The essay asks for an erotics of art in place of a hermeneutics, which is a request critics have been interpreting ever since. Sontag was not against thought. She was against the kind that replaces the work with a meaning and then throws the work away. A quotationary practices a small version of the offense she names, every time it prints a line and then explains it. The margin is here so the explanation does not pretend to be the line.