The same ‘zone-Concept’

Certain New York School artists played a decisive role in Sontag's acceptance of the post-philosophic metamorphosis of philosophy into a formally heterogeneous discourse. They helped her embrace the precariousness of a cultural expanse, symbolised by the city environment, where the philosopher is one with the archetype of the solitary artist lost in the crowd, where thinking and writing are experienced as a pressure coming from the outside: ‘I write what I can: that is, what's given to me and what seems worth writing, by me’ (‘Singleness’ 259)

Paul Thek (1933–88) was the first decisive influence in this transition. Sontag met him not long after leaving graduate school, in 1959, and they were close until about 1965, when she started to gravitate more towards Jasper Johns. What went on between Thek and Sontag has all the nature of a collaboration. For a while they were a struggling pair, and formed a ‘school’ of two, united by a meditation on the work of art in the age of technological reproduction. Thek's daring search for meaning encouraged Sontag to veer towards a more experimental position (the thinker as writer). The proximity to the artist and his practice kindled her desire to make a new contribution to criticism, to redraw its relation with art. Against Interpretation is dedicated to Paul Thek. The dedication reads ‘for Paul Thek’ – ‘for’ rather than ‘to’. Rather than addressing herself to the artist, the author is making him a gift of her essays: they are a homage, thus not necessarily to be read by him but to be had and kept. The implication is that the essays have somehow come into existence thanks to him. The gift places Sontag's project, ‘against interpretation’, on the side of Thek's practice.

The slogan championed a view of meaning freed from all restrictions that bears similarities with Jacques Derrida's decentring or dissemination of meaning, while her emphasis on surfaces may even suggest the alternative spatio-temporal plane of différance, in which there is no point of origin for the understanding of meaning.