It's actually a really shallow grab for attention. I don't even think it demonstrates her supposed intellect because anybody who thinks about it for a moment can see it's BS.
I've heard and read all sorts of things about photography as it relates to the subconscious of the photographer, a lot of which has at least some reason behind it. Cameras are jewelry? Gadgets make their owners feel smart? Photography is a form of voyeurism? Not simply speculation but in some cases demonstrably true.
Photography is subliminal murder? Subconsciously a photographer is killing the people he takes photos of with his subliminal gun? It's a frankly idiotic idea, but it sounds subversive enough, at least superficially for people to give it more thought than it deserves. Never mind that photographs are about preserving moments in time, people places etc, and not about destroying them. One could make a better argument for photography being a subliminal quest for immortality than anybody could make for photography as subliminal murder. The use of the word murder here is a grab for attention and nothing more so far as I can see.
After giving Mme. Sontag's assertions much consideration, I am inclined to agree with the above thoughts.
Sontag was a member of that rarefied coterie of east coast intellectual dignitaries who fancy themselves some sort of cerebral elite. This self-appointed coalition are supposedly capable of luminous insight and superior reasoning that the masses of unwashed simian intellectual midgets (AKA the rest of us) can never hope to even remotely grasp.
The reality of the situation is that as someone else pointed out, Sontag was a bitter and negative person who found solace in hurling pseudointellectual malice at others who she perceived as inferior to her and her peers of so-called intellectual superiority.
This type of worldview is the very definition of intellectual bigotry.
While this form of bigotry is based on supposed superior intellect rather than race, national origin or religion,
it is bigotry nonetheless and it does
not get a free pass because of its alleged intellectual roots.
Sontag's language and rhetoric often smacked of the negatively sensational. 'The white race is the cancer of human history'? Come on.
This statement issued by Mme. Sontag speaks volumes about her thinking processes. She clearly had, shall we say,
"issues."
If any other person had made such a statement about the negroid race or the entire mass of humanity of Arabian ancestry, they would be universally reviled, loathed and treated with contempt. Yet somehow the anti-caucasian racism she advocated and espoused brings no outpouring of wrath from her peers that are entrenched in the cloistered retreats of intellectual elitism.
That's what people who are honest and objective call a double standard.
It is also ironic to note that Sontag - who was herself of Caucasoid descent and therefore by her own reasoning one of the many tumors of the white race which supposedly feeds upon the rest of humanity - made no move to withdraw herself from the human race and end her own feeding on the rest of humanity.
How that could be considered anything other than hypocrisy on her part defies logic.
