essay against interpretation

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Susan sontag.

336 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1964

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None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

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Against Interpretation

And Other Essays

Author: Susan Sontag

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About this book.

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Against...

Book Details

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought. This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

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9780312280864

In The News

“Susan Sontag's essays are great interpretations, and even fulfillments, of what is really going on.” —Carlos Fuentes “A dazzling intellectual performance.” — Vogue “Susan Sontag is a writer of rare energy and provocative newness.” — The Nation “The theoretical portions of her book are delightful to read because she can argue so well. . . . Her ideas are consistently stimulating.” — Commentary “She has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience.” — Time

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Against Interpretation | Summary and Analysis

Summary of against interpretation by susan sontag.

Susan Sontag was an American author primarily known for her philosophical and literary essays that contributed to the canon of  American literary criticism  in the  20th century . One of the widely read works of her is the essay “Against Interpretation” which was published in a collection of essays bearing the title with the same name in  1966.  Within the influential movement of  New Criticism , Sontag creates a  discourse  on the form and content of a text where the latter has begun to occupy center stage amongst the critics who are preoccupied with a search for  meaning  in their  inexhaustible quest for interpretation . She clearly rejects the need for interpretation in any kind of text to render value to the raw and sensory experience of reading and viewing it. She wishes to treasure the most primitive encounter one has when engaged with any art form without any scrutiny. 

Against Interpretation | Summary

According to theorists like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, “to understand is to interpret.” Thus, interpretations are to be evaluated because it can either be a “liberating act” or a “stifling” and the author hints at the latter’s poisonous tendencies in the contemporary scenario. She points to the literary critics who believe their job to be a translation of a text into something else. A text is interpreted through various approaches such as socialism, psychoanalysis, religious allegory, etc. which ravishes it. She explicates her concern by drawing on the works of Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and the list goes on. 

Interpretation has become the need of the hour for modern readers to understand something. Her discernment of cinematic form argues for the need of responding to what is there on the screen rather than finding meanings in various scenes. 

looming sword of interpretation gives rise to abstract and parody art and modern forms of poetry where the word itself creates the magic. Further, she desires an art form that is immediate, rapid, and direct that can escape the web of interpretation, like films. As a part of the conclusion, Sontag hopes for the development of criticism that would “serve the work of art, not usurp its place” through thrusting on the form of art. She appreciates essays by various formalists which describe the “appearance of a work of art” in its sensuality. By advocating transparency in art, she refuses art’s assimilation into thought and culture and vouches for a more sensory and erotic connection with art. 

Against Interpretation | Analysis

Against interpretation | key arguments.

The West’s reflection on art has been influenced by the  Greek theory of mimesis  and representation which needs a defense, giving rise to the binaries of form and content making the former an accessory and the latter essential. A work of art is then approached with an  intention of interpretation  to answer the question ‘what does it mean’ when there should be no preconceived notions about it. She encourages absorbing it and relishing it the way it is instead of transforming it into a “translation.”   Believing in the presence of some content in any art will cause “a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle  philistinism. ”

An  artist’s intention  is sidelined with the advent of Roland Barthe’s critical notions in “The Death of the Author” which renders importance to a text as it is without the need for any knowledge pertaining to its author’s desires, wishes, or aims with it. Sontag agrees with this line of thought but she also believes that by creating meanings out of it as a selective approach, we may or may not fall into the author’s web of perspective as well as rule out all other possible meanings. Interpretation is more focused on American texts which are not  experimental in form  and thus bear the brunt of it. However, she proposes a unified surface of a work of art “whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be…just what it is” to “elude the interpreters.”  Films  happen to conform to these specifications as other areas of enquiry such as cinematic techniques, light, sound, and shot angles occupy the audience. 

Sontag finally suggests the  recovery of our sensory experience  over the intellectual and mechanical workings of our brain. From an empirical viewpoint, “we must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” as the “function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” 

Against Interpretation | Supportive Statements

“In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance.” 

By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. She articulates this with  “the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of  A Streetcar Named Desire [where]… in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization.” Sontag claims that such an interpretation “indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.” 

“The fact that films have not been overrun by interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, they were understood to be part of the mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms—the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.” 

Against Interpretation | Concluding Remarks

Initially, it appears that Sontag is refusing to search for any meaning in art. But she is advocating not searching for any different meanings in art other than what it clearly says at the surface. The belief that the task of interpretation is a never-ending process is a true literary critic should be well versed with as each individual perceives art uniquely which opens the gate to multiple possibilities. A critic’s task is to describe the artwork in its form and appearance which is a formalist approach and Sontag seconds that. 

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Uploaded by CarriC on September 3, 2010

The New York Times

Magazine | how susan sontag taught me to think.

• How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think

By A.O. SCOTT OCT. 8, 2019

The critic A.O. Scott reflects on the outsize influence Sontag has had on his life as a critic.

I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes aren’t what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different — in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. It’s a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once you’ve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents’ bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. “Against Interpretation.” No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the book’s allure — the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat — but the charisma of the title shouldn’t be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldn’t say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever “interpretation” turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way I’ve made my living as an adult. It’s not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 “Against Interpretation,” a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Saint Genet,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie,’’ Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures”), modestly presents itself as “case studies for an aesthetic,” a theory of Sontag’s “own sensibility.” Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontag’s signature is ambivalence. “Against Interpretation” (the essay), which declares that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ ” is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration — “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” — deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 It’s hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact “Against Interpretation” had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadn’t — hadn’t yet! — read and movies I hadn’t heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the ’60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading “Against Interpretation” — following it with “Styles of Radical Will,” “On Photography” and “Under the Sign of Saturn,” books Sontag would later deprecate as “juvenilia” — for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called “On Style”). For the voice, I guess, but that’s a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked “Against Interpretation” from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontag’s called “Pilgrimage.” One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. “I felt I was slumming in my own life,” Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The “pilgrimage” in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susan’s “shame and dread” at the prospect of paying the call. “Oh, Merrill, how could you?” she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks “like a book review.” The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. “Why would I want to meet him?” she wondered. “I had his books.”

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazine’s editors. “Tell him Susan Sontag called. He’ll know why.” (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading — or maybe just walking — through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book “On Photography.” The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks — words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief — had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didn’t want to fail to impress her; I didn’t want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close . I didn’t want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties — anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mother’s illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. “Sempre Susan,” a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the “I knew Susan” minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontag’s own “Pilgrimage.” It’s about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag’s longtime publisher, issued “Reborn,” the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries aren’t intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind , documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (“I.”; “H”; “C.”). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday — the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays — and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser — “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” published last month — shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. “What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized,” he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more — no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment — has at last been decisively captured by what she called “the image-world,” the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of “On Photography”), but it’s hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe it’s inevitable that after Sontag’s death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing — that rigorous, serious, impersonal self — has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag — brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable — surely fits the bill.

10 “Interpretation,” according to Sontag, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.” And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into “the life,” a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I can’t deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I don’t want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say that’s why she matters to me. In “Sempre Susan,” Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhard’s comic “possessive thinker,” who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose “art selfishness” makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

I’m the opposite of that. I don’t like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasn’t a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, she’s often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didn’t talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay — certainly among the most controversial — is “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by “the spirit of extravagance” with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings — “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it” — that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the “Notes” like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent “a seriousness that fails,” then “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of “Against Interpretation” called “Camus’ Notebooks” — originally published in The New York Review of Books — Sontag divides great writers into “husbands” and “lovers,” a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the “ideal husband of contemporary letters.” It isn’t really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. He’s the guy the reader will settle for, who won’t ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Céline or Gide. He’s also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontag’s serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in “Against Interpretation” and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into “The Pornographic Imagination” with the warning that “No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornograph ies — there are at least three — and before pledging to take them on one at a time.”

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontag’s masterful prose. She’s the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game don’t simply dictate silence or obedience on the reader’s part. What sustains the bond — the bondage, if you’ll allow it — is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. “Against Interpretation” was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. “On Photography” was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years I’ve purchased at least three copies of “Under the Sign of Saturn” — if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, I’d pick that one — and in each the essay on Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I’ve never met such a person. “Mind as Passion” is the best thing I’ve ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer “teaches us how to breathe,” about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in “Under the Sign of Saturn.” Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader — who is also, of course, a writer — is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontag’s reader, the love story becomes an implicit ménage à trois. Each essay enacts the effort — the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown — to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write — the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it — is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. It’s almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why aren’t the kids reading Canetti? Why don’t trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that “the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people.”

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The “new sensibility” she heralded in the ’60s, “dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia,” survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and “let people enjoy things” looks like an emoji-friendly update of “Against Interpretation,” with “enjoy things” a safer formulation than Sontag’s “erotics of art.”

That isn’t what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this year’s Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the ’Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of “On Photography,” which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the ’60s and ’70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query “What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter?” The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism “fascism with a human face.” After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”

That doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontag’s writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda — a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken — was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didn’t soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didn’t read — or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances — to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: “From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

20 “Consciousness” is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. It’s sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs — in ways that escape scientific analysis — to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single person’s private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontag’s great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders — Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud — but Sontag doesn’t quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 “Under the Sign of Saturn” opens in a “tiny room in Paris” where she has been living for the previous year — “small bare quarters” that answer “some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on.” Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If she’s alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

It’s only reading. By which I mean: It’s everything.

A.O. Scott is a chief film critic at The Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.” He last wrote for the magazine about the great film performances of 2018.

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Against Interpretation

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Analysis: “Against Interpretation”

Sontag’s essay finds her arguing for a reevaluation of a content-based approach to art and criticism and putting forth a potential method of replacing hermeneutical interpretation with another form of engagement with art. She argues her points through a rhetorical method of appealing to her audience with a use of logos and contrast.

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“Against Interpretation” is an essay written by American critic Susan Sontag. It is included in her 1966 collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays. This seminal essay argues that interpretation is an inherently harmful process that ignores the content of a piece of art in favor of its purported meaning. She argues against the pervasive Freudian and Marxist modes of interpretation, and invokes famous films ( A Streetcar Named Desire, Last Year in Marienbad, The Silence ) as well as Pop Art and classical Greek philosophies of art.

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Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag’s second book, was published in 1966, but some of the essays date back to 1961, when she was still writing for The Benefactor. Sontag had come to New York in the early 60’s, eager to become the writer she so longed to become. Her ideas at the time of a writer was someone interested in “everything.”

Against Interpretation is regarded as a quintessential text of the 60’s. “It wasn’t the Sixties then,” she writes. “For me it was chiefly the time when I wrote my first and second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about art and culture and the proper business of consciousness which had distracted me from writing fiction. I was filled with evangelical zeal.”

Interpretation

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

…interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality.

Avoiding Interpretation

to avoid interpretation, art maybe become parody. Or it may become abstract. … Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content,t here can be no interpretation.

Our Task With a Work of Art

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

Art is not only about something; it is something. … Art is seduction, not rape.

Morality is a code of acts, and of judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, which prescribe a standard for behaving or tiring to behave toward other human beings general (that is, to all who are acknowledged to be human) as if we were inspired by love. Needless to say, love is something we feel in truth for just a few individual human beings, among those who are known to us in reality and in our imagination. … Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices.

The Metaphor of Art as an “Argument”

The metaphor of the work of art as an “argument,” with premises and entailments, has informed most criticism since. Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.

Love and suffering

The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness. We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, but one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. … For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

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Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) Kindle Edition

A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The Benefactor , Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America , which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors . Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays , you might like Sontag's On Photography , also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A dazzling intellectual performance' Vogue 'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' T he Times

• Print length 338 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Penguin
• Publication date May 2, 2013
• File size 1887 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

A dazzling intellectual performance.

Her passing remarks on figures as dissimilar as Taylor Mead, Tammy Grimes, the Beatles and Harpo Marx are alive with a sense of what it is like to watch these performers...She rises to analysis that is nothing less than exhilaratingly shrewd...A ponderable, vivacious, beautifully living, and quite astonishingly American book

She has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience.

Susan Sontag's essays are great interpretations, and even fulfillments, of what is really going on.

The theoretical portions of her book are delightful to read because she can argue so well...Her ideas are consistently stimulating.

From the Publisher

From the inside flap, about the author.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Against Interpretation and On Photography . Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00BQ4NHWC
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (May 2, 2013)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 2, 2013
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1887 KB
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• Print length ‏ : ‎ 338 pages
• #1,607 in Popular Culture
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About the author

Susan sontag.

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

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Literature and Humanities

literature simplified and made lively

Susan Sontag’s Essay “Against Interpretation”

Susan Sontag is an avante-guarde writer (who discards conventions) who belongs to the American school of criticism. She has written novels like The Benefactor (1964) and Death Kit (1968) . “Notes on Camp”, an essay was first published in 1964, and was republished in 1966 in her collection of essays, Against Interpretation . 

Susan Sontag in her essay “Against Interpretation” focuses on what an interpretation really is. She discusses and mixes the ideas of other writers and further differentiates two kinds of interpretation – form based interpretation and content based interpretation.

She talks about the past with the present interpretation. Nothing was rejected in classical interpretation. She believes that it was the classical period which gave importance to ‘content’ of a work other than meaning and other things. She also believes that margins are always inverted. The title “against” does not mean that Sontag is against interpretation, rather it questions those that are against and tries to defend interpretation. 

Hence, Sontag advocates against interpretations of a work that plays more importance in finding the meaning, message, intention in a work. She strongly believes that in trying to establish the content of a work the interpreter avoids the form of the work. This is because it has been believed that literature or any work of art has two major functions; – ‘to teach’ and ‘to delight’ in trying to assimilate art into thought or art into culture. An interpreter exercises all the sensory experiences to set up a “shadow world of meanings” and “turn the world into this world”. The world here she refers to is the text in all it’s gestalt glory and this is what the interpreter recreates. Hence, the world of art gets depleted and impoverished in the transformation of ‘the’ to ‘this’ work, art or world. 

Sontag traces interpretation with all its doubtful, corollaries, to the classical theory of art as mimesis (imitation) of reality. Plato speaks of the value of art being dubious, since the poet-creator is “twice removed from reality”. Therefore art was neither useful nor true. Aristotle disputed this idea and interpreted that art is “medicinally useful in arousing and purging dangerous emotions” (catharsis). Here, Aristotle does not reject Plato but only adds more meaning to substantiate and defend the value of both the poet and his heart. She argues that, yet they both have looked upon art as (in Freudian terms) manifest content with the intention to communicate meanings alone. Until the advent of New Criticism, the study of ‘form’ was never given a serious thought or exercised diligently. Form is present in all animate and inanimate things even as content is. Modern theorists following soon after the formalist school believed the theory of art as a subjective expression to the point of viewing art as semiotics (study of signs) and power relationships.

Irrespective of the conceptions on the theories of art, whether art is a picture of social reality or of language, the content of it is what all finally look to (that something it says or it is trying to say or it has said). The only difference is in classical theory interpretation, only alter in order to reconcile meaning where insistent but respectful in their opinions and give one more meaning to the existing meaning without rejecting the original. On the other hand, modern theorists were radical, aggressive and dismissive in their act of interpretation. These modern theorists acting as interpreters question the truth and started excavating in order to create new meanings by “digging behind the text”. That is, in the classical period of interpretation, the old is not discarded but only revamped. On the contrary, modern interpreters discarded established truths in order to recreate their own. Therefore interpretation does not give absolute and complete meaning that is it does not have absolute and complete meaning; that is, it does not have absolute value. On the other hand, Sontag believes interpretation must be self-evaluated, with the historical view of human consciousness. 

So there has been two phases in understanding art – the innocent acceptance of art (needed no defence or support outside itself) and secondly, the experienced justification of what it says or attempts to say. In this case art began needing support from outside to appreciate it. The theory of interpretation both makes and mars context as she believes that the task of interpretation is virtually one of translating through transforming. In reducing the work of art to its content, an interpreter “lames the work of art”. Sontag cites Thomas Mann as an over-cooperative author and “the mars ravishment” of Kafka. 

By three armies of interpreters one citing is writing as a social allegory, the other as psychoanalytic allegory and the third as a religious allegory. Among the three interpretations, Kafka as Kafka is lost. In the same way, Samuel Beckett is read as an absurd world of man’s alienation from meaning or from God and from the psychological point of view looked on as an allegory of psycho-pathology. The numerous writers that Sontag cites show that interpretation has only undone the gestalt of a work. Answering the question, what kind of criticism or commentary on the arts is disabled today, Sontag begins saying that works of art are ineffable and cannot be described or paraphrased. 

A work of art can be as Sontag believes that more attention to form in art should be given. She also asks for “a vocabulary of forms” that is like descriptive rather than prescriptive. Thirdly she finds equally valuable those criticisms which are accurate, sharp and feels the form of a work of an art. In conclusion Sontag advocates against looking at an interpreting art didactically or as a delight. What is needed according to her is to refine our senses “to see, more to hear more and to feel more”. If a reader learns to remove the content from focus, one will begin to see things as they are and as they should be. She closes with a very debatable punchline saying “in place of a hermeneutics we need and erotics of art”. 

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