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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Comedy
Experience
Detachment
Tragedy

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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
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The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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