Styles of Radical Will
Susan Sontag
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0312420218
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.
When viewed as a theme for psychological analysis, pornography is rarely seen as anything more interesting than texts which illustrate a deplorable arrest in normal adult sexual development. In this view, all pornography amounts to is the representation of the fantasies of infantile sexual life, these fantasies having been edited by the more skilled, less innocent consciousness of the masturbatory adolescent, for purchase by so-called adults. As a social phenomenon—for instance, the boom in the
reinforces “attraction” and excites desire. What Bataille exposes in extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection with death. Bataille conveys this insight not by devising sexual acts whose consequences are lethal, thereby littering his narratives with corpses. (In the terrifying Histoire de l’Oeil, for instance, only one person dies; and the book ends with the three sexual adventurers, having debauched their way through France and Spain, acquiring a yacht in Gibraltar to pursue
nothing else.” For what is this theatre-and-nothing-else if not the old notion of artifice? (As if art were ever anything else, some arts being artificial but others not.) According to Nicoll, when we sit in a theatre “in every way the ‘falsity’ of a theatrical production is borne in upon us, so that we are prepared to demand nothing save a theatrical truth.” Quite a different situation obtains in the cinema, Nicoll holds. Every member of the movie audience, no matter how sophisticated, is on
of physical substance and behavior. In his films, the discontinuities are, so to speak, practical, functional; they accomplish a transformation of ordinary reality. But the continuous reinvention of space (as well as the option of temporal indeterminacy) peculiar to film narration does not pertain only to the cinema’s ability to fabricate “visions,” to show the viewer a radically altered world. The most “realistic” use of the motion-picture camera also involves a discontinuous account of space,
Johnson is acting? 2. How serious is the problem of inflation? The problem of poverty? 3. What is the meaning of the split between the Administration and the American intellectuals? 4. Is white America committed to granting equality to the American Negro? 5. Where do you think our foreign policies are likely to lead us? 6. What, in general, do you think is likely to happen in America? 7. Do you think any promise is to be found in the activities of young people today? My own response, reprinted