Antiquitopia

In a fairly biting 1961 review of Walter Kaufmann's Religion from Tolstoy to Camus , Susan Sontag undermines that books' project of what she calls religious fellow-traveling--a generalized religiousness with no content--by questioning the very possibility of being "religious" in a general sense: Does the notion "religion" have any serious religious meaning at all? Put another way: can one teach or invite people to be sympathetic to religion-in-general? What does it mean to be "religious"? Obviously it is not the same thing as being "devout" or "orthodox." My own view is that one cannot be religion in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not "language." Similarly one is not "a religionist," but a believing Catholic, Jew, Presbyterian, Shintoist, or Tallensi. Religious beliefs may be options, as William James...

In my class, the most autobiographical writings we read are Augustine' Confessions and Montaigne's Essays . Their pioneering work of self-reflection, creating particular concepts of a self, of the invention of the "inner self" as the book by Philip Cary argues for Augustine, is where their similarities end. Augustine's vision of the self is quite contained, fixed; Montaigne's, fluid, in flux, always changing. The key, in my opinion, to the Augustinian sense of the self is memory; the key for Montaigne, imagination. One looks back over a life; one looks forward, or, more accurately, always seeks living, thinking, acting in the moment. Montaigne, it seems, in his act of writing tries to catch himself in the moment of thinking. I think I personally prefer Montaigne's vision of the unfinalizable self. Susan Sontag, in her essay "The death of tragedy," has a brief comparative moment, using the difference between Augustine and Montaigne as an an...

In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules of "decorum"), of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. (Susan Sontag, "On Style") How often are we careful enough in our art of reading to read silences in the text?

Repetition reverberates throughout world literatures. Repetition, repeating, sometimes verbatim, as often can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh , or with slight variation in the retelling that gives subtle hints of shifting perspectives, which I would argue happens in the Iliad (e.g., when Achilles retells what happened in his argument with Agamemnon to his mother), is often one of the most illuminating aspects of literature. You can find it in biblical literature, near eastern literature, greek and roman literature, all the way to the present (Dadaism, anyone?). Repetition keeps track of time, creates rhythm, denotes emphasis, and provides ever-new perspective and, in fact, allows a text to comment on itself. So, I felt a certain resonance in my own experience of repetition when i read... ...if one does not perceive how a work repeats itself, the work is, almost literally, not perceptible and therefore, at the same time, not intelligible. It is the perception of repetitions that...

...the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed. (Susan Sontag, "On style")

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. (Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation") This is to give a conclusion before the premise. Part of the problem for Sontage is the artificial, illusory separation of form and content, especially the privileging of content over form: And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learend to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory. (ibid.) This illusory separation of form and content seems to be an act of violence whereby the critic creates a fissure in the work of art. It is in this violent tearing apart that space is made for interpretation, itself an act that sustains the illusion that makes it possible: ...it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as t...