Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

THE publication of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) in a paperback edition is a noteworthy event. Together with Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), it represents a new seriousness about Freudian ideas which reveals most previous writing on Freud published in America, be it the right-wing scholasticism of the psychoanalytic journals or the left-wing cultural studies of the Freudian “revisionists” (Fromm, Horney, etc.), as theoretically irrelevant or, at best, superficial. But, more important than its value as a reinterpretation of the most influential mind of our culture is its boldness as a discussion of the fundamental problems—about the hypocrisy of our culture, about art, money, religion, work, about sex and the motives of the body. Serious thinking about these problems—rightly, in my opinion, centered on the meaning of sexuality and of human freedom—has been continuous in France since Sade, Fourier, Cabanis, and Enfantin; it is to be found today in such disparate works as the sections on the body and on concrete relations with others of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, in the essays of Maurice Blanchot, in L’Histoire d’O, in the plays and prose of Jean Genet. But in America, the twin subjects of eroticism and liberty are just beginning to be treated in a serious way. Most of us still feel required to fight the stale battle against inhibitions and prudery, taking sexuality for granted as something which merely needs a freer expression. A country in...