The Relevance of Susan Sontag
The death of Susan Sontag in New York following a prolonged struggle with lukemia is an event the world mourned. Loke her other fellow New Yorker Edward Said Susan too was the voice of reason and intellect in an increasingly belligerent USA. She was instinctively against any form of political or ideological coercion and was deeply scrptical of the promise of freedom through political means. Hers was an individual's tryst with destiny in the same manner that Hannah Arndt believed that collective revolutionary movementsd only enshrine the worst kind of oppression. How relevant is this message when the USA is attempting to "export" its version of "democracy" backed by helicopter gunships and humvees.
Susan Sontag was the author of such classics as Against Inerpretation,Styles Of Radical Will, Illness As Metaphor,Where the Stress Falls and at least 4 works of fiction. Hers was an engagement with truth as she perceived it and never for once did she fall for the fashionable idea the truth is beyond the grasp of the human intellect and that everything is only a discoursea la Derrida.
It is the job of thinking individuals to advance the cause of human civilizational goals by constantly holding up the values of critical and open dialogue with society and power structures, without becoming a part of either. In this Susan was a great success. Her death will be a lossthat cannot be filled.