Activism
In 1968, Sontag signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
During 1989 Sontag was the President of PEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of the International PEN writers' organization. This was the year when Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa death sentence against writer Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini and some other Islamic fundamentalists claimed the novel was blasphemous. Sontag's uncompromising support of Rushdie was critical in rallying American writers to his cause.
A few years later, Sontag gained attention for directing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot that the London Daily Telegraph called "mesmerisingly precious and hideously self-indulgent" during the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo. Early in that conflict, Sontag referred to the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina as the "Spanish Civil War of our time". She sparked controversy among U.S. leftists for advocating U.S. and European military intervention against Serbian Christian Orthodox forces, in favor of the Bosnian/Albanian Muslim resistance and the victim population of Bosnia. Sontag lived in Sarajevo for many months of the Sarajevo siege.
Sontag continued to theorize about the role of photography in real life in her essay "Looking at War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death" which appeared in the December 9th, 2002 issue of The New Yorker. In it she acknowledges that the problem of our reliance on images and especially photographic images is not that "people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs, .... that the photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding--and remembering. .... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture" (94). She re-examines the arguments she posed in On Photography.
Susan Sontag was additionally a cultural philosopher. She spoke extensively about the distinctions between low brow culture and high brow culture. She was specific on the questions of “What is art?”, “What is truth?”, and felt that low brow culture in art eliminated the clichés. In fact, Sontag was a dear friend of philosopher, Richard Rorty. Within their friendship, they discussed the meaning of truth, which she accomplished answering by narrating her own life. Her own life story speaks to American philosophy. She was an opinionated freelance writer, and often commented on pop culture. Sontag wrote about the metaphors in disease after her own battles with cancer in 1978. She wrote Illness as Metaphor. She assailed the tradition of linking cancer to stereotypes such as personal passivity, and then wrote on Aids as Metaphor, furthering the stereotype assaults. She argued that diseases are physical and ought to be treated as such. Sontag commented on many traditional American ideals such as the military, plague, and developmental metaphors. Sontag was deemed the “pope of existentialism”, and wrote intellectual pop culture history. She agreed that pop culture and high culture are one in the same. She pronounced America to be a doomed country and with the most brutal system of slavery in modern times, often termed to have fuzzy thinking. She was a great sign of political symbolism. She believed the principal lesson to be learned from Poland was the utter villainy of the communist system, left’s intellectual insularity exists, and can it be that our enemies were right? Communism, she concluded, is “successful fascism, if you will, fascism with a human face.” She call tied the most difficult of the ethical arts into her work. She believed that freedom is a luxury, which an irresponsible activist must yield loyal opposition to. Although Sontag viewed this as moral blackmail, specifically when order and freedom conflict. Additionally, Sontag was a teacher of philosophy. She was antiinterpretive, proexperience, and believed in the sensibility expressed in her early work by resisting the vocabulary of philosophic movements.
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