ABSTRACT
The modern consciousness is “predatory,” thinking “devours” itself, and the thinker “plays the roles of both protagonist and antagonist. Reading Susan Sontag on other critics, one gets the impression that as intimate as she is with their mode of thinking, she jumps too quickly over their content. “‘If style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic feeling without falling unto banality’,” Sontag quotes Walter Benjamin, “‘it is attained chiefly by the cardiac strength of great thoughts’”. Experience is felt only in retrospect, or, to repeat Benjamin’s phrase, “commemorated.” “‘The only pleasure,’” she quotes Benjamin, “‘the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory’”. Modern conceptions of thinking separate over autonomy, but from a different standpoint, the standpoint of what Benjamin calls commentary and critique. Sincerely and respectfully, Sontag avoids the content of Benjamin’s “positions.”
