Camille Paglia

[FrazzleAndTheWolf]

she hates women and says we arent capable of creativity,

[aarspears]

what a luminary! if only we had video cameras back in 1992 when she was just "bursting onto the scene"(btw macwoolf she does not support palin she just loves what she represents: a downhome, non-academic, non-pc, fun loving and perky women who respects the rural aesthetic)

[macwoof]

she just wants to be a star. any one with intelligence could not would not support palin, unless....she is hot for sarah and thinks she stands a chance.

[Jujuman2003]

Paglia lost all credibility ever since she looked at Sarah Palin and threw every logical argument out the window so she could lick those Alaskan pussy lips. Paglia is a hysterical woman infatuated with a bimbo.

[vastedda99]

COME ON;The ONLY thing you FEMFASCISTS can KNOCK Dr. Paglia on is this ALLEGED Child Rape remark.Ignore everything else she says,SMEAR like the SUPREME FEM-NAZI BS Artist Gloria Steinem taught how to try to shut up anybody who doesn't go along with the Party Line. BTW,how many of you know Pacifist Anti-Vietnam war Steinem dated Henry Kissinger? Paglia is not only smarter than Stein-Stalin,but a lot funnier and seems to have soul.

[royceicon]

I dig her. Reading Vamps and Tramps right now....

[tirnanog20]

Yes, Paglia is a witty and erudite scholar of vast learning. (in her written work). Her TV persona is limited by TV's simplistic soundbyte culture. Every argument is flattened and simplified, and Paglia allows herself to be provoked into polarized silliness. She wants to be in showbiz, no place for a serious scholar. Nowhere in her serious writing does she say that "child rape is OK" Her book "Sexual Personae" is brilliant, a tough read. The rest is just soundbyte celebrity culture.She's no hero

[molloyx]

Paglia is indeed a welcome anti-dote to the grim, gnomic lab technicians who have, by and large, held so many American universities hostage for the past 20 years or so. And while I am sometimes astonished by some of those she celebrates [ Joni Mitchell in BREAK, BLOW, BURN...Madonna in Personae and [ yikes] Sarah Palin in a recent edition of Slate] it is certain she is a sucker for the eternal romance of language.

[CTHULUgreatoldone]

yea cuz we need MORE female authors who advocate CHILD RAPE...support fucked up groups like nambla...make fun of rape victims..yeah she talks really fast in her tv interviews..what kind of amphetamines is she on???

[gatsbygirl20]

I love Paglia's wit, erudition and intellectual guts. (Also her respect for Dylan and the Stones) But I also found Cixous, Kristeva and Derrida provocative theorists. They, and Paglia, have moved the cultural debate forward. Her work was a corrective to the deification of French theorists in the academy. They will all be remembered. The public testing of ideas and the refining of discourse is always good.Paglia herself is in many ways a post-structuralist thinker (without the "obfuscation")

[CTHULUgreatoldone]

so do you also think it is okay tahts he she condones child rape...she is quuoted in a salon magazine interview as saying sex iwth a child as younga s 8 is okay as long as there is no intercourse...how can you justuify that???

[CTHULUgreatoldone]

oh....supporting NMBLA...?tellinga salon magazine reporter that CHILD RAPE is..OKAY to do an dmaking fun of rape victims iswit and intellectual guts??can you explain this???

[shayeagain]

I bet you all are Americans...

[urthogie]

good comeback!

[tages11]

you're right, urthogie, not a great come back. a better comeback would have been this quote from your friend and mine (and certainly camille's), Susan Sontag:

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."

"pc ideologues," 1; reactionaries, 0.

[urthogie]

That's probably her stupidest quote.

[Euripides27]

shayeagain, nobody knows who Helene Cixous is. A lot of people in the western world know who Camille is! You also show your intellectual shortcomings by misrepresenting Camille's view on date rape, which shows that you have NOT read her work (assuming you can read at all). And yes, "P.C. idealogues" DO have disdain for the Western Canon. I had to listen to one professor drone on about how Milton was a sexist pig. She forgot to teach the class Paradise Lost.

[shayeagain]

Hi Euripedes. Since I am illiterate, I will merely outline your line of argument:

A) familiarity with the general public equates with intellectual rigor and relevance.

B) reading Paglia would undo the fact that she endorsed Katie Roiphe's The Morning After and therefore enjoys blaming the victim, which implies that she gets secret pleasure from their rape

C) your "one professor" is representative of all "P.C. idealogues", whatever the hell that means in the first place.

[xgianpatrick]

shayeagain:

Your B point is a garden of non-sequiturs. At any rate, I seriously doubt that either Paglia or Derrida will be remembered even in 50 or 100 years. Both are entirely too yappy (Derrida being by far the more tedious in his yappiness), but at least she delivers coherent and compelling arguments most of the time. Derrida's oblique obfuscations strike me as a bit of smoke and mirrors, and the ratio of words to idea is much too high.

[cinemaman3105]

People have been saying this of Camille for the past 16 years. Most people can't even name any other scholar

[xgianpatrick]

Hardly oblique, Paglia's cultural criticisms are spot on and witty. Her dressing-down of Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi (kack) was brutal and long overdue. Yes, she has her faults, but obfuscation was not one of them, and she drew attention to the sham intellectualism of feminism and academia in the 80's and 90's (alas, it is with us still), and the idiocy of the Andrea Dworkins among us. Love her or hate her, she possesses a knowledge of ancient history and of visual art that is rarely matched.

[cinemaman3105]

AMEN!

[CTHULUgreatoldone]

oh ..supporting NAMBLA and child rape and making fun of RAPE VICTIMS is merely a "fault"wow i bet if she MURDERED someoen..youwoudl stilll defend your hero camille...lol

[matthewelync]

As a professed conservative I am allied in many ways with Camielle's views for she makes sense where many of ther ideaology fall short. She spite's Hillary for many faults and not afraid to back it up. Very straightforward and un-pc. She rocks.

[shayeagain]

I hate this bitch. She loves date rape and should have her lesbian license revoked. She can't hold a candle to someone like Helene Cixous, a *real* intellectual. As for you two, I hope you continue to revel in your paranoid fantasy of the Western canon that is so endangered by people who *gasp* are equally at ease with Milton and the Mahabharata. "P.C. idealogues" don't disdain the "true greatness of the humanities," they disdain your ignorant asses!

[urthogie]

She "loves date rape"? False. She actually suggests that gender feminism has a poor understanding of it. But I guess nuance isn't your cup of tea.

[shayeagain]

Haha, yet Camille has an *excellent* grasp of nuance. I love her *nuanced* readings of poststructuralist thought, i.e. her sweeping dismissals thereof. Two hundred years from now, who will be remembered, Camille Paglia or Jacques Derrida? Also, what is "gender feminism" besides some term that Paglia made up in order to be contrarian and "original"?

[urthogie]

"Two hundred years from now, who will be remembered, Camille Paglia or Jacques Derrida?"

Hopefully, the former, as she isn't po-faced and nonsensical.

"Also, what is "gender feminism" besides some term that Paglia made up in order to be contrarian and "original"?"

Actually, the source of that term is is Christina Hoff Summers.

[shayeagain]

Derrida has made a serious and unerasable contribution to not only literary theory, but all of continental philosophy. Camille Paglia has made a contribution to book publishing, rabble-rousing, American tabloid and talk show discourse, and general sophistry. Her reputation in intellectual history, if it even exists to speak of, will be as ephemeral as this post.

[urthogie]

"Derrida has made a serious and unerasable contribution to not only literary theory, but all of continental philosophy."

Serious? No. Unerasable? I hope not.

[shayeagain]

Also, thanks for the info about the term. Given your usage of "po-faced", I retract my statement that you are American. It's a low blow, I'm aware.

[urthogie]

My being American depends on how you define the term... Anyways, what's so bad about Americans, specifically...?

By the way, I'm not a Paglia fan-boy. I looked at her book about gender/sex in America and she appears to be a self-engrossed media whore with a repetitive writing style. However, when it comes to criticizing the postmodernists cultural relativists in the academy I'm with her all the way, and frankly I think she introduces some fun and logic to many of the things she talks about.

[CTHULUgreatoldone]

fun an dlogic?wiat..is this the same woman hwo has a passage in one of her boooks saying something like..rape is teh same as hot sex...?would you find that amusing if you had ever been or hada family member raped???seems kind of tastelss even if she was just trying to seelll boooks..this woman has no class.

[wayne763]

Paglia will be remembered because of her humour and popular appeal. Derrida is forever confined to the libraries behind the ivory tower. Would Derrida have showed up on Donahue?

[CTHULUgreatoldone]

humour?oh yeah sayinga woman getting is becuz she dressed liek aslut and had it coming..as she says in her boooks..is really PROGRESSIVE.

[HotLotusDNA]

Love her...an intellectual heavyweight who takes on what I call the "PCDBs" (Politically Correct Dyke Bitches) who label the legacy of western culture as nothing but the product of "DWEMs" (Dead White European Males)...nothing against lesbians (Camille is one anyway), but I have a major beef with p.c. ideologues who disdain the true greatness of the humanities. Prof. Paglia takes 'em on and puts these semiotic creampuffs in their place! -- TSM

[Euripides27]

I couldn't agree more! As a current college student seriously contemplating a major in english (like Camille did), I am disgusted at the aggressive way humanities professors attack literature for being written by "DWEMs". Camille, like her mentor Harold Bloom, are great appreciators of literature. Because of this, I am thinking of switching to psychology lest my love for literature be completely eroded away.

[kasyapa]

one of our greatest intellects.