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Susan Sontag: Later Essays

Under the Sign of Saturn | AIDS and Its Metaphors | Where the Stress Falls | Regarding the Pain of Others | At the Same Time More

Edited by David Rieff

“Page after page, Sontag enlightens with her provocative insights and delights with her compelling prose. These pieces at once evoke their era and prove to be timeless.”—A. Scott Berg, Los Angeles Times

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “A project of self-transformation”—Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Susan Sontag
September 25, 2019

Interviews Mindy Aloff: “Most writers . . . are fascinated by dancing”
December 14, 2018

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From literature, painting, dance, music, and film to such political flashpoints as the Balkans, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 9/11, the Iraq War, and Abu Ghraib, in her final decades Susan Sontag brought her fervent curiosity and expansive intellect to bear on an extraordinarily broad compass of subjects. This second volume in Library of America’s definitive edition of her collected essays gathers Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Where the Stress Falls (2001), Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), and At the Same Time (2007), brilliant books in which Sontag did not merely comment on the cultural and political landscape, but helped shape it, solidifying her place as the most provocative and influential critic of her time.

“You might say that she has diverted the mainstream,” Hillary Mantel has written. “Her private islands of thought now look like the territory on which we’ve always lived.” Sontag once observed how reading books in translation gave her, from an early age, a sense of literature as “mental travel.” Here is the extraordinary logbook of her literary adventures, scintillating examinations of the writers she most admired and championed: Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Nadine Gordimer, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonin Artaud, Marina Tsvetaeva, W. G. Sebald, Elias Canetti, Machado de Assis, Halldór Laxness, Joseph Brodsky, and Robert Walser among them. The names alone reflect her passion for broadening the cultural frame of reference to encompass the whole world.

Sontag writes with unwavering rigor and intensity, asking the most difficult questions and affirming a deep commitment to “extending our sense of what a human life can be,” as she said on accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2000. In “Fascinating Fascism,” her incisive reading of the films of Leni Riefenstahl, she ponders the insidious allure of Fascist aesthetics. AIDS and Its Metaphors reckons with the HIV crisis through an elaboration of the central themes of her 1978 classic Illness as Metaphor. Regarding the Pain of Others extends her lifelong absorption with photography to explore the troubling moral issues surrounding visual depictions of violence, cruelty, and atrocity. In “A Century of Cinema” she evokes the time, only recently passed, when movies were experienced as “poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time.” “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” an account of staging a production of Beckett’s play in a city under siege, becomes a meditation on the meaning of culture: “Culture, serious culture, is an expression of human dignity—which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost.”

David Rieff, editor, is the author of Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir and editor of the journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag. His many other books include At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century, and In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Under the Sign of Saturn (1980)
On Paul Goodman
Approaching Artaud
Fascinating Fascism
Under the Sign of Saturn
Syberberg’s Hitler
Remembering Barthes
Mind as Passion

AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)

Where the Stress Falls (2001)
Reading
A Poet’s Prose
Where the Stress Falls
Afterlives: The Case of Machado de Assis
A Mind in Mourning
The Wisdom Project
Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes
Walser’s Voice
Danilo Kiš
Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke
Pedro Páramo
DQ
A Letter to Borges
Seeing
A Century of Cinema
Novel into Film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz
A Note on Bunraku
A Place for Fantasy
The Pleasure of the Image
About Hodgkin
A Lexicon for Available Light
In Memory of Their Feelings
Dancer and the Dance
Lincoln Kirstein
Wagner’s Fluids
An Ecstasy of Lament
One Hundred Years of Italian Photography
On Bellocq
Borland’s Babies
Certain Mapplethorpes
A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?
There and Here
Homage to Halliburton
Singleness
Writing As Reading
Thirty Years Later
Questions of Travel
The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)
The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)
Answers to a Questionnaire
Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo
“There” and “Here”
Joseph Brodsky
On Being Translated

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007)
Preface by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump
Foreword by David Rieff
An Argument About Beauty
1926 . . . Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke
Loving Dostoyevsky
A Double Destiny: On Anna Banti’s Artemisia
Unextinguished: The Case for Victor Serge
Outlandish: On Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier
9.11.01
A Few Weeks After
One Year After
Photography: A Little Summa
Regarding the Torture of Other
The Conscience of Words
The World as India
On Courage and Resistance
Literature Is Freedom
At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning

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N° 292 Library of America Series

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