Against Interpretation

“Against Interpretation” offers its own critique of criticism itself by engaging in discourse on the prioritization by critics of interpretation or meaning in art over content. As mentioned in the summary, she also provides Marxist and Freudian concepts as examples of the hermeneutics that she writes against. In addition to these, Sontag cites various critics by name, especially in relation to generally common and unique perspectives of canonical writers, including but not limited to the following: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Rainer Maria Rilke, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Tennessee Williams, as well as film directors like Jean Cocteau.

Beginning with Karl Marx (a 19th-century communist philosopher) and Sigmund Freud (a prominent psychologist of the 19th to 20th century), Sontag cites the latter figure’s conceptualization of manifest content and the former’s discussions of wars and revolutions. Freud’s idea involves the difference between observable experiences and their latent content, or the meaning that underlies them. He often believed that a person’s observable behavior was indicative of subconscious sexual impulses, thus prioritizing his interpretation of a person’s actions over literal value, intention, or impact.