Episode #176 - Susan Sontag - Do you criticize yourself the way you criticize a movie?

Susan Sontag - Do you criticize yourself the way you criticize a movie?

In this episode, we explore how Susan Sontag—a fierce cultural critic inspired by Simone Weil—challenged the modern obsession with interpretation, both in psychoanalysis and in art. Sontag admired Weil’s uncompromising stance against the status quo and echoed that same resistance by criticizing how analysis can distance us from the immediacy of lived experience. She warned that filtering emotions and art through normative theories often alienates people from their own reality, granting undue power to experts while reducing complex experiences to predictable patterns. Instead, Sontag called for an "erotics of art"—a renewed way of engaging with form and style that invites visceral, transformative encounters rather than detached interpretation. Through this lens, she argued, we open ourselves to art—and life—in ways that allow discomfort, openness, and even confusion to shape us. The episode closes by linking this sensibility to Sontag’s belief that truth demands sacrifice, and that progress requires voices from the margins, not just those who play by the rules of reason.

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