(4) CAMILLE PAGLIA:

SEXUAL PERSONAE: ART & DECADENCE FROM NEFERTITI TO EMILY DICKINSON (1990)

Men are from Apollo and women are from Dionysus – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Pag!

Camille Paglia that is – neo-Dionysian and prose-poet provocateur par excellence.

Her mythic milkshake of Frazer and Freud brings all the boys – and girls – to the yard!

She out-Nietzsches Nietzsche with uberman AND uberwoman, even if the latter is a bit of a bitch-goddess, to borrow from William James. Mind you, her uberman is also a creature of extremes – “there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper”.

But no one speaks better about herself – and most things really – than the consummate prose-stylist who is Camille Paglia.

“That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness….”

Or of her book that is her magnum opus and my top ten entry accordingly, Sexual Personae – a book rejected by at least seven different publishers as too hot to handle before it was published by Yale University Press – “it was intended to please no one and offend everyone”. In other words, my kind of book.

“In the book, Paglia argues that human nature has an inherently Dionysian or chthonic aspect, especially in regard to sexuality…Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.”

Or in other words, Apollo is boring but practical and Dionysus is damn good fun or hot slice of crazy.

“The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them”. Mmm…palpate. Hail to the p0rnocracy!

Apart from her Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, Paglia also celebrates the Christian-pagan dichotomy – with the latter flourishing in art, eroticism and popular culture.

She believes that the “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics” and that sex and nature are “brutal pagan forces.”

RATING: 4 STARS****

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