Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

A little bloodthirsty, a little flirtatious, and perfectly Sontag: “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art” doesn’t just complain about bad readings, it indicts a whole cultural reflex. “Revenge” frames interpretation as retaliation, the payback of the theory-minded viewer who can’t stand being moved without being in charge. Art hits first - sensually, irrationally, before you can launder it into concepts. Interpretation, in Sontag’s telling, is the counterpunch that restores the intellect’s authority by converting an experience into a message.

The intent isn’t anti-thinking; it’s anti-domestication. In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Sontag was pushing back against midcentury criticism that treated artworks like encrypted telegrams (“What does it mean?”) rather than events in perception (“What does it do?”). The subtext is power: to interpret is to annex. You take something unruly, ambiguous, embodied, and render it manageable - preferably in the dialect of whatever theory is ascendant. That’s why “revenge” lands: it implies resentment toward art’s capacity to exceed our explanations, to be more than the critic’s vocabulary.

Context matters. Postwar American intellectual life was professionalizing; criticism was becoming a status machine, with psychoanalysis, Marxism, and later structuralism offering ready-made keys. Sontag hears in that an anxiety about pleasure, a suspicion of direct feeling, even a puritanism disguised as sophistication. Her provocation still stings because it targets a familiar temptation: treating art as content to be summarized, when its real affront - and gift - is how stubbornly it resists being reduced to an argument.