In the promotion of AIDS and its Metaphors, Susan Sontag has expressed irritation, disappointment, and even hurt that her book has been reviewed by experts on science and AIDS rather than as "writing." This is "a literary performance," she insists in one interview, that "has more to do with Emerson than Randy Shilts."' "Imagine," she invites us in another, "M. F. K. Fisher just reviewed for her recipes. First of all M. F. K. Fisher is a writer. Her subject just happens to be food."2 The plausibility of such statements depends on assuming a difference, sharp enough to amount to an opposition, between one entity called writing and another called AIDS. It is not the derisory oyster that secretes the pearl of M. F. K. Fisher's prose, or that can help us estimate its luster. Likewise, the comparison implies, AIDS "just happens to be" the most recent incitement to what should more properly, or "first of all," engage our attention: Susan Sontag's ongoing writing project. The claim for the precession and superiority of form over a content whose main function is to justify the elaboration of artistic or literary devices is of course a familiar one, from Wilde, the Russian formalists, even Sontag's own early manifesto "Against Interpretation." As the case of Wilde best illustrates, however, the argument for the secondariness of content typically surfaces in contexts where the content in question, far from being trivial, enjoys a particular volatility whose ignition would catastrophically overwhelm both personal and public spheres together, obliterating whatever barriers had allowed, or required, them to be kept separate. The intellectually