Susan Sontag

A Syrian man holds lifeless body of his son, killed by Syrian Army, Aleppo, Syria, October 3, 2013, photo by Manu Brabo - AP

Sontag, Hell, Thinking, Politics

December 20, 2016 by William Eaton

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aleppo, Camus, Donald Trump, Freud, Goya, hell, Hillary Clinton, La Fontaine, Marx, politics, Susan Sontag, Sympathy for the Devil, war

Reading, Violence, Solidarity

December 5, 2016 by Steven A. Burr

By Steven A. Burr Acquiring the ability to read, it transformed me, man. Like we say it in Spanish, la cultura cura. Culture heals. And that’s what healed me was culture. It made me positive. One thing for sure it did, it helped me to stop seeing my so-called enemy as my enemy and to start seeing him as my brother. — Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious”[1] The first encounter between Max Cerda and Raymond Cruz, members of rival […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: featured, Levinas, literature, reading, Rorty, Susan Sontag, the other, violence

Zeteo’s Spontaneous Fall Issue, 2016

December 1, 2016 by William Eaton

While We Were Weeping A lot of people are put in solitary confinement “and they find the end of the world. For me, I found a new world. I found a world of self. That’s where I learned how to think. It’s where I learned how to read. It’s where I learned how to cry. I needed that so much.” — Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious.” As quoted by Steven A. Burr, Reading, Violence, Solidarity, Zeteo, 5 December 2016. In […]

Categories: Fall 2016 Issue • Tags: Bob Dylan, Existentialism, Heidegger, human rights, McCarthyism, poetry, reading, Susan Sontag, women

Adorno Was Right?

October 19, 2012 by William Eaton

Adorno Was Right? (Consumer culture is “a medium of undreamed of psychological control”?) William Eaton Review of Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) {Click for pdf} Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World is not all that interested in consumption, consumer culture or the postwar world, and the many pleasures it indeed offers are entirely intellectual, stemming as they do from the writings […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Adorno, cultural criticism, Habermas, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Susan Sontag