A great mosaic – a great False Self – is itself a work of art

July 14, 2024 1:11 AM

Did Sontag and Steiner get along? Don’t be silly. Like two positively charged particles, they were kept apart by powerful forces of repulsion. They ‘disliked and mistrusted one another,’ Boyers says; ‘the loathing they came to have for each other clearly had much to do with the sense that there was room on the current scene for only one such person.’ It seems hardly worth saying that Sontag and Steiner were alike not just as critics but as psychological case studies. Two False Selves, two mosaic-builders, busily building. If there is one true thing about a False Self, it’s that it loathes and despises other False Selves, perceiving in them, of course, the falseness that it can perceive in itself only at the cost of its existence. from The Devouring Mind by Kevin Power [Dublin Review of Books; ungated]

An essay around a review of Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, by Robert Boyers

posted by chavenet (1 comment total)

why there is no specific intellectual programme or methodology associated with Sontag
the idea of trying to interpret Sontag… [g: against interpretation]

hadn’t heard of Steiner before, but found this thought intriguing:
No philosophic theology of the order of radical challenge proposed by Bultmann [wiki]

Winnicott [freud] is also interesting:
when the disputes between the followers of Freud and Klein were at their most stormy, he retained his independence
posted by HearHere at 5:22 AM on July 14 [1 favorite]