This cluster is based on a roundtable that took place at the European Society for the Study of English conference (ESSE) at the University of Lausanne in August 2024. The roundtable proposed to reread Sontag’s manifesto “Against Interpretation” on the occasion of its 60th anniversary and in light of two recent publications on her oeuvre: Benjamin Moser’s new biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), and the new collection of her essays, On Women (Picador 2023). Our aim in returning to this polemical text was twofold. First, we wanted to mine its prescience, as a sort of ur-text, in relation to current debates in the field of literary studies about various kinds of reading and interpretive practices (surface, distant, symptomatic, reparative, experimental). Second, we wanted to consider it in relation to her engagement with feminism. This roundtable thus broadly sought to bring together the politics of interpretation and the politics of gender and sexuality.
With these common texts in mind, each participant was asked to draw on a passage they selected from “Against Interpretation.” The hope was that these responses would thus speak to one another while at the same time reflect each contributor’s individual research interests/disciplinary methodologies. Despite our divergent approaches—which include perspectives from psychoanalysis, art history, film studies, literary theory, and gender studies—the contributions in this cluster nevertheless share a central concern, which was brought to our attention thanks to an excellent question from one of our audience members: what are the social and communal implications of Sontag’s text?
Each intervention, ordered in this cluster according to its selected passage, addresses itself to this question more or less directly. Davida Fernández-Barkan focuses on the affective properties of contemporary embodied performance, contextualizing Sontag’s essay within the performance art movement of the 1960s and the history of ritual from which it emerges. Julia Straub questions the relation between the A/author and their community of readers in our time of social media and the profusion of “content creation,” in which the author’s endless capacity to provide commentary on their work transforms them into a “hypercooperative author.” Simon Swift engages sociality through the concept (and aesthetic practice) of the “mistake,” positioning Sontag within a lineage that stretches from the Romantic poets to Hitchcock and D. A. Miller in order to ask whether mistakes in works of art lead to something communal and generative, or to something antisocial and death-driven. Sofie Belulhi explores whether and how Sontag’s text partakes in contemporary critical and artistic trends that foreground descriptive practices, leading her ultimately to explore the relational and social dynamics of description itself. Finally, my contribution focuses on the ethical dimension of Sontag’s “erotics” by tracing her turn “against Freud” to an earlier text, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), in order to clarify the stakes, for Sontag, of challenging his particular mode of “hermeneutics.”
What began in theory as an exploration of the politics of reading and gender ended in fact as an inquiry into the relation between the making and critiquing of art and what Sontag’s essay has at age 60 to tell us about the possibility of collective forms of aesthetic experience and knowledge production. This emphasis on sociality reflects well the roundtable and cluster formats—the point of both being to put into practice communal forms of intellectual life.
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All citations of “Against Interpretation” in this cluster refer to Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009).
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Nell Wasserstrom