“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 14.
I. A Dialectical Reading
As Ben Libman has recently written in an article detailing Sontag’s role in introducing the Nouveau Roman into U.S. academic discourse and shaping its legacy there, “‘Against Interpretation’ (1964) was the essay that shot Sontag’s star into the firmament. […] Sontag’s argument, in its broadest strokes, is summarized by its famous, closing tagline: ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’” Surely, then, there is nothing new in my interest in this very famous essay or its equally famous closing tagline. What is perhaps new, however, is that I would like to approach Sontag’s injunction by rereading her essay in light of two recent publications: Benjamin Moser’s 2019 biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work; and On Women, the 2023 collection of Sontag’s early feminist essays published by Picador. While Libman grounds the inspiration for “Against Interpretation” in Sontag’s strategic deployment of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s theories of the novel, I’d like to suggest that Moser’s biography serves as a catalyst for exploring another source text of “Against Interpretation”: Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959). As Moser writes,
When, in 1966, Susan Sontag published the essays collected as Against Interpretation, many reviewers expressed amazement that an obscure young person, just thirty-three, had produced a work of such breadth and maturity. The book dazzled with an erudition that was impressive then and is impressive now, and that begs the question of how and where it was acquired. Their Francophile biases led many to assume that these essays had been produced in a café somewhere on the Left Bank. But the Parisian patina overlaid a far more substantial foundation that was the product of nearly a decade of monastic seclusion. From the time she moved to Wisconsin in 1951 […] to the time she reached Paris in 1958 […] she worked on Freud. For the rest of her life, she would never work as long or as intensely on any subject. The Mind of the Moralist bears the marks of this concentration and this engagement, mapping out the terrain she would later explore in Against Interpretation […]. Yet her subsequent writings rarely so much as breathe the name of Freud. [And yet] The very title of Against Interpretation might well read Against Freud, since it is against his hermeneutic principles that she inveighs.1
If Sontag’s prose always gives us the impression that she is “in the know,” as Alice Kaplan puts it,2 Moser makes clear that this cultural capital is the result of 7+ years of intense intellectual labor on not just any major twentieth-century thinker, but the thinker who redeployed the term “interpretation” for a modern context. “The interpretation of dreams was Freud’s first and most fruitful discovery,” Sontag writes in the Freud book. “It is extraordinary how much this first psychoanalytic book—with the word ‘interpretation’ carefully chosen for its title—can be made to explain. For the originality of psychoanalysis lies chiefly in its hermeneutic skill. This, I believe, is how we should read Freud’s insistence that dream-interpretation is the keystone of the entire psychoanalytic structure.”3 The suggestive force of these claims derives from their proleptic quality, knowing, as we do, that the word “interpretation” would be just as carefully selected for Sontag’s own keystone text.
Moser writes that “Susan claimed she wrote ‘every single word’ of The Mind of the Moralist. Philip [Rieff] belatedly allowed that she was its co-author. And it is in certain passages, on women and homosexuality, that Susan’s voice can be most clearly distinguished.”4 As one form of evidence among others regarding Sontag’s authorship, Moser shows how in The Mind of the Moralist, Freud “is subjected to a strong feminist reading absent from [Rieff’s other work].”5 My claim is that, when considered dialectically, “Against Interpretation” read through the Freud book reveals the ethical and political stakes that are, in turn, central to Sontag’s later essays on women published in the 1970s. Read in light of these other works, her 1964 manifesto of contemporary art and culture, which cannot in any explicit way be called a feminist manifesto, nevertheless has residual feminist implications. This would seem to enact one of the central lessons imparted by Sontag in her writings “on women”:
I’d like to see a few platoons of intellectuals who are also feminists doing their bit in the war against misogyny in their own way, letting the feminist implications be residual or implicit in their work, without risking being charged by their sisters for desertion. I don’t like party lines. They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.6
Certainly, no one could, in good faith, accuse “Against Interpretation” of bad prose.7
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II. Against Freud
There are two chapters in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist that are of particular interest when considering “Against Interpretation” and On Women: “The Tactics of Interpretation” and “Sexuality and Domination.” That these two chapters appear back to back is not accidental and speaks to the problems of sexual difference and its consequences at the heart of interpretation as understood by Sontag. If her compelling discussion of hermeneutics in “Against Interpretation” recalls Hemingway’s iceberg theory in which one-eighth of the depth of her profound knowledge of the Western cultural tradition glitters along the surface, “The Tactics of Interpretation” reveals itself to be the other seven-eighths of the iceberg. This chapter is a painstaking explication of Freudian hermeneutics and its implications. To illustrate, I’ve attempted to “excavate” a few Sontagian passages from “Against Interpretation” by placing them alongside those from the Freud book (I’ve bolded keywords that resonate across both):
“Against Interpretation”
The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. […] [I]nterpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. […] Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. […]All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning—the latent content beneath. (5-7)
Freud
As a technique of interpretation, psychoanalysis displays two concerns which stamp it as reconciliatory. […] Once granted that the dream, however meager and laconic, is a meaningful text, the interpreter’s work is to make sense out of these discrepancies, to order them in a logical translation.[…] The genuine part of the dream Freud calls the “latent content”; the dream itself, with all its nonsense, is the “manifest content.” (107)
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. (4)
The “culture lag” theory, for example, is but one among many arguments advanced by intellectuals that man has developed intellect at the expense of emotion, […]Freud accepted as an article of faith that culture “originates mainly at the cost of the sexual component instincts, and that these must be suppressed, restrained, transformed.”But this process may in time spell the end of the race, for as “the world of the senses becomes gradually mastered by spirituality,” the sexual pleasures enjoyed by our ancestors may become indifferent or even intolerable to ourselves. (183-184)
[Of Ingmar Bergman’s tank in The Silence] Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen. It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else. Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article of use, for an arrangement into a mental scheme of categories. (10)
For the work of art as such, Freud cared very little. He sometimes badly misconstrued a work in his eagerness to use it illustratively. But once we have understood that to Freud the criticism of art promised more than the practice of it, we can no longer fairly read his aesthetic commentary on a particular work with an eye toward its accuracy of assessment. The work of art is something to see through; it is presumably best explained by something other than—even contradicting—itself. Every work of art is to Freud a museum piece of the unconscious, an occasion to contemplate the unconscious frozen into one of its possible gestures. (121)
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. (13)
Mediating between Freud’s conceptions of art as an escape from reality and art endorsed as a source of psychological insight is the fact of interpretation itself. Because the “depths” from which art is presumed to emerge cannot be expressed directly, a transparent, straightforward, literal art is a contradiction in terms. As the broadest way into the unconscious, art demands interpretation. (122)
A question that remains unanswered in “Against Interpretation” is what is at stake in the “hypertrophy of the intellect” (7), of the over-assimilation of “Art into Thought,” of “taking the sensory experience of the work of art for granted” (13)? I had always felt intuitively the necessity of Sontag’s exigencies, the aesthetic and ethical importance of reveling in the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it” (13). But what are the aesthetic and ethical stakes underlying Sontag’s critique of Freudian hermeneutics and its effects on art, criticism, and, by extension, “our own experience” (14)? “Against Interpretation” doesn’t give us an explicit answer, but the Freud book does.
The accusation Sontag levels against the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis in Freud is ultimately a disregard of difference, an insistence on deindividuation, and a reinforcement of stereotypes. As she writes:
To follow our analogy between art and the dream: even when Freudians attend the context and derive meaning not just from words, which are properly accessory, but from plot and character, nevertheless Freudian methods of interpretation tend to de-individualize the text. Psychoanalysis is characteristically insensitive to the subtle surface at which much of art and life exist. It has its case book of basic plots expressive of the “family romance”; these are discoverable in every story, refracted in every symptomatic event.8
Interpreting dreams (and art) according to the method of “symbolism,” which Sontag sees as the bedrock of psychoanalytic interpretation, results in mere “equivalences” and plots foretold in advance:
Symbolism indicates that language is a prison, and traces all modes of perception back to stereotyped desires. The Freudian interpretation reduces all thought to objectifications, and all objects to symbols of the minimum self. […] The task of the Freudian science remains a kind of literary criticism, the discoveries of equivalences of symbols and actions through perceptual analogies.9
Freud’s pessimism, Sontag maintains, stems from this constitutive lack of freedom, this “implicit denial that the complexity of meanings discoverable in the inner life indicates the presence of genuine variety and contrast.”10 This suppression of variety, contrast, conflict, pluralism, and so on proves integral to our understanding of how Sontag mobilizes this term “hermeneutics” in “Against Interpretation.” In turn, it gives us a clue as to how one might “interpret” this equally important and unexplained term: “erotics.”
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III. Fascinating Feminism
In the following chapter of Freud, “Sexuality and Domination,” Sontag’s central critique lies in Freud’s anti-intellectual, anti-cultural view of women and the resulting split of mind and body along gender lines: men representing rational thought and intellectual activity, women representing the sensual and primal. Of the forms in which misogyny manifests itself in nineteenth-century rationalist thought, she writes: “a division of the sensual from the intellectual capacities is presumed. Freud’s view is plainly [that …]: women are erotic hoarders in the male economy of culture. In the strife between sensuality and culture, women represent the senses.”11 On the one hand, then, lies a conception of interpretation reducing variety/uniqueness/difference to the order of the same. On the other hand lies a dangerous division of mind/body, intellect/sense that grounds itself in sexist presuppositions. Fifteen years later, in her essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), these two strands will merge. The thrust of Sontag’s critique lies in showing how fascist aesthetics depends precisely on the erasure of singularity and on the relegation of women to the sexual. She writes,
Fascist aesthetics […] take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things […]. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever-swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, “virile” posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamourizes death.12
And a bit further down:
The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse. […] Fascist aesthetics is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in. […] the fascist style at its best is Art Deco, with its sharp lines and blunt massing of material, its petrified eroticism.13
Fascism’s rationalist creed, which necessitates mastery over the irrational, sexual, erotic force embodied by women, corresponds to Sontag’s characterization of Freud’s own implacable rationalism: “In his polite and profound misogyny, the rationalist Freud is confirmed: men must come to terms with the sexual and overcome it. His special theory of female sexuality is equivalent to the general message that sexuality must be neither denied nor thwarted, but mastered.”14 The emphasis on this insidious opposition between the rational/masculine/containment of force against the irrational/feminine/erotic force is one of the central feminist insights of Sontag’s early thinking, which extended well beyond Freud to include the longer tradition in which he participates: “That the great critical figures in modern philosophy, literature, and psychology—Nietzsche, Lawrence, Freud—were misogynists is a fact the significance of which has not yet been properly assessed.”15 “Fascinating Fascism” assesses the significance of such misogyny and its complicated legacy.
It’s from this perspective that we can reread Sontag’s (in)famous exchange with Adrienne Rich, reprinted in On Women, in which Sontag accuses Rich and a certain dominant strain of feminism of the compulsion to repeat the same error. In response to Rich’s lament that Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” seems “more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a felt reality—her own—interpreted by a keen mind” and that “One is simply eager to see this woman’s mind working out of a deeper complexity, informed by emotional grounding; and this has not yet proven to be the case,”16 Sontag writes that while she does not distance herself from feminism writ large, she does
distance [herself] from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (“intellectual exercise”) and emotion (“felt reality”). For precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment) is also one of the roots of fascism—what [she] was trying to expose in [her] argument about Riefenstahl.17
Once again we find the repetition of this antithesis between the rational and sensual that—and this is Sontag’s point—is co-opted by both “progressive” and “reactionary” ideological positionalities alike, thus undermining the difference between them. “Being very attached to the benefits of pluralism in the arts and of factionalism in politics,” Sontag writes, “I’ve grown allergic to the words ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive.’”18
What are we to make, then, of Sontag’s insistence in “Against Interpretation,” precisely, on the division of sensory, felt experience and the intellect? She can’t simply be advocating for sensory experience at the expense of intellectual activity, because as we see in her earliest writings on Freud and her later, more fully-developed articulations on feminism and fascism, this split carries with it a heavy burden of misogynist baggage. In a statement that would seem to reverse the claims about the state of culture that we find in “Against Interpretation,” Sontag asserts in “The Salmagundi Interview” (1975) that:
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. An intelligence which aims at the definitive resolution (that is, suppression) of conflict, which justifies manipulation […] is not my normative idea of intelligence.19
Whether the intellect’s hypertrophy in 1964 or its degradation in 1975, we recognize the consistent critique of Freudian hermeneutics that binds these two seemingly-opposed claims: a static intelligence that aims at definitive resolution and the suppression of conflict at the expense of an active one, which promotes difference and movement (the movement of dialectics, of desimplification). It’s this form of activity that I think we can with some confidence call an erotic one.
Sontag’s erotics, against both Freudian hermeneutics and fascist aesthetics—which obliterate plurality (and, by extension freedom) and rest on a tradition that relegates women to the position of static, primal sensuality—would be something like a “felt intelligence” as articulated in her essays on women: the “normative virtues of the intellect” as critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying, “its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment.” Felt intelligence, passionate detachment, critical tentativeness, Sontag’s erotics opens onto a landscape of generative contradictions that, above all, resist resolution and thus the “petrified eroticism” which, when reading “Against Interpretation” in light of Freud and On Women, reveals itself to be at the root of fascism, Freudianism, and (certain strands of) feminism alike.
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Endnotes
- Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), 122-123.
- Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 103.
- Philip Reiff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 105.
- Moser, Sontag, 129.
- Ibid.
- Susan Sontag, “The Salmagundi Interview,” in On Women, ed. David Rieff (London: Penguin Random House UK), 158.
- Though she has been accused of being a “bad” feminist. See two recent reviews of On Women, in which Sontag’s mode of thinking alongside and against contemporary feminism is attacked as “unsisterly,” “reluctant,” and exemplary of her own “internalized sexism”: “the reluctant feminist” and “some sister she was….”.
- Reiff, Freud, 138.
- Ibid. 145. In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag describes in different terms this same symbolist methodology of finding equivalences: “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? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?” (5)
- Reiff, Freud, 143.
- Ibid., 183.
- Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in On Women, 124-125.
- Ibid., 127-128.
- Reiff, Freud, 183.
- Ibid., 182.
- Adrienne Rich, “Feminism and Fascism,” in On Women, 143.
- Susan Sontag, “Feminism and Fascism,” in On Women, 151.
- Sontag, “The Salmagundi Interview,” 161.
- Ibid. 181.
Nell Wasserstrom