experience and advocated for a more direct engagement with form, style, and sensuous impact. This stance distinguished her from both academic formalism and ideological criticism, positioning her as an original and often provocative thinker.

Against Interpretation and aesthetic theory

The essay “Against Interpretation,” from which the collection takes its title, remains one of Sontag’s most influential works. In it, she argued that modern criticism had become overly concerned with extracting hidden meanings from art, reducing artworks to intellectual puzzles or political allegories.
Sontag proposed an “erotics of art” in place of a hermeneutics, urging critics and audiences to attend to how art feels and functions rather than what it supposedly signifies. This approach reflected her broader concern with revitalising cultural experience in an age she believed was numbed by over-analysis.
The collection also addressed topics such as:

• Modernist literature and cinema.
• Camp as a mode of aesthetic appreciation.
• The moral seriousness of avant-garde art.
• The relationship between high culture and popular culture.

These essays collectively broadened the scope of cultural criticism and challenged rigid distinctions between elite and mass art forms.

On Photography and visual culture

Sontag’s engagement with visual media reached its most sustained form in On Photography (1977), a book-length meditation on the social and ethical implications of photographic images. Drawing on history, philosophy, and cultural analysis, she examined how photography shapes perception, memory, and power.
She argued that photographs do not merely document reality but actively construct it, influencing how people understand suffering, beauty, and violence. Sontag was particularly concerned with the way images of pain could desensitise viewers while simultaneously asserting moral authority.
Key themes of the book included:

• The commodification of experience through images.
• The tension between empathy and voyeurism.
• Photography’s role in modern consumer culture.
• The ethical limits of representing suffering.

On Photography became a foundational text in visual culture studies and remains highly influential in debates about media, journalism, and digital imagery.

Illness as metaphor

In Illness as Metaphor (1978), Sontag turned her critical attention to the language used to describe disease, drawing on her own experience with cancer. She argued that illnesses such as tuberculosis and cancer had been burdened with metaphors that moralised suffering and stigmatised patients.
Sontag maintained that such metaphors were harmful, obscuring medical reality and placing unjust psychological pressure on the ill. She called for a more literal and humane understanding of disease, free from moral judgement.
This work was later complemented by AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), which extended her critique to the cultural narratives surrounding the AIDS epidemic. Together, these texts reshaped medical humanities and public discourse on illness.

Political engagement and moral responsibility

Sontag was deeply engaged with political issues throughout her life, often taking controversial positions. She was a vocal critic of American foreign policy, particularly during the Vietnam War, and later wrote extensively about war, violence, and human rights.
Her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) revisited themes from On Photography, focusing on images of war and atrocity. In this later work, she adopted a more cautious tone, acknowledging both the power and the limitations of visual representations in generating moral response.
Sontag believed that intellectuals bore a responsibility to confront injustice and resist ideological simplification. While her political views evolved over time, she consistently defended critical independence and ethical seriousness.

Fiction, film, and other creative work

In addition to her essays, Sontag wrote novels, short stories, and plays. Her fiction, including The Benefactor and Death Kit, often explored themes of alienation, identity, and existential anxiety, reflecting her philosophical interests.
She also directed several films, primarily in Europe, viewing cinema as another medium through which to explore perception and meaning. Although her films received mixed critical responses, they underscored her commitment to artistic experimentation and cross-disciplinary work.

Reception and criticism

Sontag was widely admired for her intelligence, eloquence, and breadth of knowledge, but she was also a polarising figure. Critics sometimes accused her of elitism, abstraction, or insufficient attention to social inequality. Others questioned the consistency of her political positions.
Nonetheless, even her critics recognised her as a formidable thinker who elevated public debate. Her essays are noted for their clarity, aphoristic style, and refusal to simplify complex issues.