Styles of Radical Will was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969. It is Sontag’s second essay collection — more extreme, more committed, and more politically engaged than Against Interpretation. Where the first book argued for an erotics of art, this one examines art’s capacity to refuse: to remain silent, to deny the viewer satisfaction, to be pornographic, to be politically dangerous.
“The Aesthetics of Silence” — the longest and most ambitious essay — traces the modern art tradition of reduction, refusal, and withdrawal: from Rimbaud’s abandonment of poetry to Duchamp’s abandonment of art to Cage’s embrace of silence. Sontag argues that silence in art is not absence but plenitude — a fullness that language cannot reach, toward which the most radical art gestures. The essay engages Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, mystical theology, and the history of the avant-garde in a sustained meditation on the limits of expression.
“The Pornographic Imagination” examines works by Bataille, Pauline Réage (Story of O), and others — arguing that pornographic literature, when written with literary ambition, is a legitimate form of imaginative literature and not merely a pretext for arousal. The essay was scandalous in 1967 and remains provocative: Sontag insisted on taking seriously material that respectable criticism treated as beneath attention.
“Trip to Hanoi” — Sontag’s account of visiting North Vietnam during the war — was her most directly political writing and her most controversial. She struggled, she admitted, with the gap between her intellectual sympathy for the Vietnamese cause and her visceral discomfort with collectivist culture, producing an essay more honest about its own contradictions than any piece of anti-war journalism of its era.
Collecting Styles of Radical Will
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- Without jacket: $15–$30
More difficult and less famous than Against Interpretation, but increasingly valued by collectors who recognize it as the more intellectually ambitious work.