Susan Sontag was not just a radical who broke with old New York critical circles, but one who made herself available as a bridge between two worlds: the New York intellectual tradition, to which Sontag undoubtedly belonged, with its seriousness, moral importance, and belief that culture in New York was a world stage for public argument; and the newer understanding that its inherited hierarchy of taste was becoming unstable.

Hal Foster, writing recently in The MIT Press Reader, describes Sontag as a transitional figure between the critic and the theorist. Not a systematic thinker in the line of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, or Adorno, but neither an old-style essayist defending a settled canon. Her force came from translation, selection, and presentation. She took difficult cultural objects and gave them a measured but powerful charge. She could introduce a broad American readership to Artaud, Barthes, Benjamin, Bresson, Godard, Pavese, Cioran, and Weil without turning the encounter into academic specialization. She made the foreign, the severe, and the avant-garde feel like necessary equipment for modern life.

That mediating role is increasingly valuable today. Sontag’s authority was derived from a kind of heightened subject matter delivered in accessible American language. She wrote lofty subjects into terms anyone could read. “Notes on Camp” did not invent camp, but the essay changed the visibility of the term. By publishing it in Partisan Review, Sontag placed a coded, theatrical aesthetic into the circus of American life. Decades later, when “Camp” became a Met Gala theme, the distance between private sensibility and public spectacle had largely collapsed. Sontag helped open that path, even if the final destination might have embarrassed her.

Today, one might say that culture is divided between closed systems: academic language too specialized to travel, internet commentary too fast and flippant to grow roots, and popular criticism often reduced by identity sorting and sameness. What is missing is the ability to move difficult works into public language, and to treat mass culture seriously without surrendering to its categories.