Love Quote by Susan Sontag

Celebrity love, Sontag implies, isn t really love at all; it s a high-powered feeling machine that runs fine without the human it supposedly adores. Calling it "abstract" is a provocation aimed at the sentimental story we tell ourselves about fandom: that devotion is intimate, personal, earned. Her point is colder and more exacting. The famous person functions less as a person than as a screen for projection, a placeholder where the fan can stage longing, aspiration, envy, even moral certainty.

The sly move is her mock-scientific language. "Measured mathematically" isn t a claim about literal equations so much as a jab at how standardized this passion has become. Celebrity culture manufactures affect at scale: the same arcs of adoration, betrayal, and redemption repeat with algorithmic reliability. Intensity becomes legible through numbers - ticket sales, chart positions, likes, screams per minute - metrics that translate emotion into proof. When she says it is "independent of persons", she s also diagnosing a system that invites replacement. If the idol falls, another will do; the apparatus of attention keeps humming.

Context matters: Sontag spent her career interrogating how modern media turns experience into consumable images. Here, fame is an image economy where attachment is real in the body but detached in meaning. You can feel it fiercely, she suggests, precisely because you don t have to negotiate the messy reciprocity of actual intimacy. In that gap between intensity and indifference, celebrity worship becomes both thrilling and oddly dehumanizing - for the fan and the famous alike.