The Study Of Susan Sontag's Critical Theory

It's a Susan Sontag's famous saying: In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. Against interpretation is not only a thorough rebellion to theory about content of art, but also a post-metaphysics anti-hypostasis from the point of view of philosophy. Art is mainly form, and new sensibility of art are expand by the new form, so the erotics of art emphasizes the form and therefore sensibility, it's a loud shout to the ear of sensibility. There are some likeness between erotics of art and aesthetical liberation of Eros of H.Marcuse. As a base of life, eros finally walks to an end with aesthetics, that's freedom. Form and sensibility are also two powerful weapon for Sontag to use for criticizing.Sontag's Against interpretation means fighting against interpretation which is a kind of conceptional interpretation, especially sociological and psychologic one-to-one interpretation, also a opposition to excessive idea. And contextual consistency is limit of hermeneutics.There were some characteristics in traditional category of form which easily arose substantial metaphor, to speak of style is one way of speaking about the totality of a work of art. "Stylization" is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does make the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form. So Sontag's theory of style also is a theory of form. " Yet it is evident that stylized art, palpably an art of excess, lacking harmoniousness ,can never be of the very greatest kind." We can conclude that Sontag stand by the side of avant-garde movement for she has camp taste. Susan Sontag emphasize autonomy and particularity of art, but in the end, unfortunately her point makes for extreme formlism.Among the knowledge, morality and art, Sontag's idea is that art's distinctive feature is that they give rise not to conceptual knowledge but to something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgement in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something(Iike a fact or a moral judgement) in itself.If morality is so understood-as one of the achievement of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world-it becomes clear that no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness, which is aesthetic experience. Only when works of art are reduced to statements which propose a specific content, and when morality is identified with a particular morality -only then can a work of art be thought to undermine morality. Art become anti-art when it oversteps the bounds of expressing of life and heart after...