Against Interpretation (Essay)

Published in Evergreen Review in 1964 and expanded as the title essay of Sontag's 1966 collection, "Against Interpretation" mounted the most influential assault on interpretive criticism in twentieth-century American letters. Sontag argued that interpretation — the practice of translating art into extractable content — is "the revenge of the intellect upon art," a mechanism by which mediocrity domesticates genius. The essay's target was not understanding but a specific pathology: the compulsive reduction of sensory and formal experience to paraphraseable meaning. Against this, Sontag called for "an erotics of art" — a mode of attention that experiences "the luminousness of the thing in itself" before asking what it signifies. The essay became the foundational text for a generation of critics suspicious of theory's imperial ambitions, and its framework has gained extraordinary relevance in the AI age, where formally competent outputs arrive stripped of the struggle that gives genuine thought its authority.