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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

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
Fascinated
Anthropologists
Intense
Confirm
Towards
Anthropology
Inner
Struggled
Subject
Alienation
Intellectual
Exotic
Anthropologist
Subjects
Urban
Submits
Always
Submit
Repulsion

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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Courage is morally neutral.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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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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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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