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SUSAN SONTAG
appropriateness that were gathered into the religious vocabulary. But
his most interesting followers steadily undermined the abstract meta–
religious language in which he had bequeathed his thought, and
concentrated instead on the specific social and practical applications
of his revolutionary form of process-thinking, historicism. Hegel's
failure lies like a gigantic disturbing hulk across the intellectual land–
scape. And no one has been big enough, pompous enough or ener–
getic enough since Hegel to attempt the task again.)
And so we remain, careening among our overvaried choices of
kinds of total imagination, of species of total seriousness. Perhaps the
deepest spiritual resonance of the career of pornography in its "mod–
em" Western phase under consideration here (pornography in the
Orient or the Moslem world being a very different set of phenomena)
is this vast frustration of human passion and seriousness since the old
religious imagination, and its secure monopoly on the total imagina–
tion, began in the late eighteenth century to crumble. The ludicrous–
ness and lack of skill of most pornographic writing, films, etc., is
well known to everyone who has been exposed to them. What is less
often remarked about the typical products of the pornographic imagi–
nation is their pathos. Most pornography-the books discussed here
cannot
be
excepted-points to something more general than even
sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist
society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for
high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for ex–
alted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The
need of human beings to transcend "the personal" is no less pro–
found than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society
serves that need poorly. It provides mainly demonic vocabularies in
which to situate that need and from which to initiate action and
construct rites of behavior. One is offered a choice among voca–
bularies of thought and action which are not merely self-transcending
but self-destructive.
VI
But the pornographic imagination is not just to be understood as
a form of psychic absolutism-some of whose products we might be
able to regard (in the role of connoisseurs, rather than clients) with
more sympathy or intellectual curiosity or esthetic sophistication.
Several times before in this essay I have alluded to the possi–
bility that the pornographic imagination says something, albeit in a
