Camille Paglia

From Philosopedia

Paglia, Camille (2 Apr 1947 - )

Paglia, an intellectual, democrat, and libertarian who was born in Endicott, New York, is thoroughly conversant with the humanities. She has been described as one who sizzles, whether on the printed page or during appearances on television. A professor of humanities at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, she does not hesitate in her rebelliousness to object to the Establishment’s wrong goals or society’s weaknesses, and when she takes aim she levels her cannons with precision. For example, she is known for her view that a prostitute is “the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one.”

Interviews and Quotations

A lesbian and an atheist, she minces no words and in Vamps and Tramps (1994) wrote,

• I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hardcore gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. Flicking the radio dial in America, one hears bursts of beautiful, spellbinding poetry. But it is neither academics nor contemporary writers who are filling the air with dazzling imagery and profound spiritual truths. Alas for progressive politics, these are the voices of white and black Christian ministers, reading form the Bible. Why have intellectuals abandoned the people? This is the shame of modernism. High Romanticism at least gave poetry as the prize of rebellion and, turning from God, put nature in his place.

She added,

• Everyone in the world should know all the great religions of the world: Hinduism; Buddhism; Greco-Roman and Near Eastern paganism; Judeo-Christianity; Islam, African, North American, and Oceanic tribal cults, pre-Columbia imperial myth. Art, history, and philosophy are intertwined with the evolution of religion. This is the true multiculturalism. The secularism of the Enlightenment was meant to free the mind, not kill the soul. In the spirit of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists and revolutionaries, we must keep church and state separate, even while we preserve the eternal insights and metaphors of religion. Authority belongs to the classroom, not the pulpit.

In “The Bush Look” (28 Feb 2000), Paglia’s column took on the postmodern artists who sneer at religion:

• Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole.

Her Sexual Personae, Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1991), explains that art is a pagan background between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature. She followed this with Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), in which she denounced the women’s movement’s descent into Puritanism. The artist Mapplethorpe, she holds, was the contemporary pagan priest of art. Her fourth book, a study of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, has been published by the British Film Institute in its Film Classics Series.

Of her, Gloria Steinem has said, “Twenty years ago, feminism was blamed for the beef boycott. Now divorce. Feminism isn’t responsible for divorce; marriage is responsible for divorce. What’s important is that we have progressed enough that being a feminist is no longer seen as some fringe activity. It is mainstream enough for anti-feminists like Camille Paglia to need to say they are feminists.”

Paglia is particularly eloquent on the subject of feminism:

• To rescue feminism, we must give religion its due but require it to stay in its place. Again, Judeo-Christianity is only half our tradition. Paganism has other paradigms to offer. The militant virgin goddesses, Athena and Artemis, with their cold autonomy, are heroines of mine. Plato speaks of two Aphrodites, a common one of physical childbirth and the other, the Uranian, patron of spiritual and intellectual influence, specially associated with homoerotic relations. Evasions of nature’s biological imperative are distinctly human. I take the extreme view of that Enlightenment neopagan, the Marquis de Sade, who lauds abortion and sodomy for their bold frustration of mother nature’s relentless fertility. My code of modern Amazonism says that nature’s fascist scheme of menstruation and procreation should be defied, as a gross infringement of woman’s free will.

In many respects, Paglia is the most eloquent speaker on behalf of contemporary secular humanism, although she does not align herself with any particular philosophic movement. A 1960s free speech militant, she alarms prudes and fundamentalists with her enlightened logic, aesthetics, and ethics.

In a 1995 interview with Tim Madigan, Paglia went on record concerning many subjects:

• I hate dogma in any form. I hate it in the Roman Catholic church, which is why I left it twenty-five years ago. I hate it in gay activism and feminism now. Dogma has also taken over the humanities departments in elite schools–poststructuralism and so forth. . . . There’s nothing more dangerous to a liberal democracy than fixed dogma. . . . I’m an atheist but we people of the sixties were very spiritual in our own ways. That is, we abandoned organized religions, but we sought out Hinduism and Buddhism. We were very interested in cross-cultural spiritual experiences. A passage to India, as it were. . . . The Enlightenment turned away from organized religion, but put reason and science in its place. Romanticism rebelled against organized religion, but put nature and art in its place. What has modernism done? It turned against organized religion, and given nothing in its place. . . . There’s two thousand years of developed thought behind Christianity. There’s three thousand years behind Judaism. So, better Jehovah than Foucault. Jehovah at least brings along this incredible work, the Bible. What a great collection of poetry, magnificent, filled with things of spiritual use, whether you believe in God or not. The grandeur and intellectual development of Catholic theology is staggering. Foucault is a fraud; and that’s the diet our best kinds in the elite schools are being fed. It is appalling. The man knew nothing. . . . The overall theme of my work is this: Judeo-Christianity never defeated paganism. Instead, paganism, after the fall of Rome, was driven underground. . . . Postmodernism is a big fancy word for nothing. It is so passé. Let’s get past Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. . . . Most of the women in academe who pretend to be feminists are not. They do not know the history of feminism. . . . My feminism predates the feminism of Gloria Steinem. I go way back. . . . It’s not male hatred of women, but male fear of woman that is the great universal. . . . I have a peculiar way of looking at things, through male eyes. It’s probably because of my bisexual experience. Many of the things I’m saying are obvious, but feminism is so stuck behind its own blinders. One of the worst of these is to constantly see misogyny everywhere. I’m called a misogynist! Does that make any sense? Someone who’s an open lesbian, who’s written on Madonna and Diana and Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy Onassis? I’m constantly writing evocatively of women. . . .

In a speech given at Georgetown University and airing on C-SPAN in November of 1994, she stated "I speak as an atheist" and "I do not believe in god". This she confirmed in a 1995 interview in The Guide:

• I am a sixties social activist. Where there is social injustice I think we have to take strong action to remedy it. But politics should not become a god to us. To me, art transcends all politics. I don't believe in God, I'm an atheist but matters of spirit and of the mind transcend all political affiliations. I would like a balance between art and politics. Everyone who knows anything about me knows that the minute there is a problem, I am out there and I am in people's faces, and I have kicked and punched people, and I was fired from a college my first job for getting in a fist fight.

• "We are hierarchical animals," I declared in my first book. Rousseauist liberals and armchair leftists (like Michel Foucault) think hierarchy is imposed on free-flowing human innocence by unjust external forces, like the government and the police. But hierarchy is self-generated on every occasion by any group, especially in a philosophical vacuum. As an atheist, I acknowledge that religion may be socially necessary as an ethical counterweight to natural human ferocity. The primitive marauding impulse can emerge very swiftly in the alienated young.

In a 28 February 2000 column entitled "The Bush Look," Paglia takes on the postmodern artists who sneer at religion:

• Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole.

(Paglia writes for salon.com)