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Underwritten by University Book Store Biography A preeminent intellectual personage, Susan Sontag received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951 at the age of eighteen. Several years later, she was a young critic who became known for championing European artists and thinkers in publications including Partisan Review, Harper’s, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books. With the publication of her first two books, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) and Styles of Radical Will (1969), Sontag established a far-reaching and controversial reputation that continues to grow today. Time writes of Sontag, "She has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience." While Sontag is best known as a critic and essayist, she has also written collections of short stories, novels, plays, and films. Recently, she received the National Book Award for the novel In America (2000). Her books, among them Illness as Metaphor (1978), AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), I, Etcetera (1978), and On Photography (1977), have been translated into thirty-two languages. Sontag has also been a human rights activist for more than two decades, and served as the president of the PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989. In 2001, she received the Jerusalem Prize for her lifetime body of work. She lives in New York City. Excerpt
from Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Let us test this "difficulty of communication," Woolf proposes, by looking together at images of war. The images are some of the photographs the beleaguered Spanish government has been sending out twice a week; she footnotes: "Written in the winter of 1936-37." Let's see, Woolf writes, "whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things." She continues: This morning's collection contains the photograph of what might be a man's body, or a woman's; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room . . . The quickest, driest way to convey the inner commotion caused by these photographs is by noting that one can't always make out the subject, so thorough is the ruin of flesh and stone they depict. And from there Woolf speeds to her conclusion. We do have the same responses, "however different the education, the traditions behind us," she says to the lawyer. Her evidence: both "we" -- here women are the "we" -- and you might well respond in the same words. You, Sir, call them "horror and disgust." We also can them horror and disgust . . . War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must, be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped. Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists. We hope only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of war (for there are laws of war, to which combatants should be held), and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives to armed conflict. It may be hard to credit the desperate resolve produced by the aftershock of the First World War, when the realization of the ruin Europe had brought on itself took hold. Condemning war as such did not seem so futile or irrelevant in the wake of the paper fantasies of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which fifteen leading nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy; even Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate with a public exchange of letters in 1932 titled "Why War?" Woolf's Three Guineas, appearing toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations of war, offered the originality (which made this the least well received of all her books) of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man's game -- that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male. Nevertheless, the temerity of Woolf's version of "Why War?" does not make her revulsion against war any less conventional in its rhetoric, in its summations, rich in repeated phrases. And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus. Invoking this hypothetical shared experience ("we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses"), Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will. Does it? To be sure, Woolf and the unnamed addressee of this book-length letter are not any two people. Although they are separated by the age-old affinities of feeling and practice of their respective sexes, as Woolf has reminded him, the lawyer is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male. His antiwar opinions are no more in doubt than are hers. After all, his question was not, What are your thoughts about preventing war? It was, How in your opinion are we to prevent war? It is this "we" that Woolf challenges at the start of her book: she refuses to allow her interlocutor to take a "we" for granted. But into this "we," after the pages devoted to the feminist point, she then subsides. No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. Selected
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