The marks of an active intellect

Among Susan Sontag’s most important books are her essay collections, including “Against Interpretation,� “Styles of Radical Will,� “On Photography� and “Under the Sign of Saturn.� She also wrote short stories, plays and novels.

The following are excerpts from her works. Susan Sontag on:

Photography

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing -- which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art....

The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up -- and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust.

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Illness

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

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Love

The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering -- suffering as the supreme token of seriousness.... Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering.

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Style

Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for works of art.

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Camp

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.� ...

The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.

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Fascism

Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link.... It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

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Life

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up -- up, up. And ... down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

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-- Compiled by Steve Wasserman