Against Interpretation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1966 and established Susan Sontag, at thirty-three, as the most important American cultural critic of her generation. The title essay — first published in the Evergreen Review in 1964 — is a polemic against the hermeneutic habit: the reflexive impulse to interpret art, to demand that it “mean” something beyond itself, to translate sensory experience into intellectual content.
“In place of a hermeneutics,” Sontag wrote in the essay’s most famous sentence, “we need an erotics of art.” The argument is not anti-intellectual (Sontag was nothing if not intellectual) but anti-reductive: interpretation, she argued, had become a way of taming art, domesticating its strangeness, replacing the shock of aesthetic experience with the comfort of extractable meaning. The essay drew on Nietzsche, on the French New Novel, on abstract expressionism, on the emerging avant-garde cinema of Godard and Resnais.
The collection’s other essays are equally significant. “Notes on ‘Camp’” — originally published in Partisan Review in 1964 — defined a sensibility that had previously existed without a name: the love of artifice, of exaggeration, of the “it’s good because it’s awful” aesthetic that governed everything from Tiffany lamps to Swan Lake to Flash Gordon. The essay made Sontag famous beyond academic circles — Andy Warhol reportedly kept it by his bedside — and its influence on queer theory, pop art criticism, and cultural studies has been immeasurable.
Other pieces tackle individual artists (Camus, Ionesco, Lévi-Strauss, Bresson, Godard, Jack Smith) or cultural phenomena (science fiction, “happenings,” the aesthetics of silence), establishing Sontag’s method: fierce intelligence applied to subjects that establishment criticism had deemed beneath serious attention.
Collecting Against Interpretation
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first edition: $300–$800
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Advance review copy: $150–$400
The defining document of 1960s American intellectual life. Values have risen steadily as Sontag’s reputation has, if anything, grown since her death in 2004.