Date: Wed, 28 Jun 1995 13:24:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Susan Sontag <jfr10-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: EVERYDAY LIFE


	It is in the nature of all spiritual projects to tend to consume 
themselves--exhausting their own sense, the very meaning of the terms in 
which they are couched. (This is why "spirituality" must be continually 
reinvented.) All genuinely ultimate projects of consciousness eventually 
become projects for the unraveling of thought itself.
	Art conceived as a spiritual project is no exception. As an 
abstracted and fragmented replica of the positive nihilism expounded by 
the radical religious myths, the serious art of our time has moved 
increasingly toward the most excruciating inflections of consciousness. 
Conceivably, irony is the only feasible counterweight to this grave use 
of art as the arena for the ordeal of consciousness. The present prospect 
is that artists will go on abolishing art, only to resurrect it in a more 
retracted version. As long as art bears up under the pressure of chronic 
interrogation, it would seem desirable that some of the questions have a 
certain playful quality.
	But this prospect depends, perhaps, on the viability of irony itself.

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