The Pornographic Imagination (Sontag, 1969)
SUSAN SONTAG: SEVEN THESES FROM ‘THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION’
From Styles of Radical Will (Penguin Classics, 2009; originally published in 1969)
THESIS ONE
The pornographic imagination has its peculiar access to some truth. This truth—about sensibility, about sex, about individual personality, about despair, about limits—can be shared when it projects itself into art.
THESIS TWO
Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the pornographic imagination for some hours or days or even longer periods of his life; but only the full-time residents make the fetishes, the trophies, the art.
THESIS THREE
That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.
THESIS FOUR
There is, demonstrably, something incorrectly designed and potentially disorienting in the human sexual capacity—at least in the capacities of man-in-civilization. Man, the sick animal, bears within him an appetite which can drive him mad.
THESIS FIVE
Such is the understanding of sexuality—as something beyond good and evil, beyond love, beyond sanity; as a resource for ordeal and for breaking through the limits of consciousness—that informs the French literary canon [Histoire de l’œil and Histoire d’O, among others] I’ve been discussing.
THESIS SIX
There’s a sense in which all knowledge is dangerous, the reason being that not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don’t need ‘a wider scale of experience’. It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people.
THESIS SEVEN
In the last analysis, the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.
From Styles of Radical Will (Penguin Classics, 2009; originally published in 1969)
THESIS ONE
The pornographic imagination has its peculiar access to some truth. This truth—about sensibility, about sex, about individual personality, about despair, about limits—can be shared when it projects itself into art.
THESIS TWO
Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the pornographic imagination for some hours or days or even longer periods of his life; but only the full-time residents make the fetishes, the trophies, the art.
THESIS THREE
That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.
THESIS FOUR
There is, demonstrably, something incorrectly designed and potentially disorienting in the human sexual capacity—at least in the capacities of man-in-civilization. Man, the sick animal, bears within him an appetite which can drive him mad.
THESIS FIVE
Such is the understanding of sexuality—as something beyond good and evil, beyond love, beyond sanity; as a resource for ordeal and for breaking through the limits of consciousness—that informs the French literary canon [Histoire de l’œil and Histoire d’O, among others] I’ve been discussing.
THESIS SIX
There’s a sense in which all knowledge is dangerous, the reason being that not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don’t need ‘a wider scale of experience’. It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people.
THESIS SEVEN
In the last analysis, the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.
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