With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation, in
1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and
political transformation. What is important now, she wrote, is to recover our
senses . . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. She would
remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films
of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at
the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and
pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran.