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Obituary

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

by Charlotte Rigby

Susan Sontag, a philosopher, novelist and human rights activist, died from leukemia on December 28 2004, at the age of 71. She had been battling against cancer for more than 30 years.

As a philosopher, she is best known for her essays on modern culture and aesthetics. In Notes on Camp (1964), she identified, for the first time, the experience of something so bad it’s good, as being Camp. She distinguished Camp from camping, the former being achieved when a work of art fails at being serious, but is created with complete naivete by the artist.

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