Photography and Dissent: Susan Sontag

An essay that discusses Sontag in the tradition of the public intellectual through her work on photography. The research positions Susan Sontag in the tradition of what Julia Kristava called the "dissident intellectual." In the wake of political extremism and/or fanaticism, Kristeva understands the dissident function in terms of an “analytical position,” as a critical capacity aimed at the symbolic substratum of the national culture, at the folds of common sense. Sontag came to occupy the analytical position that Kristeva theorizes and in her case this position should be understood as an achievement. Drawing on archival materials, the essay presents Sontag neither as a nostalgic modernist nor the aggressive self-made icon that she appears, but someone in search of a genuine relation to thought. I propose that Sontag’s turn to photography be grasped as one with her fall into the situation of thinking and that it resulted from her shift from the public intellectual as heroic individual to Kristeva's dissident observer.