Episode 3: Susan Sontag with Merve Emre

It's precisely because they show us that the fights that we thought we had already won were only tenuous victories.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Woir Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

Adrienne and I first conceived this podcast.

One of the things I wanted to really investigate in our long inquiry into conservative understandings of sex and gender was the response at the mid-20th century by the prominent intellectuals of that era to the emergence of second wave feminism.

It's a really surprising complicated, virulent rejection of second wave feminism by people in that scene who did not necessarily agree with each other.

You know, everybody from Norman Podhoritz to Joan Joan Didian to Elizabeth Hardwick to Irving Howe were sort of united across these quite significant political differences in a commitment to gender conservatism, right?

And so one of the thinkers that we knew we would have to talk about when we started this project was Susan Sontag.

And it might be a little bit, I think, contentious or a little bit controversial to classify her thinking on gender as conservative, but her relationship to second-wave feminism was alternately admiring, but also quite condescending.

She had moments of solidarity and moments of, I think, like outright contempt.

And there was a really interesting new book of her writing on women.

It's called Susan Sontag on Women.

It's out now from Picador, and we got to talk about it with just about the most appropriate person to talk about it, I think.

Yes, we talked with Merve Emre about this book.

I should maybe briefly say a little bit about Susan Sontak for those listeners who are not that familiar with her work.

So Susan Sontak's dates are 1933 to 2004, and these essays are largely, what is that, 1968 to 79, is that right?

75.

75.

So that's a pretty small sliver of Sontak's output.

And of course, a lot of her work had to do implicitly with gender questions.

The first major work was the essay Notes on Camp in 1964, sort of that vaulted her to broader prominence.

And of course, it's one that was all about the emerging subculture of mostly gay men.

Books of hers, like Against Interpretation from 1966, on Photography, 1977, Illness as Metaphor, 1978, and regarding the pain of others basically always had a kind of gendered aspect to it.

But that's not, you know, those are not in this book.

It's really about a very particular moment where, as Maura is saying, she was having to contend with a very well-organized and very vocal feminist movement and found herself, yeah, I don't know, annoyed by it.

Is that a way of putting this?

Like, I don't know, but like she definitely had a reaction to it, and it wasn't that of easy identification.

Yeah, I actually just looked up the dates on these essays.

They are written between 1972 and 1975.

So, an extremely short period of time.

Oh my God, so short.

They are arranged, I think, in like more or less chronological order.

And they deal with,

you know, a sense of real, I mean, ambivalence in the sense of like actual mixed feelings, not ambivalence in the sense of, you know, disgust, which I think is a caveat I've also made on this podcast before.

But, you know, there's a sense of partial admiration, partial affinity,

but a real distancing from feminism as

a category of thinking, difference from feminism as a style, and at times like a real resentment at what Sontag interpreted as feminist weaknesses, right?

There's a sense of feminists as anti-intellectuals, a phrase she uses at one point in the book.

There's a sense of feminists as sort of insufficiently hard-nosed about their reality.

She is concerned that it's overly egalitarian.

She seems to think that it's a little bit like a little bit of these people who sort of think that identity politics means that you have to be the same as everyone, every other member of the group.

There's definitely a part of that.

She doesn't want to be just one of the girls, basically.

And Sontag

also issues in one of these essays in this collection actually a really robust feminist vision where she outlines a sort of totalizing transformation of society that would be necessary for gender liberation to actually become effacious.

She seems to understand sort of the moral claims of that effort.

She certainly understands the scope of the project in this way that I think can be, for those of us with women's liberation commitments, like profoundly moving.

It's a really lucid essay, this interview with, or interview rather, with Libre, a socialist feminist magazine published in Spanish out of France.

And it's a little bit interesting, and I think speaks both to Sontag's sort of partial investment in the feminist project or her resistance to political commitment that she also has such disdain for this movement whose objectives she articulates so clearly and seems to sympathize with quite sincerely.

So there's a lot of contradiction in this book, even though it's such a short span of time.

It seems to represent a lot of indeterminance or like evolution in thinking.

And for it, we got to talk to Mervais Emre, who wrote the introduction to this new collection.

Mervais is great.

She was really generous with her time, and she is one of just the most prolific people I've ever met.

Don't compare yourself to Mervais because you'll start feeling bad, but I'm going to read her bio so maybe you can get a sense of what I'm talking about.

Merve Emre is a Shapiro Silverberg Professor of Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism.

She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale.

She is the author of Paraliterary, The Making of Bad Readers in Post-War America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, NPR, CBC, and The Spectator.

She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from the New York Review of Books, Harper's, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books, to American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, and Modernism, Modernity.

That makes me tired just reading it.

So maybe you get a sense of how accomplished Merve is and how lucky we are to have been able to talk to her.

So one thing that we talked about a little bit in the conversation that really stuck with me was this question of a position that allowed women writers at, you know, sort of somewhere in the middle of the 20th century to kind of, I think you put it, putting the first coin in the slot in order to like get to write more was basically you had to have a sustained criticism or critique of other women, especially of organized women, namely the feminist movement.

And that to me just seems,

I was just shocked to find out from Merve, for instance, how far back that goes, that there are George Elliott essays that essentially do this.

And then shocked to think to our day where that's still a very viable path.

It seems to be a rite of passage, this kind of essay that, you know, I'm not one of those girls, seems to be something that our media still eat up and that the Susan Selntags of the future still have to kind of pass through as a rite of passage.

Yeah, you know, I think Susan Selntag is definitely not somebody who needs to purchase credibility and was not at this moment in the mid-70s either.

But, you it is interesting to see her critiques of feminism and this like broader tradition of women who might have various motives, some of them like less purely intellectual than others, right?

Of attacking feminism and of criticizing feminists as somehow weak or unserious.

Yeah, and as Merve points out in our interview, basically for Sontak, that really came out of her aesthetic commitments, which was that she was an inveterate modernist.

She was ultimately a little bit of an elitist.

Actually, not a little bit.

Yeah, she was a

huge fucking elitist.

In a way, and I don't mean that just because

it's nice to, it's fine when people like certain things and want to get others to appreciate them too.

And

there's something very, very cloying about a kind of populism that sort of only goes by what people already like.

And Sontag definitely did put things on the map that otherwise probably wouldn't have had as wide a readership or wide a viewership, et cetera, et cetera.

But what these essays to me make clear is that, like, for her, feminism was essentially a populist project.

It was about finding common ground, about finding shared consciousness, about finding the biggest possible coalition.

And that is absolutely not Susan Sontag's project at all.

She seems to celebrate the moments when she gets what's awesome about something and when she can point to a bunch of people who don't.

Yeah, Mervais characterizes this elitism as a style of persuasion, among other things.

And I think that I was definitely very persuaded by Mervais.

She's got charisma, she's got authority, she's like one of the people who, when she talks, I just get this sense of dazed admiration.

You know, she's got, she's got the charisma of Sontag herself.

So I think it was a really excellent conversation, and we're really lucky to be able to have spoken with her.

So here's the show.

Here it is.

Well, Mary, thank you so much for being here and for talking with us about Susan Sontag.

Thank you guys for having me.

This is exciting.

I saw Moira last at the launch of On Women in New York.

And so when she sent me the email to do this, I was really excited to continue the conversation that we had started there.

It was the most glamorous book launch I have ever attended.

It was at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is this huge, beautiful space in an old warehouse.

And it was full of...

just willowy, gorgeous, fashionable women.

I have like never been so intimidated at a book launch,

at an essay collection launch.

So I think, you know, Sontag retains her glamour.

She's got this chokehold on us all.

She does.

And it was funny.

The guy who organized the event came up to me before, and he was like, I don't know how you want to handle this, but we have a lot of 20-somethings coming up to me asking me when Susan Sontag is going to show up.

Oh, wow.

Oh, no.

So, I mean, and that was kind of interesting to me because I think for many of us, Sontag is a very familiar figure and in fact, perhaps a kind of clichéd or obsolete figure.

And there's nothing left to say about the work that she did and the kind of position that she assumed in the cultural imagination.

So it was interesting to hear about this younger generation of women who weren't sure whether she was alive or dead.

or this younger generation of women for whom even in death her influence was such that they could convince themselves that she was alive.

I mean, I think that like some of these essays, you mentioned this in your introduction, which I thought was excellent, but like some of these essays in on women do feel like a little uncannily contemporary, or at least like they could be responding to a conflict or a discourse that's happening right now, which might be a sign of just like the stagnation of feminism, right?

That we're still having these same conversations that Sontag was having in the mid-1970s.

But it also strikes me as a sign of the sort of durability and prescience of her work that there is something very convincingly, convincingly 2023 about these essays.

I think, well, I have three kind of broad thoughts in response to that, and you can pick up whichever one of them you want.

But my first thought is that I am interested in why

our impulse is to say that if we are having similar kinds of conversations or similar ideas or similar topics or similar ways of looking at things continue to be important to us, that necessarily reflects a lack of progress.

To me, one of the things that Santag is saying, particularly in the interview that she does with Libre,

is that the problem of feminism is not reducible to the problem of capitalism, but is certainly related to it.

And as far as I can tell, we haven't solved that problem yet.

And nor have we solved the problem, as you can see in the United States and particularly post-Roe, of women's equality on a legal plane.

So to me, the idea that certain things might continue to be relevant that were relevant in 71 or 72 or 73 doesn't necessarily indicate a stagnation of the conversation around feminism, but it might indicate something like a social stagnation in the kinds of changes that are or are not happening.

So that's just one thing that occurred to me, Moira, in response to what you said.

The second thing that I would say, and I'm curious if you picked up on this in the introduction,

is that I thought that any halfway intelligent reader, well, that's perhaps a little bit insulting.

I thought any reader in the know would read the introduction and recognize that Sontag

is not looking back or across the aisle to feminist thinkers like Dorkin, for instance, but is kind of halfway to Foucault and Sedgwick.

Where she's going is much more in the direction of queer theory and a general critique of normativity and an embrace of non-normativity than looking at the second wave and its preoccupations.

And to me, this is what makes her an interestingly complex figure for the second wave is because she feels like her aesthetic preoccupations and her kind of moral preoccupations sit much more with gay men and later with queer theory than with second wave women.

And it's been surprising to me for that reason to see her talked about or placed so squarely in a kind of second wave tradition from which she only ever felt, I think, strongly alienated.

And then the final thing I'll say is that For me, some of the feeling of timeliness of the collection just comes from the interviews, which do feel like the pieces in the collection where she really shines.

And I think it just comes from how dialogue feels more present and sensually available to us than the essay form, which I like.

So you guys pick up on any of those three things and we can roll from there.

I love that.

You've given us a lot to chew on.

I think I will take social stagnation and continued relevance of mid-century feminist thought.

Do you want to to take queer theory?

And then we can maybe tag team on the interviews, which I think I agree with you, Mervey.

They're really just rich.

And I think, especially in the last one, you can almost feel her presence in the room.

You can feel her getting annoyed on the page.

You can feel her becoming excited in a way where I actually believe that that second interview was done, or it reads as if it was done in real time, whereas the Libre interview reads as if it was like more of a response to a questionnaire.

Yeah.

And, you know, before we get too deep into the weeds, why don't we do a quick overview for our listeners who maybe haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of the book yet about like this collection.

It's edited by David Reif, Susan Sontag's son, and it encompasses like this chunk of Sontag's career in the early to mid-70s that you say in your introduction, Merve, comes between her visit to Vietnam.

and her first diagnosis of cancer.

And you talk about how her grappling with the status of women and the questions posed by the women's liberation movement and its reception sort of bring about this shadow of mortality, right?

So her first essay in this collection is called The Double Standard of Aging.

It is one of the pieces that I think fits best into the standard second wave tradition.

It's talking about aging, beauty, sexual potency, as

happens.

to change throughout life, you know, between the genders.

The third world of women is the first of those two interviews that we're talking about.

It was conducted, I believe, with a Spanish-language Spanish-language Marxist feminist magazine called Libre that was based out of Paris.

It is a really interesting, probably the most systematic account of Susan Sontag's perception of women's oppression.

And it is the closest to what I would call really like a almost a radical feminist tradition.

And then there are two shorter essays called A Woman's Beauty, Put Down or Power Source, and Beauty, How Will It Change Next, which are more sort of in line with the double standard of aging.

It's more of Sontag's thinking about beauty, desirability, how it functions and sort of imposes force on women's lives.

There is her famous critique of Lenny Riefenstahl, Fascinating Fascism, and then a response to the poet and intellectual Adrian Rich, who wrote to critique Sontag's treatment of Rieschenstahl, both for its implication of feminists in Riefenstahl's rehabilitation in the 1970s and for what Rich saw as Sontag's inadequate consideration of the role of gender in Nazism.

And then the book closes with a Salma Gundi interview, which is a kind of like closing bookend, which I thought was really fascinating in part because it does, I think, represent a departure, as you know, all of these do, from her Third World of Women piece, but is probably the piece in the book where Sontag's sort of character shines through most vividly.

So I wanted to talk to you, Mervy.

And we initially weren't going to include

in the first draft of the manuscript that I received, the Salmagandhi interview was not included.

And then as I was reading around to write the introduction, I found that interview, which I hadn't read before.

And David and I emailed about it, and we thought that it would just be wonderful to end with it.

So that there were these two interviews and these two shorter pieces and then these two longer, longer pieces.

I thought that would balance the collection in a nice way.

And I think, you know,

you mentioned earlier the fact that, you know, much of Sontag's thinking feels really immediate now, not because maybe the field has stagnated, but because, you know, the challenges in society remain, like the political challenges.

And it's interesting to see Sontag framed by some of this book's critics as sort of like a relic of an era when women's oppression was worse or when it mattered more to their lives than it does now, because I think that that's, you know, perhaps a bit of a short-sighted or myopic reading of the political situation, right?

Like some of the things that Santag articulates in the Libre interview, The Third World of Women, in which she lays out this understanding of gender as a foundation of every political system.

She is like quite acute in her critiques of communist countries, the Soviet bloc, and their domestic domestic gender relations.

And she presents feminism as almost an ontological challenge, you know, right?

Like something that to actually be realized would require these radical transformations.

And she's got this like clarity of her vision, but she's also got this kind of like forthrightness of her

style.

She's explaining this radical reimagining of all human relations towards the end of gender equality and liberation.

Although she says she doesn't like the term liberation, which we can also get into.

And she's doing it like she's, you know, describing what she had for lunch.

Like stylistically, it is so calm and forthright and straightforward in this way that evokes this like seriousness and confidence that I think can sometimes be missing from feminists of this period who vacillated during the second wave between stylistic postures of like contempt and sarcasm among the radicals and sort of like moralizing earnestness among the liberals.

So I wanted to like get your thoughts on the relevance of the third world of women, both in terms of the ongoing challenges to women's freedom and in terms of like Sontag's unique posture towards these questions.

That's great.

I think that there are two ways into that.

And the first way into it is about ideology, and the second way into it is about style.

So, I'll start with ideology because I know that you, like me, are interested in why at particular moments in history, particular ideologies of feminism come to the fore

in order to explain why we are where we are.

And my sense, and I'd be curious to hear from both of you how this hypothesis feels to you or what you think about it.

My sense is that for the past half decade, but especially post-pandemic, we have been saturated in a kind of Silvia Federici-light socialist/slash Marxist feminism.

And that when people think about feminism, what they think about increasingly is social reproduction and emotional labor.

Those are the terms that have come to attach themselves to the discourse called feminism.

And where I think in this sense, the overturning of Roe was kind of a shock to people because they thought we'd we'd already moved on.

To, do you hear the thunder?

God is like, yes, speak your truth.

You mentioned the overturning of Roe and the thunder claps behind you.

Yeah.

Is that a quarter of that?

He is disappointed.

Not okay with that.

And I think this is one of the reasons that the overturning of Roe was kind of a shock to people because they thought that this was a particular stage that we were past already.

And that what we had moved on to was was talking about things like immaterial labor and nothing as obvious or as crude as the legal protections that did or did not extend to women who wanted to make certain kinds of decisions over their bodily autonomy.

So, I, and I think that given that that's the case, one of the reasons that Santag feels interesting to me at this moment.

And indeed, I think one of the reasons that many women of the second wave are interesting at this moment is precisely because they show us that the fights that we thought we had already won were only tenuous victories granted to us.

And that going back to concepts of privacy, of autonomy over one's body, of the right to be a non-normative subject,

these things actually still matter in the world and perhaps

matter even more as they have increasingly been the political battlegrounds, especially in the United States, but also in the UK.

So,

that's one thing, and that has to do with these kind of competing ideologies with feminism and

what their valences are at different moments in history.

The second thing that you said, Moira, about style, I think is really, really important.

To me, it is also striking that the tone in that interview is so collected and it is so self-assured.

And when it qualifies, it does so with the steadiest hand.

And to me, this is probably part of what irritates people

about that interview.

So some people find it entirely doctrinaire and some people find it boring.

But I think that both of those judgments are essentially pointing out a kind of tonal control that they are not used to associating with Sontag, who seems to be someone who in other essays really kind of brandishes her words with much more energy and with a kind of desire to call attention to her style qua style.

But in that interview, there is very little of that, it seems to me.

There are only kind of traces

of what I would call contempt.

So even when she is trying to distance herself from the kind of Marxist project, she's doing it in a respectful and in a considered way.

And I really admire that.

I know that there has been so much conversation about what tone should or shouldn't be, what style should or shouldn't be, about how certain attempts to keep tone cool are in fact playing into kind of dominant discourses of coolness, of rationality, of impersonality, et cetera.

But to me, it actually feels like a tremendous relief to encounter that amid the mass of second wave writers that we have who just don't want to control their tone or who control it for different purposes, control it for different ends and for different audiences.

Right.

I think that I think the calmness control that you speak to evokes in the reader, or at least in this reader, like an awareness of Sontag's authority.

She has this amassed authoritative competence is like, I think, one of the things that people notice about Sontag very early on, but I think that's an affect like uncommonly wielded towards feminist ends.

And it is kind of refreshing.

I was interested to hear you touch on the ideological differences between Sontag's posture and those of like maybe a more like doctrinaire Marxist like Federici, which I think might be a good point for us to hand things over to Adrian or for me to hand things over to Adrian to talk a little bit about like Santag's relationship to queer theory.

Well, I was going to actually, sorry, jump back a little bit and ask about this question of control.

It seems to me absolutely all over the exchange with Adrienne Rich as well, right?

Where basically, as far as I understand it, you know, Rich, as Maura was saying, criticizes fascinating fascism for essentially being one of those, I think she calls it an intellectual exercise, right?

She's basically thinking of notes on camp.

She's like, in the end, especially in the second section, the fascinating fascism starts off with a long consideration of the filmmaker Lenny Rievenstahl and then moves on to like, basically, why do we have fetish porn that has Nazi imagery in it?

Right.

And in its tone and in its sort of peregrinations of thought, it very much does feel like a late sequel to Notes on Camp.

Rich basically says, you know, it's very hard to understand what her intellectual stake in this is.

It's basically, this is just...

her exercising her mind.

And in her response, Susan Sontak then is incensed about the idea that her piece might be, and I think Rich says, more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a felt reality.

The question is, like, how personal are your politics, Susan?

Sontag's answer is twofold, right?

One is, I defy anyone to read what I wrote and miss its personal, even autobiographical character, right?

You know, we can all debate on what that might mean.

And number two, you know, that she's an ardent defender of intellectual exercise.

She wants argument and not expression.

And I think that's so interesting, right?

She closes the response with the idea that Rich's well-intentioned letter does illustrate a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric, anti-intellectualism, right?

Precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect, its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims, the rights it accords alongside passion to tentativeness and detachment, is also one of the roots of fascism, what I was trying to expose in my argument on Riefenstahl.

That's really, I mean, she's drawing blood there, right?

I mean, and it encapsulates what Moira was just saying, that basically there is this hyper-personal style that Stontak declines to share or will not indulge in to the extent that people would like her to.

And what's behind it is ultimately kind of an anti-feminist, or I don't say an anti-feminist politics, but there are, she's drawing on the tropes of anti-feminism.

There's one, for one thing, it seems to me a kind of mind-body dualism, right?

Where like getting mastery over the body is a good thing.

Or there is this question that like it gets you to categories like genius.

She talks about distrusting the egalitarian ethics of feminism.

And I was just wondering about that, like would you say that these are anti-feminist tropes kind of deployed in the spirit of feminism?

Because they are in some way definitely deployed against the dominant modes of public expression that were cultivated in the second wave, right?

No, I think that's right.

But I think what I would say is that there are people who are more dialectical readers of Sontag than Sontag was capable of being herself.

And I think about someone like Debbie Nelson, who has a long chapter devoted to Sontag in her book, Tough Enough,

in which her argument about Sontag is that it's precisely the excess of feeling that lodges in the body.

And it's precisely that hyper awareness of the body, especially when she's being treated for breast cancer and when she is realizing her mortality, that in fact galvanizes this kind of controlled and authoritative and masterful tone.

And to some extent, it's like a very old, it's not an anti-feminist trope exactly.

I would say it's much more of a modernist trope.

And I think of someone like T.S.

Eliot being like, only people who know,

only people who have a personality know what it is to not want to express it.

And I think that that's part of what also has to be taken into account here: that for every claim that Sontag makes that looks like a political claim or a claim about feminism, there's probably a corresponding aesthetic claim made just under the surface of this, and that she is really kind of through and through a modernist.

And so, it's not surprising that she's attracted to the kind of art that she's interested in, that she has this allergy allergy toward the personal or the expressive or the confessional.

And I don't think it's an accident either that the aesthetic and the political get kind of confused in both her writing and in responses to her.

Because it's perfectly possible, for instance, to be someone who agitates for equal pay for women or someone who stands outside of your local Planned Parenthood to help people walk by the protesters, or someone who donates to unions that are working on questions of equal pay for women in the workplace, right?

And at the same time, to not write in an expressive or a personal way.

I think that what Santag is saying, and I really do agree with this, is that these are just different domains of analysis.

And the aesthetic domain has a politics, but it's not, and it cannot be reduced to the domain of politics proper.

And what looks like contradiction is actually just plurality for her.

Again, that is maybe an overly generous reading of her.

Maybe it's actually just a projection of like how I live my life.

But I do think for me at least what Sontag lets us see is that there has to be room in politics for plurality.

not necessarily confusion, but just thinking about how to solve different kinds of problems differently.

Leaving the ambit of the 70s, that's the main focus of this collection for a second.

That's what, as you were saying earlier, that's what connects her to queer theory to some extent.

That Adrienne Rich, I think, has it both right and wrong.

She is an egalitarian in certain ways, or she's a communitarian.

She loves to see how communities make meaning.

But she's also an anti-egalitarian in the sense that, like, Notes on Camp is about how, like, some people get it and some people don't, which is, of course, right, like she's like Stanley Fish or someone like that.

yeah yeah i mean like the two formative influences like when she first started sort of crafting the persona that would become susan sondach appear to have been like she has this essay about an early visit to thomas mann right like famously kind of someone who thinks like you know queerness kind of accords an aristocracy of need right like basically like against your better wishes you're jolted out of the quartidian by queerness and juna barnes as nightwood right so like we're right in the middle of modernism and we're right in the middle of this idea that like maybe if you're queer, you're a little bit less equal than others or you're a little bit more interesting than others and you grok certain things in certain ways that others don't, which is something that, you know, Athius Elliott would agree with as much as Thomas Mann, but like only one of them would have sexuality in the mix there.

Right, right.

No, Elliot isn't.

I mean, and Sontag, interestingly, right, was accused or was, you know, another thing that's kind of behind Adrian Rich's criticism, of course, is that Sontag wasn't honest about her bisexuality.

I think there were many people who felt like in order for Susan Sontag to cultivate the persona that she did, she had to be available.

for the sexual projections of men.

And that bisexuality would have gotten in the way of that or it would have made her for women in a different kind of way.

And I feel like that's also behind what Rich is writing.

And I heard, Mara, did you and I email about this, that they had an affair shortly after that exchange of that exchange of letters?

letters that was an allegation in a 2018 biography of rich is that they oh yeah there is sort of like a frisson of you know beneath sontag's uh profession of of disinterest in the confessional you can really discern her anger right and i think like even in fascinating fascism that passage that indicts feminists for their supposed cooperation with the rehabilitation of Riefenstahl, for which she has like her evidence is that, oh, well, you know, Nikki de Santfay put Riefenstall on a poster next to Agnes Verde.

Like, please leave Agnes Verda out of it.

But it's rather flimsy evidence.

It's only three sentences.

And it's the kind of thing that somebody who was, a writer who was as in control of themselves as

Santag, I think, aspired to be, would have cut it.

And she didn't cut it.

And it does speak to an investment in feminism, or at least that's how I read it,

and a sort of an impatience with the movement that would not have been there if she understood them as merely a bunch of anti-intellectual groupies, as she kind of accuses in her response to Rich, you know?

What's interesting about Sontak's response to Rich on the confessional question is that essentially she says, look, just look, there is plenty of confession in this, by which she must mean, right?

Does it matter that a Jewish person is kind of mad that Hitler's favorite filmmaker gets to run around in a bathing suit and make photo books and no one says Pete, right?

Like, of course, like Susan Satig is mad.

And like, why should she not be?

Right.

And then the second part, it's, look, the whole premise of the second part of that essay is that I go to gay porn theaters, like, you do the math, right?

Like, Adrian Rich, I don't have to make that explicit, but like, it's here.

But that goes back to what Moira was saying, right?

That the kind of aesthetic moves of the modernist queer aesthete are always about concealment and revelation at the same time.

It's always a double movement, right?

It's like, I'm going to just tease you with a glimpse of this, but I'm not going to tell you outright.

It is the kind of original instantiation of show, don't tell.

And so this gets back to a question or a debate about style.

Rich wants her to tell.

That's what the confession is.

It's about telling, and it's about telling in no uncertain terms.

And it is about foregrounding the feeling and the embodied subject in the act of that telling.

And for Sontag, it's always about showing via the object.

So take the object and look at it in a particular way and write about it in a particular way that make your investments in it not clear, but suggested, let's say.

And I think what Sontag is frustrated about in part, and I also understand this, is sometimes when that is your way of working, when that's your approach to cultural or artistic analysis, you think, I mean, I think it comes essentially from a place of being afraid of exposure or vulnerability or something, right?

You think that you've given the reader so much.

And you're like, look at me, I've spread my guts.

on this table by telling you that I go to gay porn theaters.

And so to have readers who don't quite pick up on that or want more,

that feels like a kind of violation.

It feels like prying.

And I think that that in its way is interestingly, probably for her would have been interestingly anti-feminist, right?

To demand access, not leave this zone of privacy within which the individual could do things that didn't necessarily have to be exposed to the public.

It's interesting how that idea or that way of thinking about the right to privacy aligns with some other ways that we have been thinking legally about the right to privacy since Roe.

That's such a good point, that essentially who gets to be partly withholding?

Well, not a woman in the mid-70s, right?

Like there's this kind of confessional imperative that, of course, double standards is something that Susan Santec is extremely attuned to.

And this is one, right?

Like very, very clearly that to be a queer woman in the 70s meant you got to talk about that and not on your terms, but really on terms that are brought in from the outside in some way, that are not sort of your own stylistic choices.

And that's, of course, something that, you know, she, both as a reader of Juna Barnes and I think just constitutionally, was not willing to grant.

Right, and that it has to be made available to politics.

It cannot simply stay on the level of or in the domain of aesthetics or style.

It has to be something that can be mobilized for politics.

You know, the other thing that I was going to say is this all, of course, links up with the essays on beauty,

which can seem strange in this collection and can seem strange just inherently.

But when you realize that she is someone who has been for her entire life interested in the kinds of aesthetic categories that can be mobilized against beauty, it begins to make a lot more sense.

And for me, those essays are

a kind of attempt to take the essay essay on camp, in which she claims that camp is apolitical, right, and see if actually is a kind of politics of the aesthetics that you can draw out of camp.

And it was funny because reading her diaries or her journals to write about this, you know, the person that she kept reminding me of-not the kind of Marxist feminist bent of this person, but the aesthetic bent of this person, the person she kept reminding me of was Sian Nye.

In her journals, she just talks over and over again about how what she's interested in is the interesting.

She's interested in camp, which she describes as gimmicky.

She is interested in a certain set of aesthetic categories that operate contra beauty and that in operating contra beauty actually let us see the political and social and cultural structures in which certain forms of expression or certain aesthetic valences become the dominant ones while other things are like camp are marginalized or only seem to belong to certain kinds of communities of people.

So that, you know, that was kind of in the back of my mind as I was writing the introduction.

I was thinking like, oh, I've always wondered who the precursor to someone like Sian is, and I actually think it's Sontag.

I mean, Sian's much more interested in labor, of course, and Sontag isn't, but in terms of this emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, they seem very kind of linked up to me.

You know, the question of beauty also is the first thing raised in the fascinating fascism essay, right?

That we have some version of an ideal presence, a kind of imperishable beauty like Elizabeth Schwartzkopf's, that only gets gayer and more metallic and healthier looking with old age.

Like, that's, those are the terms of the very first essay in that collection.

And there is this woman who manages to fascinate and kind of carve out a style and at the same time claim for that style complete lack of politics, right?

Like, it's almost like, you know, it's almost like Wario Mario, right?

She's like,

this is the anti-Sontag.

This is bizarro Sontag, right?

This is the one thing that she would never allow herself.

She finds absolutely horrifying, right?

The idea that style could come without some kind of politics.

That's not to say that she doesn't keep looking, right?

And she talks about the dross of fascism that's supposed to be removed from Riefenstahl.

The whole essay is about the dross.

It's about the things you have to shave off.

And I think that in some ways, you know, the gimmicky and the interesting sort of fall into that same...

kind of categorical bucket where basically it's the stuff that we we're supposed to slough away before we get to the point where politics and style coincide right the words i could use to describe that bucket or the things in that bucket are this kind of these mingled feelings of attraction and repulsion.

When you look at the kind of perfectly toned, glistening, metallic bodies, there's a fascination.

I mean, this is the whole title of the essay, right?

There's a fascination

with those, and at the same time, there is a repulsion from them.

For her, the kinds of categories or the kinds of styles that were interesting were ones that courted the simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

And it was in that kind of ambivalent mingling, that intense and ambivalent mingling of the two, where you could find what she would describe as politics.

It's just that

in this case, for her, those politics were very much the politics of mass extermination

and the history of mass extermination and what it meant to try to only see the beautiful side of it, what was being lost, if that was all that you were seeing.

And there's a kind of interesting analog to me here in the way that people want to read Santech.

They want to see the beauty.

They want to see the glamour.

And I think often they want to see that without seeing everything that was happening behind it and everything that makes her this kind of politically ambivalent and interesting and at times even quite, I think, tortured person.

For our listeners who have not watched a lot of Lingley Reefenstahl, the kind of sequences we're thinking of are like the ones in the Olympia film, for instance, where there's these bodies just kind of, it starts off with a bunch of people jumping off the

jumping board into a pool.

And as the scene goes on, Reefenstahl sort of starts framing the shots in an interesting way that eventually the water disappears, then the board disappears, and at the end, you just have bodies flying through the air.

And then Santak is right, that it's both quite ravishing.

And it really takes a little obtuseness to not get the message that this is about surrender to forces beyond your control and merging with your destiny as a somehow racialized human.

Like it's in some way amazing that her contemporaries needed Susan Sontak to remind them of the fact what sequences like that were really about.

But of course, Sontak also is interested in this.

And this gets to this attraction-repulsion thing.

She says, and this is something that now shows up in basically sadomasochism, this kind of leather and surrender.

aesthetic.

That's her association.

Now, of course, as far as I know, her own relationships had an element of the sadomasochistic, right?

So there's also an attraction and repulsion there.

There's a kind of a question of, apparently she was not a very, very good person to be around in terms of intimate relationships.

Could be very withholding.

I think that there, too, there's this kind of attraction, repulsion, not just with the image itself, but with the thing that it means, that if you have eyes to see,

it's pretty obvious what the image is indicating to you.

Yeah, I think again, the journals are really revelatory

in this way, because you see not only

you see how much of that withholding has been calculated in response to feelings of vulnerability so to hear one person's account or to hear the

other person's account of their relationship with sontag would be to hear about the relationship in exactly the terms that you just described it adrienne but then if you go and you read the diaries you can see how much that withholding has been crafted in order to respond to what she perceives as a kind of imminent wounding right of her and i don't know to me this just isn't that extraordinary like i think most intense human relationships are fundamentally sadomasochistic so or at least most human like romantic human relationships are fundamentally sadomasochistic especially in their kind of early intense periods.

So for me, it actually just feels totally ordinary and totally human for her to take that and then figure out like how to harness that intensity of energy and bring it to the analysis of aesthetic objects.

I should say for me, the relationships that have never felt that way are the ones with my children.

I feel like I need to add that disclaimer.

But we should also add the disclaimer that Sontag herself kind of thematizes in the diaries kind of these exchanges and sort of power differentials in a way that no matter what's true of everyone's relationships, you know, not all of us would notate them that way in our diaries.

And you're like, oh, wow,

you're really keeping score there, Susan.

This is totally Barnesian, too.

I mean, you read a novel like Knightwood, and that is a novel about people

keeping score, right?

It's just monologue after monologue of people keeping score of how they have been shattered.

by others.

And actually that word shattering just makes me think that the other book I had in mind when I was writing the introduction is this great book that just came out from, I think, Northwestern Press, which is doing these little kind of little polemical books.

And this one is called The Hatred of Sex.

And it's by Tim Dean.

And yeah, Tim Dean.

I haven't seen this one yet, but I love his work.

Yeah, I love his work too.

And I can't remember his co-author's name for which I'm very sorry, but they have a really interesting chapter in that book on why queer theory and feminism split.

So why haven't those two two movements or those two theories or ideas or thinkers been brought together in a closer kind of way?

And they have a really interesting reading of the second and even the third wave's hatred of sex or the replacement or occlusion of sex with the erotic, which for them becomes a way of talking about sexual feeling without actually talking about sex and what it does.

Yeah.

And so to me, that was also kind of in the back of my mind when I was thinking about what Sontag is withholding.

Because if you read the journals, you see the kind of the language of sexual shattering and of being shattered into a kind of plenitude that we associate with people like Leo Borsani now, whomever, like coming out of psychoanalytic theory, you see that in her journals.

And I think that there really is a privileged relationship that's being set up between a kind of queer self-shattering and an intellectual plurality.

That it is once you are outside of yourself or no longer yourself or can't reconstitute yourself that you have the ability to think about things in different ways, in different registers, and you don't believe that, like, expressivity or confessional utterance is actually an indicator of any kind of subject, feminist or otherwise.

Right.

And so, to me, that's another way that she's, you know, getting us halfway toward Foucault and Sedgwick, Borsani,

Laplanche, not Deplanche, sorry, Laplanche, toward all of these

thinkers.

And I don't think that second wave feminism has that same

or has any really very powerful critique of the subject as a concept, even while it might have critiques of subjects marked by particular identities.

The book is co-authored with Oliver Davis, and the series.

The series is called Provocations, which are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a really, really interesting book.

and I think that it is at least, I don't know how you feel about this, Adrian or Moira.

I feel like I see this in the academy where there are a certain generation of feminist thinkers, particularly people writing about feminism in literature.

Maybe I'm only speaking from literary studies, but it felt like they were kind of supplanted then by the queer theorists who have now been supplanted by trans theorists.

And one would think that there should be a kind of continuity or at least an enmeshed enmeshed relationship between all of these camps of thinkers, but they seem much more siloed off from one another than I would imagine.

The ability to write frankly and kind of contradictorily about sex and intimacy definitely is something that, you know, Grace Lavery can do it and in ways that, you know, Leo Bersani did in 1986 and that feminist writers did in 1970.

I think that's just, that sounds to me right.

You know, I wonder, you know, the other book that I've been reading recently, because I'm editing a special issue about it, is this fantastic book from 1999 by the feminist literary critic Isabelle Armstrong.

And she has two really great chapters on the state of contemporary feminism in 1999 in it.

And I was reading that and was thinking about how, well, one, she writes quite brilliantly about female anti-feminism.

And

the kinds of lines that she's pulling out from people like Camille Paglia

were really reminiscent to me of some of the lines from that piece on Dorkin and Santag that appeared in the New Left Review.

Because Paglia, too, is just like, what's with all of these women and their pain?

Like, we need a kind of Apollonian-Dionysian divide in order to theorize endless pleasure for women.

But it all just kind of falls apart ultimately.

Or it's nothing but provocation it's nothing but style and this is what armstrong observes observes about it she says in order to have a strong style you usually need to have a politics behind it and a kind of affirmative political vision of what you want and she describes the kind of paglias of the world as having a weak style by which she means it's only style with no affirmative vision of what feminism means or what it is behind it.

And so as I was reading Armstrong, I was just thinking a little bit about how part of the benefit of understanding history and knowing about history is so you don't end up as a kind of dime store Camille Paglia or a blogger Camille Paglia so that you can actually avoid making the mistakes that previous generations of women have who I think ultimately probably, I don't know, I'm very Pollyanna-ish about certain things.

I'm like, surely we all just want the same things and we don't know how to get them,

particularly with kind of like women, left liberal women today.

It does seem to me like the question is, is how to get the things that we all probably agree are good and that we want.

But that's another reason I think why history is just important is like it stops you from making the same mistakes and thinking that they're actually original interventions.

This might be actually a good moment for us to put Sontag in a little bit of her historical context because your introduction, Mervais, touches on something that we are also exploring in our podcast over the course of this investigation we're doing, particularly into thinkers in the 1970s and their responses to the second wave, where you talk about the sort of genre of encounter with the women's liberation movement of that era by women intellectuals, right?

You mention Elizabeth Hardwick and Joan Didian.

I think we can also put Diana Trilling into that category of sort of this

condescending, cynical rejection of sort of the feminist claims about women's political position that's often wrapped up in a rejection of their style, right?

It's this kind of interesting contrast with Sontag, who does not, I don't believe, reject the feminist political claims, but quite heartily rejects their style.

And, you know, this is kind of this condemnation of feminist style as a way of or a means into or an entry point for condemning feminist political claims is sort of like a recurring genre of essay.

I feel like so many people have like it is a way station in a lot of women intellectuals' careers to basically rewrite the Didian essay on the women's movement being like, look how much smarter I am than these feminists.

You can keep publishing me now.

It's like the coin that you put into the machine and then out pops like credibility.

And I'm interested that Sontag sort of she sort of bucked the generational trend a little bit in taking these seriously.

And you know, we talked about, about

length about her ambivalence towards the movement, which I think we definitely have to take seriously, especially in that response to Rich, right?

But

what made her,

on what grounds is she more sympathetic?

What made her, and why perhaps does she differ from her peers around the New York Review of Books at that time?

Well, my immediate response, and I actually don't know if this is entirely an accurate response, but my gut instinct was to be like, well, she's not a wasp.

And there's an interesting way to me

that part of what people like Didian and Hardwick are picking up on is the embarrassment or annoyance of a kind of earnest emotional excess.

And I understand why, or I have moments where I understand why that would be annoying or irritating.

But I do think that part of exercising your judgment about people, about movements, about artworks is trying to figure out how to separate what you are annoyed by or what irritates you from what the essence of the person, the movement, or the object is.

You're here.

And I think that, I mean, this is one of the things that I think having a kind of affinity for camp probably allows Sontag to do.

A lot of campy objects are also really annoying.

But she's interested in looking beyond that to see what the essence of these objects are.

So hers isn't a stylistic critique, but really more like her great love, Walter Benjamin.

She's interested in imminent critique.

And I think that's one of the things that really stops her from writing the kind of essays that Didian

or Hardwick did.

I also think one of the interesting things to me is that she's not writing for the New York Times

or, I mean, the fascinating fascism essay is for the New York Review of Books, but she has her own kind of complicated relationship with Hardwick and the editorial

there.

But it does seem to me that writing for a place like Libre or talking to the interviewers at a place like Salma Gundi really frees her up.

And I do wonder if knowing that she was, Maria, I can't remember if you and I have talked about this, or maybe Maggie Doherty and I have talked about this.

I do wonder if her feeling like she was writing for a magazine that would not have a large English slash American circulation made her feel freer to say certain things that she would have been more cautious about saying were she writing for a place like The Times or Newsweek or Time or wherever.

There's definitely a little bit of a wider Overton window in the foreign press at that time, but I think I'm really grateful that you bring up Camp as a a note on her critique of feminism because, you know, she's got this moment in the Libre interview where she sort of advocates Camp as a posture for the feminist movement.

She's saying, you know, like cat call men, run men's beauty pageants, stick stickers on like sexist advertisements, you know, pick it, women's magazines.

Some of these are things that like the actual feminist, radical feminist movement was doing at the time, right?

Like now

famously handed out stickers that said this oppresses women that you could like stick on one of those ads on the subway that's just like a zoomed-in picture of a paratitz.

Like famously, witch, the like campy performance art group, they released mice at a bridal expo.

So apparently they expected all these delicate brides to like squeal and scream, but actually the women like caught the mice and then were like nurturing the mice.

It was a very

interesting moment.

But you know, there were these, she was both describing and advocating an ongoing sort of theatrical approach to the feminist complaint that was not so earnest, not so confessional, a little more ironic, detached, cynical, contemptuous.

But then she also goes on to describe in her response to Rich, the feminist movement's gauchism, right?

Like their ugliness.

And you mentioned this fascination earlier she has with these objects that sort of both draw in and also repulse.

And it strikes me that she has a little bit of that relationship to feminism itself, right?

She both feels affinity and also like embarrassment and like a bit of repugnance at the same time.

Well, or the more kind of affirmative way to put that, which I think is a really brilliant point, Moira, is that what she wants is for feminism to be campy.

She does not want it to be kind of earth mother earnestness.

She wants it to be one long

performance.

that simultaneously attracts and repulses.

And she thinks that that is what will align in some way.

That is what will align her sense of the political and the aesthetic.

And what's interesting, now that you mention it, I'm thinking about the Libre interview.

I mean, it's just interesting that she doesn't acknowledge that that's already being done.

Yeah.

Or she doesn't acknowledge the extent to which it's being done.

And we could even think about how something like burning bras outside of the Miss America pageant is a campy act in its own right.

But perhaps one of the, I don't want to say problems, but one of the ambivalences or one of the shortcomings of Sontek is that she does want to rout the tradition of camp in men and in gay men's aesthetics.

That stops her from seeing how parts of the women's movement were themselves generating a kind of female or feminine camp that could have been much more easily used by her in her writing.

on women.

And I don't know if that's just because she wasn't clued into it or if, you know, she wanted to maintain this kind kind of affinity with these male cultural giants.

But that does seem like an interesting, an interesting drawback and a missed opportunity.

At the same time, it might also be just inherent to camp itself.

If you want to camp it up, you need normies.

And that's part of

what's always going on with these kinds of essays that Moira was sort of describing, that you need other feminists to be super humorless so that you are the, you know, I'm the cool girl.

I'm, you know, I can hang with the guys.

You know, it's the, this is a big problem, right?

That, like, in some way, an emphasis on camp and politics is wonderful, but it does tend to commit a whole lot of other people to being normier than they maybe really are if you're being really honest with yourself.

Yeah, I think there is a difference between camp and cruelty.

I mean, this is in part what the fascinating fascism essay is about.

Yeah.

Where does one dwell

between camp and cruelty?

When does parity actually curdle into violence of one kind or another.

And that's the line that I think anyone invested in that kind of performance of either the self or of one's politics is, if they are a kind of conscientious ethical thinker, always trying to walk and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing.

Yeah, but I mean, I think we think camp is in some way it's more individualistic.

You know, there are people who get it and people who don't.

It's never universalist.

Universal camp is not camp at all.

And this is something that I think that, of course, is a tricky thing politically.

And I think that, you know, maybe that's what trips her up there.

You think about feminism?

I mean, there are people who get it and people who

don't.

Like the ability to understand certain issues or the ability to see the way that social life, political life is organized as a set of or through a kind of feminist lens, right?

There are some people who will get that and for whom seeing it through a feminist lens makes certain issues salient and makes them sites of viable political conflict and other people who simply won't see it that way.

So I don't know.

I don't think that getting it or not getting it is essential or unique, let's say, to camp.

And I think that almost every kind of aesthetic and almost every kind of movement is always positing an inside and an outside.

Yeah, but the question is, is there a populist kind of appeal to, I mean, what was consciousness raising about?

It was about the idea this can ripple outward.

This can, you know, you too can learn to think this way.

I do think that there is, at least in Santa's conception of camp, and I think it's identical with her modernism, a sense that some things are better left to the people who get it constitutionally.

And if you need it, explain it to yourself, well, maybe it's just not for you.

And, you know, if Anya Svada is not your cup of tea, that's all right.

But of course, Susan Santa is going to judge you for it.

it.

So I do think that that's the difference, right?

Like, whereas, of course, 70s feminism was expansive.

It was saying we want to reach other people, and as is Susan Sontak, obviously, in interviews like the Third World Feminism one, right?

So she has moments of expansive politics, but I do think that like when she's at her campiest, she's at her most exclusionary.

Well, I think it comes down to what are you trying to persuade people?

And what are your, you know, this is, I think, a related question to style, but it's a question of persuasion, right?

How are you trying to persuade people?

Because I think exclusivity is itself a kind of persuasive gesture, right?

You learn to recognize the thing because you want to be part of the crew of people who gets it.

Whereas consciousness raising is like, we will teach you how to get it.

You don't have to teach yourself how to get it.

So I think it essentially comes down to like different styles of persuasion and different ideas of what will persuade.

And this perhaps also goes back to kind of sadomasochism too, right?

Like, there are people who can be persuaded into relationships through essentially sadomasochistic dynamics.

And there are people who want to be persuaded to be in communities or relationships or whatever through other kinds of dynamics, through kind of sympathy and mutuality and respect and maximum expressiveness.

And so I think that all of these things get interestingly kind of wrapped up with one another, which is just another reason why I think this is an absolutely fascinating moment for how imbricated

style and politics and ethics and morality and beauty and ugly and freedom and fascism all become in this collection.