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Sexual Personae: Arte y decadencia desde Nefertiti a Emily Dickinson (Deusto)
La sexualidad y el erotismo, dice Camille Paglia en esta apasionante obra, es el lugar en el que se cruzan la naturaleza y la cultura. Lo cual produce de manera inevitable conflictos. Muchas veces, la teoría feminista los ha simplificado, y ha pensado que bastaba con reajustar la sociedad, establecer la igualdad sexual y aclarar las funciones de cada sexo para que reinaran la felicidad y la armonía.
La realidad es mucho más complicada. Y para demostrarlo, Paglia emprende un recorrido por la gran cultura occidental. Por estas páginas pasan los poemas de Lord Byron, las esculturas renacentistas más apolíneas, las obras de teatro de Shakespeare, las decadentes pinturas orientalistas, la crueldad del Marqués de Sade, la Mona Lisa de Leonardo Da Vinci, vídeos (un tanto pornográficos) de Madonna y el carisma sexual de Elvis Presley. Todo ello ilustra, con su belleza y su carácter a veces amenazante, de qué hablamos cuando hablamos de sexo y cuáles son sus máscaras.
Con una mezcla de crítica de arte, talento narrativo, incursiones en las religiones judía y cristiana y el paganismo, y una amplitud de miras que supera a la de cualquier ideología, Paglia reconstruye nuestra civilización con una osadía sin precedentes.
Sexual Personae es una guerra de guerrillas cargada de erudición contra los lugares comunes más complacientes sobre el sexo y su lugar en la cultura, y también una celebración de su poder oscuro.
1937 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1990
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About the author
Camille Paglia
29 books1,214 followersCamille Anna Paglia is an American social critic, author and teacher. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, became a bestseller. She is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."
She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 414 reviews
February 4, 2017
Few books have roused in me the same mixture of confusion and stimulation as this bizarre doorstop of passionate, un-PC artistic engagement. Paglia, as an iconoclastic feminist who hates feminism, might have been co-opted by the right in the way that, say, Christina Hoff Sommers was co-opted; but this fate was precluded by her conservative-repellant persona of pro-drug, porn-mad lesbianism. So, unclaimed and unwanted by any special interest groups, she relishes her position as a universal provocateuse, and seizes every opportunity to suggest that potential allies might instead like to go fuck themselves. Paglia comes at you from so far out of left-field that she's actually wandered off the field altogether, and is now yelling at you from way off in the car park somewhere, gesticulating with a rabid look in her eye like someone trying to shift copies of The Watchtower outside a Tube station.
Those who can't see past her gender politics – this is a populous group, as you'll see from other reviews – are missing out on a lot of remarkable readings here, which can be genuinely radical in a way that ‘orthodox’ gender theory so often isn't. But seeing that far does require some heavy squinting (abandon metaphor!) for anyone who finds gender essentialism deeply irritating, as I tend to. ‘Let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the terrible duality of gender,’ she coaxes. Given her own lifestyle, she seems a unlikely cheerleader for the concept. But for Paglia this gender duality is mythic, archetypal: men stand for rationality and society, while women are in league with the dangerous natural world, that ‘fetid organic life that Wordsworth taught us to call pretty.’ She follows this logic to some eyebrow-raising conclusions:
For the first couple of hundred pages, I went back and forth on whether I thought that she really believed this stuff. Sometimes she seems to be talking about the psychological concepts of MAN and WOMAN, but at other times she seems to mean plain old real-life men and women. As a man, one reads passages like the following not so much in appreciation as in shock, so rarely is this kind of thing now met with:
This goes both ways – whence her famous pronouncement, also from Sexual Personae, that ‘There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper’. Exceptions to all of Paglia's edicts (Hadrian in his review talks of ‘her many broad Nietzschean ukases’, which is perfect) spring readily to mind, but they don't seem to damage her theories. She considers women like Myra Hindley or Emily Dickinson not to be challenging the limits of their gender but rather to be exhibiting, in their different ways, a kind of hermaphrodism.
The argument seems circular. But to read Paglia, you have to be pragmatic. Forget about whether she's a visionary or a monster, and ask instead: does this approach open up new and productive ways to see the works of literature and art she's discussing? In my case, the answer was a sporadic but resounding ‘yes’. It will be impossible, now, to read The Faerie Queene without being overwhelmed by visions of Paglia's Spenserian enclosed garden, ‘slippery with onanistic spillage’; nor will I ever read Emily Dickinson in the same way having succumbed to the convincing portrait of her here as ‘the female Sade’, whose poems are ‘the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist’.
By turns enthralled and annoyed, I never stopped being forced to look at stuff I thought I knew in ways that I had never considered. Take Blake's ‘Infant Joy’, for instance, a lyric I had previously thought of as pretty insubstantial fare:
Paglia calls this ‘sadomasochistic’! Her argument – that focusing on a baby's innocence heightens your awareness of its vulnerability in various interesting ways – might be argued with, but it completely changed the way I see the poem. At other times, casting around for connections, she doesn't hesitate to pluck examples from pop culture in a manner that can take your breath away. Simeon Solomon's Until the Day Breaks (1869):
In this ‘androgynous brother and sister’, Paglia sees an anticipation of ‘Jean Cocteau's homoerotic ephebes’, which is fair enough and had me thinking already. But then she goes on to suggest that ‘their dreamy incestuous intimacy is learnedly reproduced in Madonna's superb peep-show video, “Open Your Heart” (1986)’—
—a link that would occur to few other critics, and is unlikely to have been committed to paper by anyone else! It is mad but, somehow, weirdly mind-expanding.
Often, to be sure, her judgements strike you as nonsensical. Her staccato sentences and florid imagery combine to form bizarre, other-worldly epigrams: so pity in Henry James is ‘a grisly fleur du mal of phallic elasticity’; Hester's breasts in The Scarlet Letter are called ‘sacs of engorged significance’; compound German nouns are described orgiastically as ‘spawning prefixes and suffixes and hyphenated by dildos’. These rococo phrases come at you scatter-gun style, one after the other, in disconnected leaps of illogic that can be wearying. (Bryan Appleyard, interviewing Paglia for a magazine, talked about ‘scrabbling for purchase on the baroque cliff face of her mind’.) Often, her argument rests only on an assertion she herself made previously, so that the effect is like someone in a Looney Tunes cartoon crossing a chasm on a bridge they're dismantling behind them to assemble in front. The overall impression is not so much of an argument mounting from one example to another in cumulative force, but rather a crazed, proliferating web of connections leaping from one creative artist to another, metastasising unpredictably across time and space. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; but when it does, the effect is exhilarating.
What I found especially wonderful was not so much her ideas about sex in terms of gender roles, but rather sex in terms of arousal, desire, objectification, fantasy. I am someone who believes, with Klimt, that ‘Alle Kunst ist erotisch’, and have tried ham-fistedly to make this argument in several below-the-line discussions here on Goodreads. In Camille Paglia I have now found my high priestess. ‘Sex is poetry; poetry is sex,’ she says. And, ‘Emotion without eroticism is impossible.’ And especially, ‘Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism has admitted.’ This is something she shows again and again in places where I would certainly fear to tread.
Despite the longueurs, despite all the phallic and vulval non-sequiturs, despite the sense of cocaine-fuelled '80s logorrhoea – despite all that, what Sexual Personae really brings is something that is too often missing from criticism. Enthusiasm! Camille Paglia may be mad, but she is absolutely passionate. She talks about decadent literature or symbolist painting not like it's an academic exercise, but like it's a matter of life or death. For some people, it is. And though I spent a lot of time shouting objections at the page, I have never been sent back to my bookshelves as often or as frantically as I was while I was reading this bonkers, hormonal dissertation.
Those who can't see past her gender politics – this is a populous group, as you'll see from other reviews – are missing out on a lot of remarkable readings here, which can be genuinely radical in a way that ‘orthodox’ gender theory so often isn't. But seeing that far does require some heavy squinting (abandon metaphor!) for anyone who finds gender essentialism deeply irritating, as I tend to. ‘Let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the terrible duality of gender,’ she coaxes. Given her own lifestyle, she seems a unlikely cheerleader for the concept. But for Paglia this gender duality is mythic, archetypal: men stand for rationality and society, while women are in league with the dangerous natural world, that ‘fetid organic life that Wordsworth taught us to call pretty.’ She follows this logic to some eyebrow-raising conclusions:
The historic repugnance to women has a rational basis: disgust is reason's proper response to the grossness of procreative nature.
For the first couple of hundred pages, I went back and forth on whether I thought that she really believed this stuff. Sometimes she seems to be talking about the psychological concepts of MAN and WOMAN, but at other times she seems to mean plain old real-life men and women. As a man, one reads passages like the following not so much in appreciation as in shock, so rarely is this kind of thing now met with:
We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics, and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.
This goes both ways – whence her famous pronouncement, also from Sexual Personae, that ‘There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper’. Exceptions to all of Paglia's edicts (Hadrian in his review talks of ‘her many broad Nietzschean ukases’, which is perfect) spring readily to mind, but they don't seem to damage her theories. She considers women like Myra Hindley or Emily Dickinson not to be challenging the limits of their gender but rather to be exhibiting, in their different ways, a kind of hermaphrodism.
The argument seems circular. But to read Paglia, you have to be pragmatic. Forget about whether she's a visionary or a monster, and ask instead: does this approach open up new and productive ways to see the works of literature and art she's discussing? In my case, the answer was a sporadic but resounding ‘yes’. It will be impossible, now, to read The Faerie Queene without being overwhelmed by visions of Paglia's Spenserian enclosed garden, ‘slippery with onanistic spillage’; nor will I ever read Emily Dickinson in the same way having succumbed to the convincing portrait of her here as ‘the female Sade’, whose poems are ‘the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist’.
By turns enthralled and annoyed, I never stopped being forced to look at stuff I thought I knew in ways that I had never considered. Take Blake's ‘Infant Joy’, for instance, a lyric I had previously thought of as pretty insubstantial fare:
I have no name
I am but two days old.—
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name,—
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
Paglia calls this ‘sadomasochistic’! Her argument – that focusing on a baby's innocence heightens your awareness of its vulnerability in various interesting ways – might be argued with, but it completely changed the way I see the poem. At other times, casting around for connections, she doesn't hesitate to pluck examples from pop culture in a manner that can take your breath away. Simeon Solomon's Until the Day Breaks (1869):
In this ‘androgynous brother and sister’, Paglia sees an anticipation of ‘Jean Cocteau's homoerotic ephebes’, which is fair enough and had me thinking already. But then she goes on to suggest that ‘their dreamy incestuous intimacy is learnedly reproduced in Madonna's superb peep-show video, “Open Your Heart” (1986)’—
—a link that would occur to few other critics, and is unlikely to have been committed to paper by anyone else! It is mad but, somehow, weirdly mind-expanding.
Often, to be sure, her judgements strike you as nonsensical. Her staccato sentences and florid imagery combine to form bizarre, other-worldly epigrams: so pity in Henry James is ‘a grisly fleur du mal of phallic elasticity’; Hester's breasts in The Scarlet Letter are called ‘sacs of engorged significance’; compound German nouns are described orgiastically as ‘spawning prefixes and suffixes and hyphenated by dildos’. These rococo phrases come at you scatter-gun style, one after the other, in disconnected leaps of illogic that can be wearying. (Bryan Appleyard, interviewing Paglia for a magazine, talked about ‘scrabbling for purchase on the baroque cliff face of her mind’.) Often, her argument rests only on an assertion she herself made previously, so that the effect is like someone in a Looney Tunes cartoon crossing a chasm on a bridge they're dismantling behind them to assemble in front. The overall impression is not so much of an argument mounting from one example to another in cumulative force, but rather a crazed, proliferating web of connections leaping from one creative artist to another, metastasising unpredictably across time and space. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; but when it does, the effect is exhilarating.
What I found especially wonderful was not so much her ideas about sex in terms of gender roles, but rather sex in terms of arousal, desire, objectification, fantasy. I am someone who believes, with Klimt, that ‘Alle Kunst ist erotisch’, and have tried ham-fistedly to make this argument in several below-the-line discussions here on Goodreads. In Camille Paglia I have now found my high priestess. ‘Sex is poetry; poetry is sex,’ she says. And, ‘Emotion without eroticism is impossible.’ And especially, ‘Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism has admitted.’ This is something she shows again and again in places where I would certainly fear to tread.
Despite the longueurs, despite all the phallic and vulval non-sequiturs, despite the sense of cocaine-fuelled '80s logorrhoea – despite all that, what Sexual Personae really brings is something that is too often missing from criticism. Enthusiasm! Camille Paglia may be mad, but she is absolutely passionate. She talks about decadent literature or symbolist painting not like it's an academic exercise, but like it's a matter of life or death. For some people, it is. And though I spent a lot of time shouting objections at the page, I have never been sent back to my bookshelves as often or as frantically as I was while I was reading this bonkers, hormonal dissertation.
January 2, 2016
Paglia - as a friend of mine once said to her face at a signing - is a gateway drug. I got ahold of this in high school and it functioned as a syllabus for the next few years. She showed me how raunchy, perverse and gorgeously gilded Spenser can be. She turned me on to Gautier, Pater, and, above all others, to Baudelaire. I continue to return to her readings of Byron and Wilde. This book is nigh-impossible to read cover to cover. Don't try it. The prose is an unceasingly percussive hammering of vivid declaratives. Better to jump around, sampling chapters here and there. Paglia would have more of a reputation as a stylist if someone would extract and publish in a separate volume all the paragraph-sized prose poems scattered throughout this work of criticism. Pater's famous purpureus pannus on the Mona Lisa is tame stuff next to Paglia's peaens to Egyptian cat-worship and that bust of Nefertiti.
March 10, 2026
As another reviewer said Paglia is like a "gateway drug". Read her and you’re on your way down the yellow brick road of subversive decadence. Whether you agree with her or not, you will be challenged to think. Camille isn’t looking for a gaggle of cheerleaders, she's looking for an intellectual bar brawl.
June 8, 2011
camille paglia: so misguided! despite the sheer idiocy behind many of her theses, she is a compelling, exuberant author, very readable, and definitely brings a certain kind of gusto and an often unique viewpoint to many classic authors. her rather operatic take on emily dickinson is particularly enjoyable. if this book in any way acts as a gateway drug to classic literature, then i suppose there is something positive to it all. that said, and exciting writing style aside, her reductive view of the genders and her scorn for anything that she finds to be based on intellectual analysis is appalling and also pretty sad. the world is a much bigger place than you realize, camille! there is room for all sorts of things to have value, even michel foucault.
July 15, 2014
I will usually read the books I'm given and this one was from a coworker at Loyola University Chicago. I doubt if she, a believing Catholic, read it herself. She likely would have been even more offended than I was.
With the exception of overt, practiced racism and sexism, I believe I'm hard to offend, but Paglia's two-faced book did it. On the one hand, she tries to be sexy, treating the literary canon as resting on a seething bed of academically neglected eroticism. On the other hand, she writes about this eroticism with a prurient tone as if it were loathsome. I got the impression of a very neurotic author, divided within herself. Given the book's success, I felt little pity for the author. She's doing fine. The culture which would make such a work a best-seller, however, would appear to be in deep trouble. The offense reaction, of course, suggests that I share the cultural disease.
For what it's worth, if the book hadn't been successful, if it had been the work of some closeted intellectual, I would have been more prone to notice its virtues. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, was a neurotic racist, but I've defended his horror fiction. (Interesting that Paglia associates in my mind with neurotic horror fiction.)
With the exception of overt, practiced racism and sexism, I believe I'm hard to offend, but Paglia's two-faced book did it. On the one hand, she tries to be sexy, treating the literary canon as resting on a seething bed of academically neglected eroticism. On the other hand, she writes about this eroticism with a prurient tone as if it were loathsome. I got the impression of a very neurotic author, divided within herself. Given the book's success, I felt little pity for the author. She's doing fine. The culture which would make such a work a best-seller, however, would appear to be in deep trouble. The offense reaction, of course, suggests that I share the cultural disease.
For what it's worth, if the book hadn't been successful, if it had been the work of some closeted intellectual, I would have been more prone to notice its virtues. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, was a neurotic racist, but I've defended his horror fiction. (Interesting that Paglia associates in my mind with neurotic horror fiction.)
Read
April 11, 2008OK, so her theoretical basis is absolute bullshit, combining personal bias, excessive Freudianism, and reactionary sexual politics into an obnoxious combination. However, the analyses themselves are quite wonderful. Having sat through any number of dry college lectures on the deemed classics of the Western canon, it was nice to see their dark, chthonic qualities exposed. This doesn't have the academic rigor that I was expecting, but it was a very fun read, and now I feel like going back through Spenser and Emily Dickinson and picking out darkly psychosexual cues.
March 22, 2008
This book was horrible. Paglia's worldview is bizarrely Freudian. Paglia writes only the loosest and most unsatisfactory of evidence for any of her assertions. She ignores the lack of evidence for the majority of psychodynamic theory in general and for the "family romance" in particular. When you ignore empirical evidence all you have left is what resonates for you personally, which Freudian theory does not. Though she even picks through psychodynamic theory. The book makes me want to shake her. Paglia writes well, but the danger of her compelling prose is that people may believe her.
December 17, 2018
This book is one of my all-time favorites and my favorite of Paglia's. I prefer Paglia the "academic" as opposed to the "media whore" (i.e. as she has expressed herself in her column for Salon.com) as I am at least 50% in disagreement with her political / geopolitical and often right-leaning Libertarian point of view. In "Sexual Personae" she presents herself in full-on scholarly mode, in a way that she has not, unfortunately, repeated since this work was published. I have read this book at least twice; it is rare for me as a reader to return to any text I've read previously. The essence of the work can be summarized via the blurb that appears on the back cover of the paperback edition of "Sexual Personae": "..... [makes] a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature" ("daemonic" being a term that appears frequently in this book). Also memorable are Paglia's theory of the artist's metaphysical "sex change" via his / her work of art (a là Coleridge's lesbian vampire / daemon) and the chapter covering Edmund Spenser's "The Fairie Queene", a product of the English Renaissance that I had been unaware of until my discovery of "Sexual Personae" and which I have still not read. "Sexual Personae" also aided me in refining my understanding of the terms "Apollonian" and "Dionysian", in a way that no other writer has besides Nietzsche.
Most importantly, it's Paglia's actual writing that draws me in. Whether or not what she is writing can be substantiated academically, that does not concern me. I inherently believe that Paglia knows what she's talking about. Thus I will close with this quote from page 55 of Chapter 2 ("The Birth of the Western Eye") concerning the statuette "Venus of Willendorf" [circa 30,000 B.C.]:
"Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention of agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night."
Most importantly, it's Paglia's actual writing that draws me in. Whether or not what she is writing can be substantiated academically, that does not concern me. I inherently believe that Paglia knows what she's talking about. Thus I will close with this quote from page 55 of Chapter 2 ("The Birth of the Western Eye") concerning the statuette "Venus of Willendorf" [circa 30,000 B.C.]:
"Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention of agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night."
July 23, 2018
This is a scam. It's not smart, and it's not good in the slightiest. It's just Camille Paglia rambling. If you can tolerate this, good for you. I will not torture myself. I stopped at the first 100 pages. She's a LOT like Jordan Peterson, making baseless psychological claims and yet, these get taken as truth by illiterate people.
She's also heavily Freudian and contradictory. This book is borderline male worship. If that sounded like a radical feminist complaint to you, think of the disgusting ways in which she worships pedophilia, abortion, pornography and the nauseous feeling she gets and spreads about the pregnant body (saying pregnancy itself is solipsistic and devilish).
She even gets away with saying men are potential rapists, and there is nothing you can do because rape, as terrible as it is, is part of nature. And the talks about how man is superior just because of his genitalia. For a self professed homosexual, she is absolutely obsessed with penises. And I was told that this woman defended values! (I know she doesn't). I get the idea that many people get blinded by the psychologist discourse and don't even process what they're reading.
I'm nauseated at her selective reading of history, literature, paganism and Christianity to support things that don't make sense. Rationality and rationalism aren't the same and neither are exclusive to men. Among the women of tragedy she just took out the ones that stood because of being evil, and from there she concluded that men are afraid of women, particularly their mothers. Antigone didn't count as an upholder of law and reason, apparently! (luckily, I don't think she'll ramble about Madonna here, but I was dreading the moment as she goes back and forth to make "poignant" contemporary commentary).
She's quick to laud capitalism because it gave women the possibility to think like men and write obnoxious books, perhaps she should reflect on this sentiment a bit more for how much it describes her and this book in particular. For all her oppositon to transvestites, transsexualism or however you call it, she seems to endorse it a great deal so as long as it retains "shamanic" qualities. If men think this woman 'gets' them, then I'm truly sorry for them.
She's also heavily Freudian and contradictory. This book is borderline male worship. If that sounded like a radical feminist complaint to you, think of the disgusting ways in which she worships pedophilia, abortion, pornography and the nauseous feeling she gets and spreads about the pregnant body (saying pregnancy itself is solipsistic and devilish).
She even gets away with saying men are potential rapists, and there is nothing you can do because rape, as terrible as it is, is part of nature. And the talks about how man is superior just because of his genitalia. For a self professed homosexual, she is absolutely obsessed with penises. And I was told that this woman defended values! (I know she doesn't). I get the idea that many people get blinded by the psychologist discourse and don't even process what they're reading.
I'm nauseated at her selective reading of history, literature, paganism and Christianity to support things that don't make sense. Rationality and rationalism aren't the same and neither are exclusive to men. Among the women of tragedy she just took out the ones that stood because of being evil, and from there she concluded that men are afraid of women, particularly their mothers. Antigone didn't count as an upholder of law and reason, apparently! (luckily, I don't think she'll ramble about Madonna here, but I was dreading the moment as she goes back and forth to make "poignant" contemporary commentary).
She's quick to laud capitalism because it gave women the possibility to think like men and write obnoxious books, perhaps she should reflect on this sentiment a bit more for how much it describes her and this book in particular. For all her oppositon to transvestites, transsexualism or however you call it, she seems to endorse it a great deal so as long as it retains "shamanic" qualities. If men think this woman 'gets' them, then I'm truly sorry for them.
May 30, 2009
She's a lunatic and a pagan, but very helpful.
October 22, 2018
"Once you get into it, it isn't as hard as it looks" and "It changed my life" are phrases we often invoke to help stress the importance of important books we'd like to see more people read. Well, in the case of Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, first published in 1990, those phrases are no mere cliches -- they matter, and this book matters.
It is important to understand that Paglia earned her academic "chops" teaching students at an art academy. She was no mere Ivy League theorist, with analysis consisting of meta upon meta. She wrote to be understood -- and this book is not only her breakthrough, but in many cases her summa.
I read SEXUAL PERSONAE with difficulty for the first time when it was first published, loved every minute of it, and found application to my life. I re-read it (with a great deal more ease) about five years after that, again loved every minute of it, and found more application. It changed and expanded the world I live in, as well as how I think about "art." One key to Paglia's thought is that art does not exist without those who understand and appreciate it, and that people who appreciate it find that it informs them well beyond just the boundaries of "the picture" or "the sculpture." I can't tell you how many times I've pondered her equation of Lord Byron with Elvis Presley -- both "Byronic" figures, and here's the rub -- no mere camp or parlor game.
If you want a history of pictorial art, the Sister Wendy books are fine. If you want an academic history of art, there are plenty of college textbooks, used and new, out there. If you want to know what academics think about what other academics think about what artistic endeavors they deem currently fashionable -- by all means get your ticket punched for Harvard, Princeton or Columbia. But if you want to gain greater insight about how art works in the world -- including yours and mine -- buy this book and read it all. It starts with Nefertiti, moves on through numerous thinkers to Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson, and was published in the age of AIDS. Even folks whose reaction is less enthusiastic than mine come away a lot smarter!
SEXUAL PERSONAE was, is, and deserves to remain a classic. "Classic" can be a cliche, too, but in this case I mean it.
--October 21, 2018
Allen Smalling ("ALLEN") for GR
It is important to understand that Paglia earned her academic "chops" teaching students at an art academy. She was no mere Ivy League theorist, with analysis consisting of meta upon meta. She wrote to be understood -- and this book is not only her breakthrough, but in many cases her summa.
I read SEXUAL PERSONAE with difficulty for the first time when it was first published, loved every minute of it, and found application to my life. I re-read it (with a great deal more ease) about five years after that, again loved every minute of it, and found more application. It changed and expanded the world I live in, as well as how I think about "art." One key to Paglia's thought is that art does not exist without those who understand and appreciate it, and that people who appreciate it find that it informs them well beyond just the boundaries of "the picture" or "the sculpture." I can't tell you how many times I've pondered her equation of Lord Byron with Elvis Presley -- both "Byronic" figures, and here's the rub -- no mere camp or parlor game.
If you want a history of pictorial art, the Sister Wendy books are fine. If you want an academic history of art, there are plenty of college textbooks, used and new, out there. If you want to know what academics think about what other academics think about what artistic endeavors they deem currently fashionable -- by all means get your ticket punched for Harvard, Princeton or Columbia. But if you want to gain greater insight about how art works in the world -- including yours and mine -- buy this book and read it all. It starts with Nefertiti, moves on through numerous thinkers to Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson, and was published in the age of AIDS. Even folks whose reaction is less enthusiastic than mine come away a lot smarter!
SEXUAL PERSONAE was, is, and deserves to remain a classic. "Classic" can be a cliche, too, but in this case I mean it.
--October 21, 2018
Allen Smalling ("ALLEN") for GR
July 23, 2008
Ah, Camille Paglia. What can I say that hasn't already been said? This book is well-written and absorbing, but if you are a female with half a backbone at all, you will want to rip it into pieces, piss on it, then set it on fire (which I guess won't be very effective if you just pissed on it). Paglia's main thesis is that men are the movers and shakers, and women are slothful baby producers. Civilation wouldn't exist without men because women have no drive to do anything except sit around and wait for men to bring them food and build stuff for them. Then where, I ask, did Paglia get the motivation to write this very long, detailed, and well-researched book? The irony is like where Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970's was running a big organization devoted to convincing women that they should be stay-at-home moms.
I gave this book 4 stars because, as I said, it is well-written and sucks you in. It enrages me, but I guess that's worth something.
NB: I read this book a long time ago, so maybe my opinion would be different now. Guess I'll need to reread it.
I gave this book 4 stars because, as I said, it is well-written and sucks you in. It enrages me, but I guess that's worth something.
NB: I read this book a long time ago, so maybe my opinion would be different now. Guess I'll need to reread it.
Read
October 25, 2017Kitap Cinsellik, Şiddet, ya da Doğa ve Sanat başlıklı Camille Paglia'nın sanat ve insanlık tarihine dair temel fikirlerinin yer aldığı bölüm ile başlıyor, ondan sonraki ilk üç bölüm de biraz sanat tarihinin gidişatı üzerinden bu fikirlerin tartışıldığı bölümler. İlk dört bölümden sonra da genellikle bir ya da birkaç yazar üzerinden daha dar alanda tartışmaya başlıyor. Yani aslında kitap ilk bölümde sunulan fikirlerin yazar yada yazarlar öznelinde tartışılması şeklinde ilerliyor. Bu nedenle benim tavsiyem bu kitabı ilk bölümü ya da ilk üç bölümü okuyarak kitaba başlamak ve sonrasında ilginiz olan yazarlara dair bölümleri okuyarak ilerlemek. Ben kitabı baştan başlayıp sırayla okumak niyetiyle elime almıştım ve bir bölümde o kadar tıkandım ki sonra aylarca kitabı elime almadım. Daha sonra ilgilendiğim yazarlara dair bölümleri okuyarak ilerlediğimde çok daha rahat ve keyifli okudum.
Bence bahsettiğim şekilde de olsa mutlaka okunması gereken bir kitap çünkü farklı bir eleştirel bakış sunuyor okuyucuya. Mesela ben Moby Dick'e dair fikirlerini okurken kitabı ne kadar tek yönlü bir bakışla okumuş olduğumu fark ettim. Fikirleri fazla iddialı ve hatta fütursuz gelebilir kimilerine ama okuduğu yazarla çarpışmak da gayet verimli bir şey olabiliyor okuyucu için.
Feminist kuramla ilgilenenlere de ayrıca tavsiyemdir.
Bence bahsettiğim şekilde de olsa mutlaka okunması gereken bir kitap çünkü farklı bir eleştirel bakış sunuyor okuyucuya. Mesela ben Moby Dick'e dair fikirlerini okurken kitabı ne kadar tek yönlü bir bakışla okumuş olduğumu fark ettim. Fikirleri fazla iddialı ve hatta fütursuz gelebilir kimilerine ama okuduğu yazarla çarpışmak da gayet verimli bir şey olabiliyor okuyucu için.
Feminist kuramla ilgilenenlere de ayrıca tavsiyemdir.
April 29, 2017
يستحق كتاب التناقضات المثير للجدل العلامة الكاملة.
قرأته مترجمًا في طبعته العربية الصادرة عن دار التنوير.
كتاب مرهق، لكنه يعوضك بمضمونه الشائق.
هو دعوة للتفكير والتأمل في سيرة الجنس والرغبات عبر أعمال مبدعين كبار، مع تحليل أدبي ونفسي قد تتفق أو تختلف معه لكنه جهد مقدر. غاصت المؤلفة عميقًا وعادت باللآلئ.
فقط لي ملاحظات بسيطة على الترجمة في هذا الكتاب الذي يقع في نحو ٩٥٠ صفحة، ربما كان أولها أن اسم المؤلفة كاميل باليا وليس كاميلي، وأن نيقولاي غوغول لا يُكتب عادة غوغل، كما أن الغورغون كأسطورة لا تُكتب الغرغون.
غير أن هذا لا يمنع من الإشادة بهذا الكتاب الممتع وترجمته للعربية.
قرأته مترجمًا في طبعته العربية الصادرة عن دار التنوير.
كتاب مرهق، لكنه يعوضك بمضمونه الشائق.
هو دعوة للتفكير والتأمل في سيرة الجنس والرغبات عبر أعمال مبدعين كبار، مع تحليل أدبي ونفسي قد تتفق أو تختلف معه لكنه جهد مقدر. غاصت المؤلفة عميقًا وعادت باللآلئ.
فقط لي ملاحظات بسيطة على الترجمة في هذا الكتاب الذي يقع في نحو ٩٥٠ صفحة، ربما كان أولها أن اسم المؤلفة كاميل باليا وليس كاميلي، وأن نيقولاي غوغول لا يُكتب عادة غوغل، كما أن الغورغون كأسطورة لا تُكتب الغرغون.
غير أن هذا لا يمنع من الإشادة بهذا الكتاب الممتع وترجمته للعربية.
November 23, 2009
Camille Paglia's completely obnoxious and over-the-line and I only agree with her about 1/4 of the time. But when I do, I feel like she's slit open the deepest rivers of impassioned, tangled instincts I have about intellectual women and the utter foolishness of much of the feminist movement - and the dangers of being a woman who lives too far above the waist. Paglia nails it on these topics. Even tho' I'm sure if I ever sat next to her at a dinner party I'd end up wanting to slap her.
March 5, 2017
"Shock jock" of academia and belligerence more than a groundbreaking new theoretical synthesis of sex and gender, and about 30 years after a similar radical-feminist sexuality was propounded by several others. I did have a chill of excitement when I read this, though, back in the day... As others have noted, hard to tell if more brilliant or crazy (not knocking either - whatever gets you through the night.)
For my money, Donna Haraway's book that came out the same year said much more about nature, society, gender and sex.
For my money, Donna Haraway's book that came out the same year said much more about nature, society, gender and sex.
November 11, 2023
A bit of an academic show-off, and later, a celebrity-hound, with some really f*cked-up ideas about the importance of Madonna, Paglia penned her most important (and best-written) book here. Won't say it changed my life, but I couldn't stop talking about for weeks after I finished it. Her take on Emily Dickinson as a super-sadist is dead on the money. This will be read long after everyone has forgotten the pseudo-feminist junk that was popular when this book debuted. You know who I'm talking about.
Edit 9.22.19:
My admiration for this book continues to grow. Love her or hate her, the woman was on to something with her exploration of the classic Apollonian/Dionysian split in human nature. That's undeniable. Sexual Personae directly carries on Nietzche's work in the Birth of Tragedy, and has much much more to say on the topic.
And the way she says it is equally important in my mind, and accounts in large part to the success of this book--which, given its girth and weighty subject matter, was a dark horse best-seller in its time. Simply put, she doesn't write like a philosopher or an academic, and that's a very good thing. She has something important to say, and she wants you to understand.
This is a high crime and tantamont to treason in the intellectual world, and I'll leave it at that. I have strong feelings on the subject, but run the risk of a full rant meltdown against "professional" intellectuals if I say another word. Suffice to say, give me the intellectual oddballs, weirdos and outlaws any day of the week. All the rest is noise.
Time for a reread.
‐-------------‐----
Reread in progress, just finished first chapter, Birth of the Western Eye. Her prose is just fantastic. Why dont more people write this way? Short, pithy sentences, bristling with the brio that comes from knowing your material inside and out and not being afraid of having fun with it.
A quick scan of the the current news indicates Paglia is having run-ins with the woke crowd, including calls for her grandfathered tenure to be revoked. Not surprising. She's outspoken. But I'll bet anything none of her critics have actually read this book. It's a piece of dynamite and it doesnt lend itself easily to any specific ideology or political stance.
More later.
Edit 9.22.19:
My admiration for this book continues to grow. Love her or hate her, the woman was on to something with her exploration of the classic Apollonian/Dionysian split in human nature. That's undeniable. Sexual Personae directly carries on Nietzche's work in the Birth of Tragedy, and has much much more to say on the topic.
And the way she says it is equally important in my mind, and accounts in large part to the success of this book--which, given its girth and weighty subject matter, was a dark horse best-seller in its time. Simply put, she doesn't write like a philosopher or an academic, and that's a very good thing. She has something important to say, and she wants you to understand.
This is a high crime and tantamont to treason in the intellectual world, and I'll leave it at that. I have strong feelings on the subject, but run the risk of a full rant meltdown against "professional" intellectuals if I say another word. Suffice to say, give me the intellectual oddballs, weirdos and outlaws any day of the week. All the rest is noise.
Time for a reread.
‐-------------‐----
Reread in progress, just finished first chapter, Birth of the Western Eye. Her prose is just fantastic. Why dont more people write this way? Short, pithy sentences, bristling with the brio that comes from knowing your material inside and out and not being afraid of having fun with it.
A quick scan of the the current news indicates Paglia is having run-ins with the woke crowd, including calls for her grandfathered tenure to be revoked. Not surprising. She's outspoken. But I'll bet anything none of her critics have actually read this book. It's a piece of dynamite and it doesnt lend itself easily to any specific ideology or political stance.
More later.
June 1, 2022
honestly could not stand this book. Paglia is a good writer for sure, and obviously very intelligent, but this is… one of the most self-hating theoretical books i’ve ever read. the entire novel is essentially an argument as to why woman = nature = evil and man = civilization = good. her repeated descriptors of women include “foaming”, “spilling”, defining female bodies as things that “ooze, drip, or hang in fleshy sacs”. she then contrasts this with male bodies, which she frequently describes as “angular”, “chiseled”, “architectural”, “perfected”. her gross generalizations of gender barely hold up enough to support her thesis, which is hard to discern seeing as this book was a lot of rambling, grad-student nonsense, grasping at straws hoping to strike gold in word vomit.
also she said she’s a fan of Sade, that alone is enough for me to stop reading.
also she said she’s a fan of Sade, that alone is enough for me to stop reading.
November 1, 2014
A clearly insane person. A clearly fierce intellect. (It is clear that her intellect is fierce; not that the fierceness possesses great clarity.) I won't be putting this down unless it's to throw it in front of an oncoming train and/or soak it with my sad, sad, non-transcendent womanly piss.
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Cut to 3/4 of the way through. Bored now. Nice troll, tho.
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Cut to 3/4 of the way through. Bored now. Nice troll, tho.
February 3, 2011
I don't even know where to begin with this, so I won't. Oddly, Sexual Personae explained my life to me. I was shocked. What does any of this have to do with me, but it did. Paglia blew me away with her non-namby-pamby feminism that upset all the liberals.
August 20, 2016
An incomparable, unique, and often ridiculous study of sexuality and literature. I took my time reading this as there is a huge amount of information to absorb, and Paglia's style (made up of brief but incredibly pungent sentences) is wearying, although I don't mean that as a criticism. In the contrary, it gives the reader all the more reason to savor this radically different take on Emily Dickinson, The Fearie Queen, Shakespeare, Whitman, and so many more. One needn't agree with all or even most of what she says to find this work fascinating. The book is most valuable for its aesthetic and analytical purposes. Certainly that is Paglia's approach. Whether or not one agrees with the theory that Emily Dickinson was Amherst's Madame de Sade, Walt Whitman was a hermaphrodite, or any of the other sensational statements in Sexual Personae is immaterial. I enjoyed this work as I have enjoyed few other works of modern literary criticism, and in this way Paglia is in league with her mentor Harold Bloom.
When reviewing Sexual Personae, one must acknowledge the egregious social conclusions that Paglia draws, mostly in the first chapter. Do I agree with her? Not in the slightest. I am actually inclined to agree, on issues of politics, with the Feminists Paglia so often attacks. So why do I return to Paglia's book? For the same reason I return to Stephen Dedalus's lectures on Shakespeare in Ulysses. They may be bullshit theories, but they are riveting bullshit theories.
You'll enjoy this much more if you ignore the Women's Studies/Art Criticism tag on the back and read this as the book Myra Breckenridge always threatened to write.
When reviewing Sexual Personae, one must acknowledge the egregious social conclusions that Paglia draws, mostly in the first chapter. Do I agree with her? Not in the slightest. I am actually inclined to agree, on issues of politics, with the Feminists Paglia so often attacks. So why do I return to Paglia's book? For the same reason I return to Stephen Dedalus's lectures on Shakespeare in Ulysses. They may be bullshit theories, but they are riveting bullshit theories.
You'll enjoy this much more if you ignore the Women's Studies/Art Criticism tag on the back and read this as the book Myra Breckenridge always threatened to write.
January 18, 2022
This book is quite infuriating at times, because we have here an absolutist author who doesn’t enjoy caveats and seems to get quite a rush out of turning the written word into a bloodbath. Lesbian Ayn Rand as an eldritch horror. I absolutely adore Paglia’s wild swings between visionary and monster, if only mostly because tepid apologists and handwringing wingers are so tedious and prevalent these days and most everyone else remaining seems to be an uncultured, science-hating, death-cult Neanderthal.
What we have here is a bit of a lunatic journal, raw surreal dream imagery scrawled into a madly unapologetic pagan thesis with all the vicious conviction of Crowley but infinitely more humanity, empathy & pathos. Crowley’s a real jerk. Paglia’s just a feisty scrapper. Emily Dickinson on a bad day with brass knuckles and a boot knife. With every page I swung between wild vacillations of adoration, bewilderment and horror, with an occasional disapproving cluck. And it felt great, and the garden of my psyche is now bursting to the brim with Belthane blossoming and all afire with stars, playing a mental game of darts with a human viper.
So, as Warwick’s review states, “…to read Paglia, you have to be pragmatic. Forget about whether she's a visionary or a monster, and ask instead: does this approach open up new and productive ways to see the works of literature and art she's discussing?”
Guaranteed, it will refresh the reader’s perspective, even if that is irritating or disturbing. As I see it, this work transcends “irritating”, “disturbing”, “right” or “wrong”; it’s a work of art that shakes up the stale world and challenges preconceptions, and in doing so, engages the mind - if not to become convinced, then at least to find a deeper understanding of the reasons one doesn’t agree, to justify one’s own paradigm more soundly. It’s a narrative, a mythology, and I’m thrilled to have unearthed this sharp obsidian arrowhead even amid the pseudosentient grey ooze of global corporate oligarchy, bubble wrapped children & sterile consumer goods. It is an artifact of resistance against inoffensive mediocrity.
What we have here is a bit of a lunatic journal, raw surreal dream imagery scrawled into a madly unapologetic pagan thesis with all the vicious conviction of Crowley but infinitely more humanity, empathy & pathos. Crowley’s a real jerk. Paglia’s just a feisty scrapper. Emily Dickinson on a bad day with brass knuckles and a boot knife. With every page I swung between wild vacillations of adoration, bewilderment and horror, with an occasional disapproving cluck. And it felt great, and the garden of my psyche is now bursting to the brim with Belthane blossoming and all afire with stars, playing a mental game of darts with a human viper.
So, as Warwick’s review states, “…to read Paglia, you have to be pragmatic. Forget about whether she's a visionary or a monster, and ask instead: does this approach open up new and productive ways to see the works of literature and art she's discussing?”
Guaranteed, it will refresh the reader’s perspective, even if that is irritating or disturbing. As I see it, this work transcends “irritating”, “disturbing”, “right” or “wrong”; it’s a work of art that shakes up the stale world and challenges preconceptions, and in doing so, engages the mind - if not to become convinced, then at least to find a deeper understanding of the reasons one doesn’t agree, to justify one’s own paradigm more soundly. It’s a narrative, a mythology, and I’m thrilled to have unearthed this sharp obsidian arrowhead even amid the pseudosentient grey ooze of global corporate oligarchy, bubble wrapped children & sterile consumer goods. It is an artifact of resistance against inoffensive mediocrity.
December 20, 2016
She inadvertantly turned me into the psychopath reader I am today, but doing a line by line interpretation of "Stairway To Heaven" in Guitar World about 10 years ago. This close reading of a classic, unavoidable song blew me right away and impressed me, showing me that brainy reading is something even I could do.
There's a lot of repetiton here, I mean how many times can you hear about the gilded masochistic whatever in repressive societal repressiveness until you get sick and tired?
Nonetheless, I'm loving her primal erudition, her campiness, and her common sense. She's Italian, dontcha know? She loves the internet, Harold Bloom, pop culture, and midaeval epic poetry. My kind of chick.
But there's smart, whip-cracking turns of phrase and a ballsy iconoclasm which never relents and stays interesting as you go through the mountains of text.
I love her.
Sex and Death: two great tastes that go great together!
March 25, 2012
Lots of people have issues with women and femininity. Not many, however, spend 750 pages pretending that they're deep.
September 14, 2020
I'm grateful for the existence of this book, and Paglia, one of those people overflowing with words and ideas. Whether this book is exactly true is hard to say. Paglia is astoundingly knowledgeable, but her attempt to schematize mythology, art history, Comp Lit and pop culture, all while refuting the received ideas of the humanities and modern feminism is a tall order for anyone, and not really testable in any way. (In particular, her hand-wavy explanations of the success of more recent pop culture through a given persona and some psychoanalysis seems like a cheap trick.) But the parallels she finds in recurrent "sexual personae" (the phrase comes from Bergman's 1996 film) throughout history are very tempting.
The most blatant statement of her ideas on gender is tucked away near the book's end. (Blatant, related to "babbling" first appears in Spenser, one of the many interesting etymologies in the book: minion, grotesque, matriculate.)
A corollary of this is that sexual liberation and fulfillment are inextricably linked to sexual violence and gender separation. Society thus protects us from some of the bad, but at the cost of some good. Paglia strongly opposes the Rousseauist idea that people are fundamentally good, as well as the belief that social progress will necessarily make us happier. She notes that decadence explicitly rejects the egalitarian ideals of liberalism, something often forgotten today by academics who assume that the people they teach must have had good (or at least palatable) politics.
A lot of her insights she connects to her personal background: as a child of the wild 60s, as an Italian-American, and we can assume, as a lesbian, although the book focuses more on gay men (she approvingly quotes Mae West: "Lesbians are not humorous persons"; they are sinister and vampiric, like Geraldine in Coleridge's Christobel). She pushes against cold Protestantism, and stresses the pagan spirit in Catholicism and Western culture in general.
Paglia extensively summarises from de Sade, whose capacity to shock even in 2020 is astounding. For her, Blake continues the Sadean tradition in English literature as Dickinson does in American(!) Among German Romantics, Goethe and Kleist similarly carry over the decadent tradition. And back in England, Coleridge is to Wordsworth as Sade is to Rousseau - the dark, sexual response to an attempt to enthrone nature over desire. From Coleridge the line leads to Poe, Baudelaire, Moreau, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Huysmans, Beardsley, Baudelaire and Wilde (the latter of whom has roots in, of all people, Lewis Carroll). And there is so much more here: Keats, Shelley, Byron
The most blatant statement of her ideas on gender is tucked away near the book's end. (Blatant, related to "babbling" first appears in Spenser, one of the many interesting etymologies in the book: minion, grotesque, matriculate.)
Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men’s egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. Women have a more accurate sense of reality; they are physically and spiritually more complete.Or elsewhere
There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.For Paglia, the Nietzschian dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian is mirrored by a conflict between celestial rationalism and a chthonic slimy ooze of decadent and hedonist nature, which are roughly represented by the male and the female. Of course within these there are many disparate personae: there are masculine women and feminine men (a decoupling of gender and sex Paglia admits to getting from Simone de Beauvoir), such as the "beautiful boy" (a mute, "autistic" archetype) found equally in religious poetry and man-boy affairs, which includes Petrarch's Laura, Dante's Beatrice, Tadzio from Death in Venice, and Alcibiades; or the "cheerfully sadistic" Emily Dickinson (a perfect description). She says that there is no evidence for any historical matriarchy, calling it a feminist fantasy.
A corollary of this is that sexual liberation and fulfillment are inextricably linked to sexual violence and gender separation. Society thus protects us from some of the bad, but at the cost of some good. Paglia strongly opposes the Rousseauist idea that people are fundamentally good, as well as the belief that social progress will necessarily make us happier. She notes that decadence explicitly rejects the egalitarian ideals of liberalism, something often forgotten today by academics who assume that the people they teach must have had good (or at least palatable) politics.
A lot of her insights she connects to her personal background: as a child of the wild 60s, as an Italian-American, and we can assume, as a lesbian, although the book focuses more on gay men (she approvingly quotes Mae West: "Lesbians are not humorous persons"; they are sinister and vampiric, like Geraldine in Coleridge's Christobel). She pushes against cold Protestantism, and stresses the pagan spirit in Catholicism and Western culture in general.
People who dismiss astrology do so out of either ignorance or rationalism. Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts.Or fascinatingly
John Anthony West claims that the four principal elements of modern organic chemistry, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, closely correspond in function to fire, earth, air, and water.Beginning from Nefertiti and the Venus of Willendorf, Paglia draws her thread from pagan religion (secretly embedded in the bloodstream of Catholicism) to the dawn of the Renaissance. Her first major focus is Spenser ("Spenser made English literature world-class only by abandoning Chaucer and eradicating his influence"), and she spends a lot of time analysing the Faerie Queene. Next in her pantheon is Shakespeare, with Antony and Cleopatra as the marquee play (Kent Christensen suggest Tina Turner for the female lead), not King Lear. If Spenser is Apollonian control, Shakespeare is Dionysian decadence; and among the Metaphysical poets, Donne is Shakespeare's heir, while Herbert is Spenser's. ("If you want to know how Sappho sounds in Greek, don’t read her pedestrian translators; read Herbert.")
Paglia extensively summarises from de Sade, whose capacity to shock even in 2020 is astounding. For her, Blake continues the Sadean tradition in English literature as Dickinson does in American(!) Among German Romantics, Goethe and Kleist similarly carry over the decadent tradition. And back in England, Coleridge is to Wordsworth as Sade is to Rousseau - the dark, sexual response to an attempt to enthrone nature over desire. From Coleridge the line leads to Poe, Baudelaire, Moreau, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Huysmans, Beardsley, Baudelaire and Wilde (the latter of whom has roots in, of all people, Lewis Carroll). And there is so much more here: Keats, Shelley, Byron
Byron, the Romantic exile, did England a favor. Energy and beauty together are burning, godlike, destructive. Byron created the youth-cult that would sweep Elvis Presley to uncomfortable fame. In our affluent commercial culture, this man of beauty was able to ignore politics and build his empire elsewhere...Mass media act as a barrier protecting politics, which would otherwise be unbalanced by the entrance of men of epochal narcissistic glamour. Today’s Byronic man of beauty is a Presley who dominates the imagination, not a Buckingham who disorders a stateBalzac, Théophile Gautier, Emily Brontë, Walter Pater...finally ending in Dickinson:
Early in this book, I traced the ancient evolution from femaleness to femininity, which I defended as an artifice of high culture. Dickinson performs a stunning operation on these terms. She accepts femininity but denies femaleness, sweeping it out of her cosmos.Paglia is a torrent of knowledge, always finding new connections and ideas. Even if she isn't right about everything, she is an inspirational part of the academic world, that rare scholar who can excite and infuriate a jaded public with her intellectuality.
January 23, 2026
It is odd this book took me so long to read, as the prose stings and sings and is never dull. One reason is Paglia is stubbornly sui generis, which drew the ire of people from a broad spectrum in her day. Every few pages had me thinking for or against. I do think the feminists were at least correct to call her a misogynist of sorts. Rarely has the feminine been bashed in better prose or in more biting insights, and sadly most feminists failed to answer her. Likely out of fear. A person who can string together a sentence like she does would scare me as an opponent. In the end, she is better at describing the power and the horror of ego-driven Apollonian male creativity. We have lost that in our era, and as such, our art is rather mediocre as compared to the high points of the past. For example, The Exorcist was only possible with Friedkin's crazed behavior that would today not be tolerated. Those who wish to take this out of art despise genius, and none of their platitudes have any answer for that. Paglia does get it, perhaps too well.
Yet, fascinating as it is, Paglia's thoughts wander too much and are at their worst when they are broad. I also think Dickinson broke her. That part came across to me as nonsense, the raved anger of a person who cannot understand what others see, and it repulses her. Yet, the book should be read by all means. Few books of its kind are both entertaining and challenging without falling into the turgid phrases of the likes of Kant.
Yet, fascinating as it is, Paglia's thoughts wander too much and are at their worst when they are broad. I also think Dickinson broke her. That part came across to me as nonsense, the raved anger of a person who cannot understand what others see, and it repulses her. Yet, the book should be read by all means. Few books of its kind are both entertaining and challenging without falling into the turgid phrases of the likes of Kant.
November 12, 2019
Paglia is always reaching and is always sex obsessed.
She’s downright wrong in places: chillingsworth and Dimmesdale are locked in a sexual sadomasochistic battle? Twain’s descent into gloom is his fear of the female? Or perhaps the death of his daughter and his bankruptcy played a part.
But her passion, her intellectual precocity is immense. Her mind’s ability to cross connect poets and authors and myths across cultures and times is daunting and fearless.
She’s a flame headed avatar who one imagines penning this entire work in one sustained orgasmic blast.
She’s got mad skills.
She’s downright wrong in places: chillingsworth and Dimmesdale are locked in a sexual sadomasochistic battle? Twain’s descent into gloom is his fear of the female? Or perhaps the death of his daughter and his bankruptcy played a part.
But her passion, her intellectual precocity is immense. Her mind’s ability to cross connect poets and authors and myths across cultures and times is daunting and fearless.
She’s a flame headed avatar who one imagines penning this entire work in one sustained orgasmic blast.
She’s got mad skills.
November 18, 2010
I stopped reading after 150 pages of unsupported theory, grad-school hackery, over-reliance on the myths of the Greek pantheon to "explain" art and gender behavior, and severe overuse of the word "chthonian." Paglia's not and never is boring, but after I found myself rolling my eyes and flipping ahead to see if I was going to get a break from the above-mentioned complaints, I figured I wasn't going to make it through the remaining 600 pages.
May 31, 2016
هذا الكتاب يلخص صراع تاريخي بين الرغبة و العقل بين الابولونية و الديونيسوسية بين الديانات السماوية و الديانة الوثنية الفكرة تبدو فكرة أحادية قد لا تقنع الكثيرين لكن كاميلي باليا تبدو واثقة مما تخبرنا به من خلال وضعها لتاريخ الفن والأدب ككل تحت المجهر..النجمة للموضوع لكن طريقة تحليلها للأعمال تستحق خمس نجمات حتى لو كنا نراها بشكل مختلف..يقرأ بحذر.
January 22, 2017
Czemuż, o czemuż nie mogę wstawić ujemnej gwiazdki?
Cała ta praca może posłużyć jako przykład ujmowania „natury” jako chwytu retorycznego, znalezienia sposobu na esencjonalistyczne sankcjonowanie określonego porządku po tym, jak kategoria boga przestała spełniać swoją funkcję na tym polu. To Deleuze czy Derrida pisał, że nie ma natury, są tylko jej konsekwencje? Dla Pagli konsekwencją natury są heteroseksistowskie dywagacje, które trudno traktować inaczej niż materiał masturbacyjny prawicowego publicysty. Jej „metodologia”, jeśli można tak to nazwać w tym przypadku, składa się z powierzchownego freudyzmu (żebym musiała bronić Freuda… już tylko dlatego czuję się brudna po lekturze, mniejsza o treści samej książki), wulgarnego darwinizmu i garści wyrwanych z kontekstu cytatów z Nietzschego. O tym, że jest wybiórcza, wtórna, nudna i głupia chyba nie warto wspominać, bo to widać na pierwszy rzut oka. Pod wieloma względami Paglia to po prostu Harold Bloom, który się nie cenzoruje, co bardzo ułatwia mi pracę. I chociaż zwykle daleka jestem od tego typu rzutowania treści na autorkę – Pagli mogę tylko współczuć życia seksualnego. Swoją drogą, zarzut o wtórność Pagli przeszkadzać nie musi, biorąc pod uwagę, że święcie wierzy w każdy stereotyp, jaki wyprodukowała heteroseksistowska kultura. Jeśli „Sexual Personae” jest imponująca objętościowo to właśnie dlatego, że stanowi leksykon takich stereotypów.
Niektóre recenzje na Goodreaders sugerowały, że metodologia jest o kant dupy potłuc, ale analizy są ciekawe. Od tej pory mam powody myśleć, że na Goodresers „ciekawe” to synonim „grafomańskie”. To jak lovechild Eliadego i bloga erotycznego trzynastolatki słuchającej Tokyo Hotel. Nie powiem, w pewien sposób to mistyczne przeżycie. Tak jak wpadnięcie do szamba może być zmieniającym życie doświadczeniem. Efekt jest taki, że mam nieustane mdłości odkąd zabrałam się za lekturę i mój poziom ogólnej mizantropii podskoczył o kilka pasków, zupełnie jakbym siedziała na czasie na wp. Idę się kurować Netflixem i nie wiem, kiedy zdołam znowu być funkcjonalną istotą ludzką.
Cała ta praca może posłużyć jako przykład ujmowania „natury” jako chwytu retorycznego, znalezienia sposobu na esencjonalistyczne sankcjonowanie określonego porządku po tym, jak kategoria boga przestała spełniać swoją funkcję na tym polu. To Deleuze czy Derrida pisał, że nie ma natury, są tylko jej konsekwencje? Dla Pagli konsekwencją natury są heteroseksistowskie dywagacje, które trudno traktować inaczej niż materiał masturbacyjny prawicowego publicysty. Jej „metodologia”, jeśli można tak to nazwać w tym przypadku, składa się z powierzchownego freudyzmu (żebym musiała bronić Freuda… już tylko dlatego czuję się brudna po lekturze, mniejsza o treści samej książki), wulgarnego darwinizmu i garści wyrwanych z kontekstu cytatów z Nietzschego. O tym, że jest wybiórcza, wtórna, nudna i głupia chyba nie warto wspominać, bo to widać na pierwszy rzut oka. Pod wieloma względami Paglia to po prostu Harold Bloom, który się nie cenzoruje, co bardzo ułatwia mi pracę. I chociaż zwykle daleka jestem od tego typu rzutowania treści na autorkę – Pagli mogę tylko współczuć życia seksualnego. Swoją drogą, zarzut o wtórność Pagli przeszkadzać nie musi, biorąc pod uwagę, że święcie wierzy w każdy stereotyp, jaki wyprodukowała heteroseksistowska kultura. Jeśli „Sexual Personae” jest imponująca objętościowo to właśnie dlatego, że stanowi leksykon takich stereotypów.
Niektóre recenzje na Goodreaders sugerowały, że metodologia jest o kant dupy potłuc, ale analizy są ciekawe. Od tej pory mam powody myśleć, że na Goodresers „ciekawe” to synonim „grafomańskie”. To jak lovechild Eliadego i bloga erotycznego trzynastolatki słuchającej Tokyo Hotel. Nie powiem, w pewien sposób to mistyczne przeżycie. Tak jak wpadnięcie do szamba może być zmieniającym życie doświadczeniem. Efekt jest taki, że mam nieustane mdłości odkąd zabrałam się za lekturę i mój poziom ogólnej mizantropii podskoczył o kilka pasków, zupełnie jakbym siedziała na czasie na wp. Idę się kurować Netflixem i nie wiem, kiedy zdołam znowu być funkcjonalną istotą ludzką.
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