Susan Sontag, one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died Tuesday of leukemia at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, according to her son, David Rieff. She was 71.
The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of "Notes on Camp," written for Partisan Review and included in "Against Interpretation," her first collection of essays, published two years later.
Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as crafting portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti.
Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform.
"We live in a culture," she said, "in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression.
"In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."
In a Rolling Stone article in 1979, Jonathan Cott called Sontag a writer who was "continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other -- much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one's touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving."
A self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist," Sontag sought to challenge conventional thinking.
"From the moment I met Susan Sontag in 1962, I felt myself to be in the presence of a woman of astonishing intelligence and the most exemplary literary passions," novelist Carlos Fuentes told The Times on Tuesday. "I admired her work and her life without reservation."
She was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York City and raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and a fur trader father who died in China of tuberculosis during the Japanese invasion when Sontag was 5.
