Interest in Susan Sontag has grown in recent years. As I complete this book, two new books on her have just come out: the first, an intimate portrait, the second, a biography translated from the German. Not surprisingly, her life draws attention. It is a fascinating example of the formation of the public intellectual in modernity. With the publication of two volumes of her journals we have been given access to an extraordinary document of that formationformation. The conflicting desires for knowledge and experience, which for Sontag the woman translated into a constant oscillation between the mind and the body, writing and life; the use of the body and sexuality to accede to intellectual illumination; the city as the new topography of philosophical truth; the vertiginous overlap of being and seeming, of individual self and self-fashioned public identity – all these motifs are woven together in an absorbing story that is not Sontag's alone but is representative of many. She has never appeared more as a public intellectual than in her journals, in that representative struggle to create herself.

This book, however, is neither an intimate portrait nor a biography. It is an in-depth study of Susan Sontag's thought, concentrating on her contribution to literary criticism. Her career as a public intellectual parallels the transformation of contemporary literary criticism and the rise of theory. Sontag was a pioneer in proposing a new critical theory. Strangely, however, her intervention remains largely understudied. While her slogan ‘against interpretation’ has become part and parcel of her celebrity persona, the meaning of that project seems to remain peripheral – even foreign – to the movement we have come to call ‘theory’, where, instead, it fully belongs.