[lbo-talk] kvetching about Sontag's relation to the closet

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

DSR debburz at yahoo.com, Fri Jan 7 12:57:24 PST 2005:
>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>>  Sontag's discussion of illness as metaphor (_Illness as Metaphor_,
>>  1977) -- some diseases get romanticized, some are regarded as
>>  punishments for bad personalities of patients or their mothers,
>>  others become metaphors of absolute evil, modern political
>>  discourses
>>  across the ideological spectrum tend to designate their targets as
>>  cancer and incite violence against them, such metaphoric uses of
>>  illness make it difficult to treat illnesses as they are -- was
>>  politically useful for queer activists even before she authored her
>>  > own book on AIDS and its metaphors.
>>  > Sontag was also one of the first major writers who addressed the
>>  AIDS
>>  crisis in a story published in a mainstream magazine: "The Way We
>>  Live Now" (1986).
>
>Exactly.  (Yoshie I really think you should send your comments to 
>the houstonvoice editor.) I find this article annoying.  To suggest 
>that Sontag was even partially closeted is naive, imho.  And if the 
>measure of "outness" is newsprint gossip, there were some minor 
>media gossip spits and sputters about Leibovitz leaving her for a 
>younger woman, or having an affair with one -can't remember, don't 
>care -  a couple of years or so ago. 
>
>Sontag never denied her relationships, sued anyone over exposure or 
>accusations or made a fuss about it one way or the other, and for 
>that, I respected her even more.

Also, the style of art, literature, and philosophy that Susan Sontag 
championed was the sort that resists reduction of a text to the 
personal biography of its author (which is rooted in the same drive 
to discover the "truth" of a person to the "nature" of the person's 
sexuality, which must, in turn, be classified into one of the three 
limited categories invented by bourgeois culture), and in that 
resistance also lay a mode of queer modernist politics, whether or 
not she intended it.

Gary Indiana wrote: "She once told Dick Cavett, after the first of 
her struggles with cancer, that she didn't find her own illness 
interesting. She stipulated that it was moving to her, but not 
interesting. To be interesting, experience has to yield a harvest of 
ideas, which her illness certainly did -- but she communicated them 
in a form useful to others in ways a conventional memoir couldn't be. 
(To be useful, one has to reach others on the level of thought, not 
only feeling -- though the two are inseparable.)" ("Susan Sontag 
(1933-2004): Remembering the Voice of Moral Responsibility -- and 
Unembarrassed Hedonism," 
<http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0501,indiana,59762,2.html>).  That 
sort of critical detachment and abstraction isn't the only way to 
approach the relation between thought and experience, universality 
and particularity -- for instance, one of the writers Sontag admired 
the most, Jean Genet, arguably created a new universal through 
insistence upon his particular experience -- but it's certainly a 
valid way of living and writing, not at all the same as putting one's 
life into the closet out of shame.
-- 
Yoshie

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