Susan Sontag on individualism and selfishness
One often means the other
Successful in many different forms of writing, from the provocative essay to the novel, Susan Sontag shot to intellectual stardom with her book Against Interpretation, which dissolved the distinction between high and low culture. She favored a “pluralistic, polymorphous culture,” with literature incarnating “an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity.” The first quote (and the preceding line) is taken from her speech on receiving the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, published as “The Conscience of Words.” The second is taken from The Complete Rolling Stone Interview.
I.
I prefer to use “individual” as an adjective rather than as a noun.
The unceasing propaganda in our time for “the individual” seems to me deeply suspect, as “individuality” itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising “individuality” and “freedom” — which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
I don’t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.
II.
Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life — to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in and paying attention to it.
That’s what a writer does — a writer pays attention to the world. Because I’m very against this solipsistic notion that you find it all in your head. You don’t, there really is a world that’s there whether you’re in it or not.
Referring to having had cancer, she continues:
And if you hae a tremendous experience, to me it’s much easier to connect your writing to what is actually happening to you rather than to try to retreat from it by becoming involved in something else, because then you’re just splitting yourself into two parts. People said I must have been detached to write Illness as Metaphor, but I wasn’t detached at all.