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brice_mo's review against another edition
4.0
Nobody does it like Sontag.
Aside from her ability to make cultural criticism feel as stylish as it is essential, Susan Sontag also had such a gift for meaningfully limiting her scope. I've read so many authors who attempt to follow her model—or worse, improve upon it—and they almost always lose focus as they get caught in their own web of ideas. Conversely, everything Sontag wrote seems deliberately self-limiting, and that's what makes her work feel almost limitless.
Aside from her ability to make cultural criticism feel as stylish as it is essential, Susan Sontag also had such a gift for meaningfully limiting her scope. I've read so many authors who attempt to follow her model—or worse, improve upon it—and they almost always lose focus as they get caught in their own web of ideas. Conversely, everything Sontag wrote seems deliberately self-limiting, and that's what makes her work feel almost limitless.
lizawall's review against another edition
I read these essays because Susan Sontag is famous, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. They turned out to be much closer to my current preoccupations than I had expected, which I found by turns exhilarating, ominous, disappointing and disturbing. Lately I've been almost obsessively troubled by the relation between power and aesthetics and so, it seems, was she.
"Riefenstahl's current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful—as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer—do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst."
"Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. And so people hedge their bets—admiring this kind of art, for its undoubted beauty, and patronizing it, for its sanctimonious promotion of the beautiful."
"The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be 'nice,' as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged."
-"Fascinating Fascism"
"There was something sad in all this talk about pleasure..." -"Remembering Barthes"
...to covet, to thirst, to long for-these are passionate but also acquisitive relations to knowledge and truth..."
The very last passage in this book I found beautiful: "The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power."
It is such a strange and yet maybe fitting ending, because this is exactly what Sontag seems not to do. She is avid, she achieves, and she gathers power, but she doesn't go beyond. She has a wonderful capacity for lucid prose and logical argument, but these very capacities take on a sinister quality when they are placed so insistently in the forefront, while the subjects she proposes to champion: troubled, mad, and mostly dead, recede. I am thinking in particular here of Artaud and Benjamin. I have never read any Artaud and don't plan to, but what I gathered in her essay about him was exactly that it shouldn't have been written. What does it mean to break down a theater of cruelty for the readers of the New Yorker? One has a sense of her sense of herself as serving her subjects by bringing them out of obscurity. But when their power, as she acknowledges and dwells on, is intrinsically related to their obscurity, then there is something troubling about her attempt to disseminate it. Again back to Artaud, she seems at times to be approaching an argument in favor of madness, then draws back for a distinction between identification and appreciation. And, ok, I thought it was gross. Get in or get out, sister. As it stands, I just can't get past those New Yorker readers, and the sense in her writing that she is performing for them, showing off how edgy she is while remaining palatable.
"Riefenstahl's current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful—as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer—do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst."
"Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. And so people hedge their bets—admiring this kind of art, for its undoubted beauty, and patronizing it, for its sanctimonious promotion of the beautiful."
"The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be 'nice,' as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged."
-"Fascinating Fascism"
"There was something sad in all this talk about pleasure..." -"Remembering Barthes"
...to covet, to thirst, to long for-these are passionate but also acquisitive relations to knowledge and truth..."
The very last passage in this book I found beautiful: "The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power."
It is such a strange and yet maybe fitting ending, because this is exactly what Sontag seems not to do. She is avid, she achieves, and she gathers power, but she doesn't go beyond. She has a wonderful capacity for lucid prose and logical argument, but these very capacities take on a sinister quality when they are placed so insistently in the forefront, while the subjects she proposes to champion: troubled, mad, and mostly dead, recede. I am thinking in particular here of Artaud and Benjamin. I have never read any Artaud and don't plan to, but what I gathered in her essay about him was exactly that it shouldn't have been written. What does it mean to break down a theater of cruelty for the readers of the New Yorker? One has a sense of her sense of herself as serving her subjects by bringing them out of obscurity. But when their power, as she acknowledges and dwells on, is intrinsically related to their obscurity, then there is something troubling about her attempt to disseminate it. Again back to Artaud, she seems at times to be approaching an argument in favor of madness, then draws back for a distinction between identification and appreciation. And, ok, I thought it was gross. Get in or get out, sister. As it stands, I just can't get past those New Yorker readers, and the sense in her writing that she is performing for them, showing off how edgy she is while remaining palatable.
ericfheiman's review against another edition
3.0
My rating is less about the force and craft of Sontag’s writing (which is stellar, as usual) and more 1) my lack of familiarity with the subject matter of most of these essays (Canetti? Artaud’s actual writings?), and 2) my (and maybe most of culture’s) slow drift into philistinism since I read Against Interpretation 20 years ago as I get older, busier, and less patient.
sh00's review against another edition
3.0
Продолжаю собирать странную коллекцию статей Сонтаг, в очередной раз умиляясь способностью написать и обдумать абсолютно всё - способность, впрочем, приписываемую в основном Барту. Посади, пишет Сонтаг, его перед коробкой сигар - и мысль за мыслью сложится эссе.
Я давно понял, что охватить всё столь же бесполезно, как и посвятить свою жизнь исключительно описаниям с размышлениями. На интеллектуальной сцене есть Повестка, а вокруг сцены три кольца оцепления - а аудитория такая, что плюнешь. Вероятно, так было всегда, иначе бы та же Сонтаг на полном серьёзе не рассуждала о "doxi" (популярные темы за пределами Повестки). А значит, я не буду заимствовать приёмы и проблематику, я просто собираю коллекцию, ведь главное достоинство библиотеки не в том, что ты ей пользуешься, а в том, что ты можешь ей воспользоваться.
Потом. Если захочешь.
Я давно понял, что охватить всё столь же бесполезно, как и посвятить свою жизнь исключительно описаниям с размышлениями. На интеллектуальной сцене есть Повестка, а вокруг сцены три кольца оцепления - а аудитория такая, что плюнешь. Вероятно, так было всегда, иначе бы та же Сонтаг на полном серьёзе не рассуждала о "doxi" (популярные темы за пределами Повестки). А значит, я не буду заимствовать приёмы и проблематику, я просто собираю коллекцию, ведь главное достоинство библиотеки не в том, что ты ей пользуешься, а в том, что ты можешь ей воспользоваться.
Потом. Если захочешь.
klaos's review against another edition
4.5
Sotto il segno di Saturno è una raccolta di saggi messi insieme da Susan Sontag negli anni Ottanta che raccoglie, tra encomi, elogi, critiche e necrologi spirituali, dei volti segnati (chi più, chi meno) dalla dimensione saturnale più propria. Al centro v'è il saggio che dà il titolo al libro dedicato al più saturnale degli autori del Novecento, Walter Benjamin che dà il canone di lettura di ogni altro volto ritratto che va da Paul Goodman a Elias Canetti. Ogni anima tormentata descritta (tormentata come fu Sontag stessa) ha qualcosa di dire nei confronti dell'arte in cui si è cimentata e nei confronti del presente in cui ha vissuto. Il ruolo di Sontag, in tutto questo, è di proiettare quei volti su sè stessi e, facendo così, li riattualizza e li ricolloca nel futuro. Questi saggi non sono posti per sé stessi o per l'autrice ma sono posti come interrogativi esistenziali per chi li andrà a leggere. Il vero pregio della penna di Sontag e la spinta nei confronti del futuro, di un futuro che deve preservare la dimensione saturnale.
ellie00000's review against another edition
4.0
Terrific essays coming from a terrific writer. My personal favorite is “Fascinating Fascism”, just wow.
“
The SS has become a referent of sexual adventurism. Much of the imagery of far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism. Boots, leather, chains, Iron crosses gleaming torsos, swastikas along with meat hooks and heavy motorcycles, have become the secret and most lucrative paraphernalia of eroticism.”
“Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the “feminine masses”.
“The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.”
“Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Tight-wing movements however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in , have an erotic surface, certainly Nazism is sexier than communism”.
“
The SS has become a referent of sexual adventurism. Much of the imagery of far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism. Boots, leather, chains, Iron crosses gleaming torsos, swastikas along with meat hooks and heavy motorcycles, have become the secret and most lucrative paraphernalia of eroticism.”
“Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the “feminine masses”.
“The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.”
“Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Tight-wing movements however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in , have an erotic surface, certainly Nazism is sexier than communism”.