Imprint: Penguin Classics
Published: 02/07/2009
ISBN: 9780141190082
Length: 224 pages
Dimensions: 196mm x 16mm x 130mm
Weight: 160g
Price: £12.00
Publisher's summary: " Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself. "
Dedication: For Joseph Brodsky
Contents
"On Paul Goodman" (1972)
"Approaching Artaud" (1973)
"Fascinating Fascism" (1974) [on Leni Riefenstahl]
"Under the Sign of Saturn" (1978) [on Walter Benjamin]
"Syberberg's Hitler" (1979)
"Remembering Barthes" (1980)
"Mind as Passion" (1980) [on Elias Canetti]
Having read the irresistible Conversations with Susan Sontag in the spring I was caught in what has become a Susan Sontag project. I celebrated my first visit to the Librairie Galignani (depuis 1801, 224 Rue de Rivoli) by buying five volumes of Susan Sontag, and have just finished reading the last of them, Under the Sign of Saturn. But appetite grows while eating. I will also need to read Where the Stress Falls (her last essay collection published in her lifetime) and At the Same Time (posthumous 2022, with a preface by her son David Rieff). Further posthumous collections are being edited. This year Sontag's feminist writing was collected as On Women, and for October 2024 Sontag on Film is foreseen, edited by David Thomson and Tom Luddy (1943-2023).
Having read the irresistible Conversations with Susan Sontag in the spring I was caught in what has become a Susan Sontag project. I celebrated my first visit to the Librairie Galignani (depuis 1801, 224 Rue de Rivoli) by buying five volumes of Susan Sontag, and have just finished reading the last of them, Under the Sign of Saturn. But appetite grows while eating. I will also need to read Where the Stress Falls (her last essay collection published in her lifetime) and At the Same Time (posthumous 2022, with a preface by her son David Rieff). Further posthumous collections are being edited. This year Sontag's feminist writing was collected as On Women, and for October 2024 Sontag on Film is foreseen, edited by David Thomson and Tom Luddy (1943-2023).
The formidable essay "Approaching Artaud" now belongs for me to the seminal writings of Susan Sontag, together with "Against Interpretation", "The Aesthetics of Silence" and On Photography. They are art criticism and culture criticism on the highest level, where art meets philosophy, expanding the boundaries of understanding, and the limits of what art can be.
There are portrait essays on the kindred souls Paul Goodman, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti, plus the title essay on Walter Benjamin, which interestingly enough is not among the author's best. Perhaps the subject was too close to Sontag, whose classic studies On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others belong to the greatest achievements of Benjaminian inspiration.
There are two essays in this volume that are of more Benjaminian grandeur than the title essay: "Fascinating Fascism" (on Leni Riefenstahl) and "Syberberg's Hitler", both of which also belong to Sontag's greatest writings on the cinema. In the scathing Riefenstahl essay we do learn that Sontag does not suffer gladly fools of the Riefenstahl rehabilitation fashion. The Syberberg essay contains Sontag's assessment of the end of the golden age of film art.
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