Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets.


This is an important collection of essays. One which quickly afforded me acquaintance with an unknown figure (Paul Goodman) and then continued with intriguing approaches to figures which have occupied my personal pantheon for decades: Artaud, Canetti, Benjamin and Barthes. Today is my best friend Joel's birthday and when I told him earlier he should use the Fascinating Fascism essay for his classes, he shot back that he was curious about Sontag on Bataille. Well, apparently this occurred at least twice. These essays were written throughout the 1970s and there is a sobriety in effect. The risks of extremism have be calculated and are to be avoided.

My one concern was in her measured approach to My Hitler: A Film From Germany she didn't mention Fassbinder. I do agree with her on the point that despite the hubris of the director's claim: we haven't been exorcised of Der Führer. ( )

The essays that weren't on the erotic appeal of fascism were not as good. ( )

Contains "Fascinating Fascism" - reproduced here: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFas...

If you like reading a quality newspaper, and particularly like reading the longer contributions about art, and cultural background, then the essays collected in Under the sign of Saturn by Susan Sontag will probably interest you.

Susan Sontag's essays are characterized by a very broad spectrum erudition. The essays in Under the sign of Saturn mainly focus on France and Germany, the two countries Sontag has a particular interest in. Sontag lived in Paris for two years, where she studied at the University of Paris, and, although she did not speak German, Sontag was a German Studies expert and wrote many essays on various German authors, and German history and culture. The first, short essay, reminiscences on Sontag's time in Paris where she knew Paul Goodman.

Whether a reader will enjoy reading Under the sign of Saturn seems to depend on the interest in the topic of the essays and the ability to maintain an interest in reading them all the way through. Thus, the second essay introduces the relatively unknown French author Antonin Artaud in an essays of 57 pages.

The third essay is on Leni Riefenstahl, but rather than discussing the artistic merits of Riefenstahl's cinematographic works during the Nazi period, the essay's main focus is on a book of photographs, The Last of the Nuba, in which Riefenstahl apparently persists celebrating the fascist aesthetic ideals, suggesting she never came clear of fascism.

The most fascinating essays is the title essay "Under the Sign of Saturn" about Walter Benjamin. The essay is a superb synthesis of the cultural world just before the Second World War in Vienna and Paris, as Benjamin sought a way to escape the doom of fascism that was increasingly asserting itself. The essays describes various authors and painters in the surroundings of Walter Benjamin, including references to Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus".

The next essays, from 1979, is a review of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film Hitler, a Film from Germany.

These three essays, make Under the sign of Saturn an essay collection of particular interest to readers in German history and culture during the 1930s - 1940s, and the reception of its digest.

They are followed by an essays remembering Roland Barthes and an essay about Elias Canetti. ( )

I read these essays because Susan Sontag is famous, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. They turned out to be much closer to my current preoccupations than I had expected, which I found by turns exhilarating, ominous, disappointing and disturbing. Lately I've been almost obsessively troubled by the relation between power and aesthetics and so, it seems, was she.

"Riefenstahl's current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful—as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer—do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst."

"Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. And so people hedge their bets—admiring this kind of art, for its undoubted beauty, and patronizing it, for its sanctimonious promotion of the beautiful."

"The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be 'nice,' as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged."
-"Fascinating Fascism"

"There was something sad in all this talk about pleasure..." -"Remembering Barthes"

...to covet, to thirst, to long for-these are passionate but also acquisitive relations to knowledge and truth..."

The very last passage in this book I found beautiful: "The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power."

It is such a strange and yet maybe fitting ending, because this is exactly what Sontag seems not to do. She is avid, she achieves, and she gathers power, but she doesn't go beyond. She has a wonderful capacity for lucid prose and logical argument, but these very capacities take on a sinister quality when they are placed so insistently in the forefront, while the subjects she proposes to champion: troubled, mad, and mostly dead, recede. I am thinking in particular here of Artaud and Benjamin. I have never read any Artaud and don't plan to, but what I gathered in her essay about him was exactly that it shouldn't have been written. What does it mean to break down a theater of cruelty for the readers of the New Yorker? One has a sense of her sense of herself as serving her subjects by bringing them out of obscurity. But when their power, as she acknowledges and dwells on, is intrinsically related to their obscurity, then there is something troubling about her attempt to disseminate it. Again back to Artaud, she seems at times to be approaching an argument in favor of madness, then draws back for a distinction between identification and appreciation. And, ok, I thought it was gross. Get in or get out, sister. As it stands, I just can't get past those New Yorker readers, and the sense in her writing that she is performing for them, showing off how edgy she is while remaining palatable.