Whither the heart of darkness?
December 29, 2004
The death of Susan Sontag has wrought predictable outcomes among the commentariat, yet another to add to the litany of outcomes that exhibit the tendency to lionize or demonize one’s intellectual compatriots, or opposites, respectively. Can the merits of her entire artistic career be boiled down to one quote about her lofty, intellectaually elite observation over the September 11th attacks? This quote?
Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.
In a Machiavellian analysis post-9/11, one can conclude that the spiritual nexus of a fat and decadent culture prone to capitulation to terrifying evil was the World Trade Center towers. One can also conclude that to stab at the heart of America those two same towers would have been the perfect accompaniment to stabbing the nerve center of its government, Washington, D.C. Her conclusion was a matter of opinion; to this day it is a stinging reminder that it still really is.
What grates at us is not the seeming praise that she heaps on those who struck at us, rather, it seems the heartless and cold assertions that she makes. I hardly agree with anything she has said, and her seemingly deficient social skills at framing her opinions are what have made people demonize her just as equally as the substance of her opinions has.
I do not write tonight to lionize her, nor to enshrine her as a thinker for our times. I write tonight to note that hers was not the heart of darkness that so many who have demonized her today imagine her to be. Her enabling of evil did not come close to the works of people like Engels, or Marx, or Mao, not even that of Rifenstahl nor of Michael Moore. No, her penny into the well was merely the matter of amoral intellectualism.
In our partisan times, post-election notwithstanding, it takes plenty of class, intelligence and effort to treat an intellectual opposite with any sort of fairness especially upon death, but then again, there is a reason Josh Trevino’s background as a Washington speechwriter and successful blogger is what it is:
If she could not quite grasp the inexorable logic that leads directly from her courageous stands (pace the deceased, courage is not morally neutral) for Poles, Bosniacs and Kosovars to the present struggle for Iraqis, are we to hold that so dearly against her? It is a long road from shilling for genocidal Communism to nearly arriving at a consistent worldview of freedom’s inexorable expansion. In the case of Susan Sontag, she ought to get credit for the distance traveled.
It is so much easier, instead, to collect the platitudes the media has heaped upon her—ignoring of course the conventional wisdom against speaking ill of the dead—and scream “liberal bias” . Susan Sontag did not carry the heart of darkness that even Jacques Derrida—whose philosophy showed no respect for the creativeness of man—had, and her death could be best met by her enemies with some sort of silence. If not in respect for her, then in respect for those who mourn her, and perceive value in her legacy.
4 Comments to Whither the heart of darkness?
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I love how people think speaking ill of the dead is bad, but outwardly lying about how high-minded and intellectual they are is A O K. The woman was trash. She was a high-minded intellectual in the minds of those that agreed with her, namely the “white-man-is-to-blame” and the “we-brought-it-all-upon-ourselves” crowd.
There is nothing interesting or intellectual about her talking points stances. One does not have to be a genocidal oppressor to be an utter jerk in life or in death, and she fits the category quite well. Her lionization, while not done by you, in the mainstream press is disgusting because the whole scope of her opinions is utterly ignored.
She’s symptomatic of a larger problem of hate-america-first-pseudo-intellectuals, the likes of which I cannot stand, and deserves exactly zero respect whether it’s in death or in life.
Of their deaths I had no respect for Derrida, Arafat, or that Hamas dude in a wheelchair. “Jerk” she may have been but my point is that she was not as evil as those I mentioned, perhaps not as malevolent at all.
You know me more than most that I, too, detest the hate-america-first mentality, but I place it under the “misled” or “self-loathing” columns than under “evil.” The talk among some rightwing websites makes the bitch sound like she bathed in the blood of ten thousand virgins every night.
Trevino’s examination of her passage from schilling for Communism to speaking out for freedom for Eastern Europeans is a fair treatment of what I call “redemptive efforts,” the same efforts that Leni Rifenstahl made after WW2. Efforts that to this day no one would give her credit for, efforts that detract from the beauty of her photography, at least in the eyes of those whose forgiveness will forever be denied her.
I don’t think anyone is over-villainzing her. In order for that to happen, one would have to be distorting her comments. Unfortunately, her comments are out there for the whole world to see, and in reality, there’s no room for interpretation of them.
Her meaning is pretty clear.
As I said earlier, you don’t have to be the embodiment of evil to be a malicious hateful bitch whose death brings forth zero sympathy.
I’d say that aptly describes my feelings toward her.
Frankly, I’m glad she’s dead.
From Sontag’s “notorious” New Yorker essay:
“Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly†attack on “civilization†or “liberty†or “humanity†or “the free world†but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?…”
Arthur Silber quoted the entire essay on his blog:
http://coldfury.com/reason/index.php?p=69
We should not lose sight of the specificity of this act of terrorism. There is no culture clash – relgion and hate are theater. It’s all about wealth and destiny. Sontag’s essay was a clarification of foreign policy. If the problem is with American foreign policy, why is it taboo to address it?