Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag
Vintage, 1961, 2001

I

Against Interpretation

pp 3-4
The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.
[See Le problème de l'être chez Aristote]
[It] is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.
2, p 5
Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

3, p 5

Of course, I don't mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, "There are no facts, only interpretations." By interpretation, I mean here a conspicuous act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation.

Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A?

II

The anthropologist as hero

pp 72-73
Lévi-Strauss' aim is very much like that of Lucretius, the Graecophile Roman who urged the study of the natural sciences as a mode of ethical psychotherapy. [...] He recommended scientific knowledge, which teaches intelligent detachment, equanimity. Scientific knowledge is, for Lucretius, a mode of psychological gracefulness. It is a way of learning to let go.

Sartre's Saint Genet

p 96
Sartre brilliantly observes: "Abjection is a methodical conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoché [...]"

IV

Godard's Vivre Sa Vie

1

p 197
"The cinema is still a form of graphic art," Cocteau wrote in his Journals. "Through its mediation, I write in pictures, and secure for my own ideology a power in actual fact. I show what others tell. [...] The greatest power of a film is to be indisputable with respect to the actions it determines and which are carried out before our eyes. It is normal for the witness of an action to transform it for his own use, to distort it, and to testify to it inaccurately. But the action was carried out, and is carried out as often as the machine resurrects it. It combats inexact testimonies and false police reports."

3

p 198
Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument which is, by definition, complete; but the price of its completeness is that proof is always formal. Only what is already contained in the beginning is proven at the end. In analysis, however, there are always further angles of understanding, new realms of causality. Analysis is substantive. Analysis is a mode of argument that is, by definition, always incomplete; it is, properly speaking, interminable.
The extent to which a given work of art is designed as a mode of proof is, of course, a matter of proportion. [...] But still, I should argue, all art tends towards the formal [...] In great art, it is form—or, as I call it here, the desire to prove rather than the desire to analyse—that is ultimately sovereign.

V

Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death

pp 257-258
Being psychoanalysed has become as much a bourgeois institution as going to college [...]
The trouble with psychoanalytic ideas, as it now appears to many, is that they constitute a form of retreat from, and, therefore, conformity to the real world.
p 259
It is no accident that Freud chose to use the word sex when, as he himself declared, he might as well have used "love". Freud insisted on sex; he insisted on the body.

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