Originally published: New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ©1966.

Includes bibliographical references.

Against interpretation -- On style -- The artist as exemplary sufferer -- Simone Weil -- Camus' Notebooks -- Michel Leiris' Manhood -- The anthropologist as hero -- The literary criticism of Georg Lukács -- Sartre's Saint Genet -- Nathalie Sarraute and the novel -- Ionesco -- The death of tragedy -- Going to theater, etc. -- Marat/Sade/Artaud -- Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson -- Godard's Vivre sa vie -- The imagination of disaster -- Jack Smith's Flaming creatures -- Resnais' Muriel -- A note on novels and films -- Piety without content -- Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's Life against death -- Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition -- Notes on "Camp" -- One culture and the new sensibility -- Afterword: thirty years later.