Yoshie, I am suprised that you of all people fell for Sontag's crap.
She was a plagiarist. When confronted she didn't even bother to deny it. She shifted the question by saying that all literature was borrowing and stealing so why bother to acknowledge anybody or provide footnotes. Of course, her cult acted as if the oracle had spoken and made sure the issue was dropped. No one stopped to wonder why the great champion of people thinking for themselves needed to steal other people's words.
> 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.
She didn't have critical detachment. She had a mediocre mind: see Edmund White. Her whole approach was predicated on the personal/particular -- since she couldn't engage anything at a high level, she came up with the notion of not engaging at all -- being above it all. She masked her own intellectual inadequacy with a theory of detachment -- don't think, just experience -- Buddhism lite. She crawled into the closet because if she came out she would be just another queer intellectual -- nothing special, not the Queen Bee she was (if they ever make a movie of her life it is a shame that Joan Crawford is dead -- she would be perfect. I guess we will just have to settle for Faye Dunaway doing Joan doing Susan).
Real queer intellectual revolutionaries -- Genet, Baldwin, Lorde, Burroughs, Locke -- exploded the universals from within and still remained connected to the matrix of existence. Sontag wanted to be above it all, self-positioned at at the top of the hierarchy -- detached, all-knowing, the object of fawning admiration: think for yourselves all you want, but be sure to agree with me. LOL.
She was aided in all this by having presence and style, so she was able to fool a lot of people (who obviously were looking to be fooled) When somebody revealed the woman behind the curtain, she turned vicious: see Camille Paglia.
She was the Tommy Hilfiger of culture. She saw the trend on the street, slapped her label on it, and then made her pronouncements. Of course, when the great mass of unwashed middlebrows turned, she was quick to note the problem and do an about face. One day she hails Leni Riefenstahl; when championing a Nazi is not flying too well: "Oh my, I was wrong." Got to give her credit: she a) knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear and b) trick them into believing that she had come up with it all by herself.
As for not suing people, when Rollyson and Paddock were writing their biography of her, she sicced her lawyers on their publisher. So much for intellectual freedom and people thinking for themselves. Far from being detached, Sontag was determined to control everything she could.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister