Against Interpretation and Other Essays Quotes

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing _in_ the world, not just a text or commentary _on_ the world.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. (...) And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities, that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to See more, to Hear more, to Feel more.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force - not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. Mostly it is a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“نویسندگان بزرگ یا شوهرند یا معشوق. برخی نویسندگان فضایل استوار یک شوهر را به ما عرضه می‌کنند: قابل اتکا، فهیم، سخی، برازنده. در سوی دیگر نویسندگانی قرار دارند که در آن‌ها قابلیت‌های یک معشوق را ستایش می‌کنیم، قابلیت‌هایی که از طبیعت و مزاج برمی‌آیند تا فضیلت اخلاقی. زن‌ها به شکلی عجیب ویژگی‌هایی چون بی‌ثباتی، خودخواهی، غیرقابل‌اتکا بودن، و خشونت را که در مورد شوهر هرگز با آن‌ها کنار نمی‌آیند در معشوق خود می‌پذیرند، به شرط آن‌که در عوض نوعی هیجان و فوران احساسی شدید را تجربه کنند. به همین سیاق، خوانندگان نیز با فهم‌ناپذیری، وسواسی بودن، حقایق دردناک، دروغ، یا دستور زبان بد کنار می‌آیند-اگر در عوض نویسنده امکان چشیدن عواطفی کمیاب و احساساتی خطرناک را در اختیارشان قرار دهد. و همان‌طور که در زندگی وجود شوهر و معشوق هر دو ضروری است، در هنر نیز چنین است. باعث تاسف است که ناگزیر باشیم میان آن‌ها دست به انتخاب بزنیم
.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Interpretation must itself be
evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts,
interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping
the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly,
stifling.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Insanity becomes the privileged, most authentic metaphor for passion.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Man is a creature who is designed to live on the surface; he lives in the depths- whether terrestrial, oceanic, or psychological- at his peril.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“It has become spiritually fashionable to be in pain.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Love- any love- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“And the world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays