FLUXEUROPA: CAMILLE PAGLIA

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CAMILLE PAGLIA

Handsome, sharp and vigorous, exuberant, manic and abusive are just some of the adjectives which can and have been applied to Camille Paglia, the motor-mouthed academic and cultural critic of Italian-American background and 'wavering sexual orientation'. Paglia was catapulted into media stardom when, following publication of her book, Sexual Personae, in 1992, she achieved fame if not infamy with expressions of her admiration for Madonna, and her involvement in bitter public controversies about 'date rape' and the state of academe.

Like Nietzsche, a source of influence along with Freud, Jung and Amelia Earhart, Paglia is a sort of anti-intellectual intellectual, who lauds vigorous scholarly discipline and the mass pop culture of modern society. Whilst criticising postmodernist philosophising, she's a prophet of postmodern culture. This ambiguity runs deep. Difficult to put into a neat, preconceived, pigeon-hole, she has been accused of being both an anti-feminist and a neoconservative, while claiming, herself, to be a genuine libertarian whose cultural critiques have merely upset the feminist party line and the academic gravy train.

For Paglia, female power is sexual power, and sex is dark and dangerous. This innate female power is exercised through beauty and glamour, values denied or rejected by the anti-aesthetic puritanism of contemporary feminists, whom she further provoked by suggesting that women should take some responsibility for their own safety. This, she argues, is not to condone rape and brutality, but to add an element of realism. Paglia sees female vulnerability largely as a problem for naive upper middle class WASPs whose utopian assumptions and rejection of biological reality have rendered them vulnerable.

Paglia sees civilisation as a fragile brake on human cruelty, a brake removed by extreme ideas of freedom indulged in the 60s. This makes her view of the human condition essentially conservative, but she is far from being a conservative.

Paglia is in her element scourging the pretentiousness and shoddiness of pseudo-leftist academics who have made a dull, if lucrative, career out of social deconstructionism à la Derrida and Foucault. At her best, she is a well-oiled critical machine-gun, subjecting her targets to a withering and remorseless fusillade. At her worst, she is drunk on the aggressive thrill of her own invective - vituperative and repetitious.

Paglia, who is Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, is in love with visual and aural culture, and is conducting a duel against the 'word-fetishism' of cultural criticism emanating from English departments. As a prophet of modern popular culture she follows in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, while her knowing references to its minutiae recall the sardonic treatment of the same in the work of Quentin Tarantino.

Rik - Updated: 10 October 1996. Amended: 26 May 2000.

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