This essay is fine, mostly; but basically it is a long note for Moser to take home from the teacher, telling his parents how disappointed the teacher is in his biography.  That, from what she says of it, sounds plausible.  But the best paragraph in the essay is this, about what it is in Sontag that Emre, the author, finds absolutely valuable:

The best answer to the question I opened with—why do we want and need a Susan Sontag?—comes from the literary critic Deborah Nelson’s fantastic 2017 book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil. In Nelson’s view, Sontag’s thoughts on art and modernity are neither original nor systematic. What is enchanting about her writing is her style: an associative and aphoristic approach to talking about, or around, intense emotions without indulging in them. “An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that,” Sontag wrote in her diary—a glimpse of how her style served as an exercise in emotional self-regulation, in modeling aesthetic decorum. Her essays aspired to teach her readers how to “feel more sensually” as “the antidote to feeling too much or too little emotion,” Nelson writes, offering a more nuanced reading than Moser does of Sontag’s desire “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Again, I'm still enthralled by Craig Seligman's Sontag and Kael.  But this small piece makes me want to read Nelson's book, because the occasional aphorisms in Sontag's writing--and I do think they are not more frequent than "occasional," though I agree they're structurally quite important--do seem to me very revealing of something at the heart of her style.  

As she employed them, aphorisms were frequently a Classical genre meant to hold at arm's length a Romantic affect.  Consider: "Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration."   "We need an erotics of art."  "Depression is melancholy minus its charms."  In each case you have a sense of something powerful and dense and threateningly imperious, held at least a sentence's length away.  You are not experiencing it; you may be witnessing it; you are definitely analyzing it, anatomizing it.  Sontag created a style so deeply cool as to make it almost a space suit for her mind.

It seems to me that part of her genius was the way her mind was constantly oscillating between obsessive ravishment by the world--her "aesthetic" moments--and a deep recoiling wariness of the world--her more "analytic" moments.  Her style, then, among other things, is the condensed result of enduring those oscillations over time.  Only someone who has experienced all the things she talks about--boredom, desire, pain, suffering, obsession, paranoia, depression, hate, lust--can have the acquaintance required to get at their granular, phenomenological pith in the way that she does; and only someone who has consciously survived those passions, and come out the other end, with a vivid memory of what they felt like "from the inside," so to speak, but still as just a memory, so at one remove, the remove of the distance of time, the remove of someone who has endured them and found that the remembering self is effectively if not identical than continuous with the person who was in their thrall but now, perhaps a bit disappointingly, is no longer is in their thrall, who has discovered that there was always a hard, stone-like "I" beneath the emotion, passion, experience, life--only someone who has so survived those passions in this way, I say, can actually analyze them with the cool perspicacity that Sontag so reliably displays.

This is sad, in a way, because it suggests a distancing of the self from its experience.  Here is what I mean: One lesson that a person who has such an experience, someone such as Sontag, could take away from these things is that one is somehow not wholly absorbed in these moments, that one is always a bit observing, recording, noting, planning to remember them, to comment upon them.  One transcends one's life--one is, in a way, sovereign over it.  This is pretty dislocating, I think, for one's own experience of one's life.  But perhaps it is necessary for any seriously fine-grained communicable representation of one's experiences to anyone else; perhaps it is only if you can inhabit the only-just-slightly dislodged perspective one one who almost was fully absorbed in the experience, then you can "give a report" (if that's what it is) of that experience to someone else, to allow them also to share in that proximity to it.  Thus, instead of one person being enmeshed in an experience, at least two of you almost have an experience, I suppose. 

I recognize this may be a bit crude as a picture of what I'm getting at.  It may also be a bit romantically wistful.  But I think it gets at something real.  Sontag's ability to judge experience is based, I think, on an escape from it.  Her style expresses that quite powerfully.  Perhaps its charm for us is not (only) in the accuracy or punchiness or revelatory character of its observations, but also in the aroma of sovereignty it exudes and that we sense.  Maybe we are charmed by it in no small part for the promise of "toughness" or invulnerability it implies.  

If so, is that something we should desire?  It's a serious question.