(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Susan Sontag: The complete Rolling Stone interview. Møller Forlag, 2015
“The only possible metaphor for the life of the spirit,” wrote politologist Hannah Arendt, “is the feeling of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse, without thinking the human spirit is dead. ”Susan Sontag agreed. In the second volume of his diaries and notebooks (As Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh) she declares: "Being intelligent is to me not to look like doing something 'better'. That's the only way I exist ... I know I'm afraid of passivity (and addiction). When I use my mind and spirit, there is something that makes me feel (independent). And that's a good thing. "
To think and live. This is how Jonathan Cutt opens the preface to his full 1978 Rolling Stone interview with Susan Sontag. She revolves around a human drive carried by curiosity and realization – a hungry desire for life. To be alive, one must feel and think, transcend oneself. For Sontag, intellectual engagement was primarily driven by this urge for formation and self-transcendence. She would have screamed away from the assembly line thinking of our time in education systems. And would there even be room for her as an inspirer in an increasingly slippery and indifferent public space? For the new generation of Scandinavian readers, Susan Sontag is not a natural figure. The 1960s and up to the new millennium was Sontag's era. In a time when the free spirits are perceived as in short supply, the Danish release is more than in place. The book is the story of a public intellectual and an artistic-passionate and political commitment that comes together in one person. Sontag was strong evidence that living a thinking life and thinking about the life you live can be complementary and life-affirming activities.
Camp and visions. Sontag was born in 1933 and died of cancer in 2004. She grew up in Western America, but later moved to New York, which together with Paris made up her permanent base for the rest of her life. She was a child of the 60s with a look for both popular culture and European modernism. And then she was a one-man army introducing the world's hungry curious to a whole generation of French and German thinkers and writers, especially from Roland Barthes to Walter Benjamin. She fed the frontier-looking and ill-equipped young people with new openings for life-forms in the sexual-experimental, Sontag called camp (a long time before queer) and felt just as comfortable among punks for punk concerts with Patti Smith as among readers of literary readings. She always set a high standard of quality, but she also possessed the rare "eye" that can see the visionary in the politically problematic. For example, she called Leni Riefenstahl's film The triumph of the will for a masterpiece without explaining Nazi propaganda with aesthetic excuse.
I like dialogue and I know that a lot of my thoughts are the product of conversation.
The first time the world hears about Susan Sontag is when in 1968 she was invited by the North Vietnamese government along with a delegation of anti-war activists and reporters from the war. The event "made me re-evaluate my identity, my forms of consciousness, the psychic forms of my culture, language, moral determination, psychological expressiveness," she says. Nearly three decades later in 1993, she is in Sarajevo and is asked if she wants to erect Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot, she does not hesitate. While the bombs are raining outside the theater, she performs the play, an action that can be summed up in the title of one of her most important books: To consider the suffering of others.
The interview as conversation. For the legendary Rolling Stone Magazine (RSM) it was obvious to get a bigger interview in the box with Sontag. She was the epitome of the artistic and political way of life that could challenge the establishment while always having something interesting to say. When her book about photography was published the year before, in 1978, the time has come. But will she speak? For most of her role models, the European modernists, journalists and interviews are associated with empty word exchange and the truth associated with silence, with reflection, with writing. Don't talk. But for Sontag, it's different: "I like the interview form ... and I like it because I like conversation, I like dialogue, and I know that a lot of my thoughts are a product of conversation. In a way, the most difficult thing about writing is that you are alone and have to establish a conversation with yourself, which is a fundamentally unnatural act. [...] the conversation gives me a chance to find out what I mean. I don't want to know anything about the audience, because they are an abstraction, but I really want to know which one single person believes, and it requires a special personal meeting. " The first part of the conversation takes place in 1978 in Paris, the second part takes place almost half a year later in New York.
The photograph is a case study of what it is like to live in the 20th century in a highly developed, industrial consumer society.
Image and reality. About his early breakthrough book Against Interpretation she says she has not abandoned the basic idea of style. "Our look at reality is a matter of style." … "Don't interpret, there's nothing to interpret." It is the same basic idea that reappears in her view of photography and later in her view of illness. In his book The photograph she says that "photography gives one new eyes, cleans one's eyes". In the conversation, she highlights how the contradiction or ambiguity of seeing both is a problem and an opportunity. "Photography is a case study of what it is like to live in the 20th century in a highly developed, industrial consumer society." Truth is in a way in things and Sontag turns image and reality into complementary concepts: when reality changes, the image also changes. As Sontag falls ill with cancer, she begins to think about the disease, how we use words and images to talk about the sick and the stranger and ourselves, and how it is associated with shame and false images. The disease persecutes her for the last 25 years of her life. In long moving passages, she speaks of suffering as a resonance ground for experience. The possibility of change is found in the body which is the place of pain. Something breaks down and something new arises – the disease and the body as a place for maintaining a critical stand. Until her death, the illness helped to create an expanded field of experience. In the books To consider the suffering of others og False notions about illness, she shows how our eyes on illness, demons, pain and suffering sharpen the sense of the essentials of life and the ability to reach out to the strangers who stand out.
Art and life. As a 13-year-old she read Kafka and Thomas Mann. When she reads a few years later in high school The Karamazov brothers (Dostoevsky) she says: "This is incredible, now I know why I have to live." The shock and desire to pursue this strange connection between art and life followed her for the rest of her life. From her fiction and essays on illness to theater productions and documentaries, she revolves around the question: Is art a means of change or is art itself the change? She herself said: "The really serious attitude is the one who perceives art as a means to achieve something that you may not achieve until you give it up." In that case, it is about giving up the utopia, the notion of something on the other, giving up the notion of a goal as something that awaits one as a result of one's efforts. Because maybe it's not about the goal (which we never know what is) but about receptivity, the way we are conscious? That art itself – the practice and effort of writing, reading, thinking, filming – er the change itself.
Towards the end of the conversation, she says that what flows together in her fiction, as well as in her essays and theatrical settings, is "a search for an excess of the self, an attempt to become another or better or nobler or more moral person – in that way. that whatever one strives for and honors is therefore given the character of something moral, because it is attributed to an art or an imperative or a goal or an ideal. " So maybe art is both things, both the practice that is changing, but also a means of change?
The release of the complete Rolling Stone Interview and Jonathan Cott's foreword leaves one with the impression of a accomplished serious human being who again dares to ask the basic questions: What is a human being? What is beauty? What is suffering? What life damage is saved? What can we do? What responsibility do we have for those who suffer? What does thinking, art and literature do at all?
Alexander Carnera is an author and essayist, and a regular writer in Ny Tid.
acmpp@cbs.dk
