The Poetics of Disagreement

Book About women is a collection of essays and interviews by Susan Sontag from the first half of the seventies of the last century. The texts were edited by her son David Riff, who arranged them chronologically and thus referred to the early works of this American theoretician and writer. Essays on gender, social roles and limitations, but also on history, aesthetics and death, topics that will haunt Susan Sontag throughout her life, show us how the attitudes of one of the undoubtedly most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century were formed. In these records of unquestionable lucidity, we recognize her intellectual fervor, but also her steadfast refusal to be classified under any banner, including the feminist one.

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Sontag, therefore, deals with various topics: from the unjust "double standards of aging", according to which men's years bring respect, and women, allegedly, only a loss of value, through the analysis of the dictates of beauty ("beauty is women's work in this society and, at the same time, the stage of their enslavement"), all the way to a sharp criticism of the permanent appeal of fascist aesthetics in the essay "Fascinating Fascism". Her writing is sharp, often polemical and never resorts to easy solutions. It exposes the social, cultural and political patterns that shape the experience of women, both in the public sphere and in private life. The texts created in dialogue and disagreement with another great figure of American feminism, the poet and essayist, Adrienne Rich, have a special weight. While Richova advocated a more militant, clearly ideologically colored feminism, Sontagova refused any classification and acceptance of labels. "Of course I'm a feminist," she said, "but I would never call myself a liberated woman." Her feminism consisted in constant questioning, not in accepting slogans. Sontag confronts us with the fact that even the most attractive slogans can become new restrictions, and that the liberation of women cannot be separated from the wider struggle against stereotypes, ideology and false norms. Her solutions may not always be clear or definitive, but precisely in this unyielding complexity lies the strength of her views. In other words, a collection About women it is not an easy or comforting book.

For today's reader, this collection is a valuable testimony not only of a time and the debates that shaped that time or were related to it, but also of a person who refused to be trapped in other people's definitions. In the early essays, Susan Sontag presents herself in her most critical but also most vulnerable form, as an intellectual who was at the same time part of the female experience, but also critically resisted it, persistently refusing to be molded into given patterns. Today, in the era of social media and digital self-presentation, her thoughts sound almost prophetic. If in the seventies "the only standard of beauty was youth", in the time of Instagram that standard was further tightened by algorithms, filters and pressures of constant comparison. This is precisely why Susan Sontag's insistence on complexity and resistance to stereotypes, as well as on freeing the imagination, remains as relevant, perhaps more necessary, than ever before.

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