Success Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag doesn’t just defend the right to be wrong; she weaponizes it. The opening clause is a feint of liberal generosity: sure, critics can miss. Everyone misses. But then she tightens the knife. Some mistakes aren’t mere misreads, she argues; they’re diagnostic. A “lapse of judgment” can expose not a bad day but a bad instrument - an inability to feel, register, or recognize what art is doing.

The key word is “sensibility.” Sontag isn’t talking about critics as fact-checkers. She’s talking about critics as people whose taste, attention, and moral imagination form a kind of perceptual apparatus. In her world, criticism is less courtroom and more physiology: your reactions reveal what you’re built to notice. If you consistently respond to complexity with suspicion, or to formal daring with boredom, that’s not an argument you’re making - it’s a temperament you’re advertising.

The subtext is a rebuke to a mid-century critical culture she often sparred with: critics who treated art primarily as a vehicle for messages, moral lessons, or sociological proof. Her broader project (especially in “Against Interpretation”) is to reclaim intensity, surface, and form from the grip of reductive reading habits. So when she says “radical failure,” she’s drawing a line between ordinary error and a deeper incapacity: a sensibility so blunted or dogmatic it can’t meet art on its own terms.

It’s a harsh standard, and deliberately so. Sontag wants criticism to feel consequential again - not a consumer guide, but a test of one’s capacity for attention.