Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays
Susan Sontag
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0312420080
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This third essay collection by America's leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.
could never find its appropriate nourishment. * * * Nietzsche coolly assumed an atheist theology of the spirit, a negative theology, a mysticism without God. Artaud wandered in the labyrinth of a specific type of religious sensibility, the Gnostic one. (Central to Mithraism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and Tantric Buddhism, but pushed to the heretical margins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the perennial Gnostic thematics appear in the different religions in different terminologies but
evokes “memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris … memories of the rooms where these books had been housed.…” Bookhunting, like the sexual hunt, adds to the geography of pleasure—another reason for strolling about in the world. In collecting, Benjamin experienced what in himself was clever, successful, shrewd, unabashedly passionate. “Collectors are people with a tactical instinct”—like courtiers. Apart from first
language presents the dark side of modern poetry’s successful verbal alienations—of its creative use of language’s purely formal possibilities and of the ambiguity of words and the artificiality of fixed meanings. Artaud’s problem is not what language is in itself but the relation language has to what he calls “the intellectual apprehensions of the flesh.” He can barely afford the traditional complaint of all the great mystics that words tend to petrify living thought and to turn the immediate,
value of the mind that it alone is used to oppose death. Because the mind is so real to him Canetti dares to challenge death, and because the body is so unreal he perceives nothing dismaying about extreme longevity. Canetti is more than willing to live as a centenarian; he does not, while he is fantasizing, ask for what Faust demanded, the return of youth, or for what Emilia Makropulos was given by her alchemist father, its magical prolongation. Youth has no part in Canetti’s fantasy of
most of the small number of moviegoers who had taken films seriously throughout the nineteen-twenties—would terminate cinema’s greatness as an art form. He continued acting in films until 1935, but with little hope of getting a chance to direct his own films and with no further reflection upon the possibilities of cinema (which, regardless of Artaud’s discouragement, remains the century’s likeliest candidate for the title of master art). From late 1926 on, Artaud’s search for a total art form