Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia (2015)

Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947 in Endicott , New York ) is an American art and cultural historian . Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies ( Humanities and Media Studies ) at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia .

Life

Youth and education

Camille Anna Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, in 1947. She was the eldest of three children of Pasquale Paglia and Lydia Anna Paglia, née Colapietro, and grew up in an Italian immigrant family. In 1971 she earned a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Yale University .

academic career

In the fall of 1972, she began her first teaching position at Bennington College . In 1973 her essay Lord Hervey and Pope appeared in 18th century Studies . The Times literary supplement hailed this work on November 2, 1973 as brilliant . Her essay The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queen ( The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queen ) appeared in the winter of 1979. In the same year, she resigned from her position after disputes over her private life.

In the early 1980s, Camille Paglia completed her book, but initially could not find a publisher for the publication. She earned her living teaching at Yale, various colleges in Connecticut, and the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky .

In 1984 she finally got a professorship at the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts , which in 1987 merged with its neighboring school, the Philadelphia College of Art , to form the University of the Arts . In the years that followed, Paglia continued teaching as she completed her manuscript for Sexual Personae . A chapter from it, the essay Oscar Wilde and the English androgynous (Epicene) appeared in 1988 in the magazine Raritan . In 1986 her essay Nature, Sex, and Decadence appeared in the book Pre-Raphaelite Poets by Harold Bloom.

Her work Sexual Personae , which had previously been rejected by seven publishers and five literary agents, finally found its publishing house in Yale University Press and was published in 1990. The German translation was published in 1992 under the title Die Masken der Sexualität .

Private life

In 1978, Camille Paglia was with a lover, a former student, at a university dance event and was physically assaulted by a student. Camille Paglia filed a complaint. However, the wealthy parents of her loved ones turned against her. They approached the college administration with a request that professing homosexuals should not find work in college and that they should not send their daughter to such an institution. After a lengthy dispute with the administration, Camille Paglia finally accepted her leave of absence and resigned from her position a year later.

In the early 1990s, some of her closest friends died of AIDS and their father died of cancer. Until 2007 she lived for 14 years with her partner Alison Maddex, whose son they raised together.

plant

Paglia claims to liberate the history of literature and art from the dungeon of academic teaching and libraries (Paglia). To this end, she tries to consider literature, art history and religion in their context. In her research she includes classical visual arts and literature, but also pop culture and popular cultural phenomena such as sports and video clips.

Through her studies of the classics and the works of Jane Ellen Harrison , James George Frazer , Erich Neumann , Camille Paglia developed her theory of a sexual history that contradicted the ideas that were en vogue at the time. That was the deeper reason for her conflicts with Kate Millett , Marija Gimbutas , Carolyn Heilbrun and other leading bourgeois feminists of the time. Paglia writes: The libertarian movements of the modern age suffer from unresolved internal contradictions [...] The feminists who strive to drive violent relationships out of sexuality turn against nature. [...] Sexuality is something demonic.

With her dissertation Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art ( Masks of Sexuality: The Androgyne in Literature and Art ) in 1974 she took a clear position here. At the same time, she was an avowed lesbian from simple Italian descent and thus also lagging behind the conservative academic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream, if still available.

She pays special attention to the relationship between nature, civilization and art, and especially sexuality as a delicate interface between nature and culture . She turns against the idea of ​​suppressing sexuality and nature from art, as well as against the romanticization of the motto back to nature . Paglia sees amoral, aggressive, sadistic, voyeuristic and pornographic elements as inseparable components of high art that have been ignored or covered up by academic art and literature . On the other hand, she warns against letting these elements run free in reality: the renunciation of social control, the complete freedom of people, a return to nature is tantamount to unleashing violence and lust. Society is not a crime, but the force that keeps crime in check.

The introductory essay to her main work Sexual Personae is entitled: Sexuality and Violence or: Nature and Art. In it she writes: Sexual freedom, liberation of sexuality: modern illusions. We are hierarchy-conscious animals. [...] In nature, brute force rules as the law - the strongest survive. There are safeguards in society for the weak. [...] When the social control mechanisms weaken, then the innate cruelty of man breaks through. Where sexual liberation is attempted or achieved, sadomasochism is not far. She writes: This book adopts the perspective of de Sade , the least read of all the great authors of Western literature.

Interpretation of classical art history

Paglia sees the entire western cultural and art history in the field of tension between two principles: On the one hand, the devotion to the raw, fascinating nature of man, especially his sexual naturalness, including its dark, dangerous and violent facets. She describes this as the chthonic principle that belongs to the earth. On the other hand, Western man tries to assert his integrity as a person in the face of the blind grinding of the subterranean forces, the endless, slow suction, mud and morass : By concentrating on the beautiful , through order, through reason and logic, through objectification. This is what she calls the Apollonian principle. Art , she writes, is form that struggles to awaken from nature's nightmare. [...] Art is a magical spell, [...] is order.

Although Camille Paglia is a combative feminist in the sense that she is committed to the political, professional and social equality of women, she takes the view that men are more likely to represent the Apollonian principle and are therefore those who promote art, culture, science and Advanced civilization. She justifies this directly with the biological role of men and women. All cultural achievement is an evasion into Apollonian transcendence , the men are anatomically predestined for such projections. But , she continues, as seen in Oedipus, predestination can be a curse. The man is predestined for tragedy, for the classic drama of rise and fall. The thesis of the increasing insignificance of the Dwem , the dead white European men (German "dead white European men"), as well as the fashionable discourse of political correctness, she countered several times.

Camille Paglia first attracted public attention with her two-volume work Sexual Personae , published in 1990 , which was published in German under the title Die Masken der Sexualität . Drawing an arc from antiquity through the Renaissance and Romanticism to the modern age, it examines the manifestations of the chthonic and the Apollonian principles in western art history in essay-like, self-contained chapters, each dealing with a single significant artist, an art movement or contemporary phenomenon . Paglia has therefore been called the bête noire of feminism. Sexual Personae was initially rejected by some publishers, but after its publication it became a bestseller, a rare achievement for scientific publication.

Dealing with pop culture

That same year, she began writing about popular culture and feminism in newspapers and magazines. With her theses, she provoked feminists as well as conservative and left-wing intellectuals and became the object and participant of lively public debates. 1991 appeared under the heading Woman Warrior (about: The warrior ) a cover story about it in the magazine The New Yorker . A review of Susan Sontag appeared under the programmatic title Sontag, bloody Sontag .

In 1991, in a spectacular lecture at MIT , Paglia described the postmodern philosophy of Foucault or Lacans as "French nonsense" (french rot), which is responsible for the crisis in American universities and the alienation of their graduates.

In the essay Sexuality and Violence , she comments on the femme fatale as the most important figure among the demonic archetypes of the feminine who stand for the uncontrollable closeness of nature . The femme fatale is the return of the repressed, the birth of the guilty conscience that the West has towards nature . It is an extrapolation from the biological facts of women , such as the vagina dentata , the toothed vagina : both are eerily direct symbols of female power and male fear . Because castration is the danger that every man exposes himself to during sexual intercourse with a woman , whereby the woman's latent vampirism [...] is a consequence of her maternal function . Paglia is convinced of the amorality of instinctual life .

Her collection of articles Sex, Art and American Culture was published in 1992, and received lively and controversial reception at many American universities. In it, for example, she describes herself as a true Madonna fan , because Madonna embodies the future of feminism , she resurrected the Babylonian whore, the pagan goddess .

Vamps and Tramps was released in 1994 . Some mainstream representatives of feminism and some left-wing liberal voices accused Camille Paglia of misogyny and included her in the then intensely debated anti-feminist backlash . Paglia denied these allegations. She continues to publish in general and specialist magazines, for example Interview magazine .

In the Clinton-Lewinsky affair , Paglia was one of the few prominent intellectuals who campaigned for President Clinton to be punished: it was an abuse of power with consequences for society as a whole. The president must be an integrating, stabilizing element within society. He failed to make this claim by indulging in a reckless sexual affair.

Paglia expressed skepticism about the theory of man-made global warming. It is not scientifically substantiated, but an expression of a hunger for piety and apocalypse after the ordinary church had been transformed into a directionless feel-good therapy .

German translation in the new right Antaios publishing house

At the beginning of 2018, her book Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism , published in 2017, was published under the German title Frauen haben, Männer werden. Sex, Gender, Feminism by the couple Götz Kubitschek and Ellen Kositza in the neurerechte publishing house Antaios . In one of her reviews of the publisher's new releases on YouTube , Ellen Kositza explained how she came across Paglia many years ago, and assessed the public interest in the book as an expression of a turn to "anti-feminism". On April 3, 2018, Lilli Heinemann and Camille Paglia published an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung entitled “Shocked and repulsed”, in which the author was outraged by Kubitschek's treatment of her and her book. This was announced on the same day by Arno Orzessek on Deutschlandfunk Kultur under the heading “Feminist against right-wing publisher” and on the following day in a background discussion “Reactionary Feminism? - Camille Paglia in dispute with the right-wing publisher ”with the literary scholar Barbara Vinken , who described Paglia's oeuvre as an“ annoying case ”. The German-language edition finally had to be taken off the market in mid-April 2018 due to a threat of legal action by Paglia and it was blamed.

Publications (selection)

• Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art (Dissertation 1974)
• Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson 1990
  • The masks of sexuality . From the American by Margit Bergner, Ulrich Enderwitz and Monika Noll. Berlin: Byblos Verlag. ISBN 3-929029-06-5 ; Munich: DTV, 1996. ISBN 3-423-08333-6
  • German edition of the introductory essay: Sexuality and Violence or: Nature and Art . In: The masks of sexuality . Munich: DTV, 1996. ISBN 3-423-30454-5
• Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays 1992
  • The war of the sexes: sex, art and media culture . From the American. by Margit Bergner ... Berlin: Byblos Verlag, 1993. ISBN 3-929029-18-9
• Vamps and Tramps: New Essays 1994 ISBN 0-679-75120-3
• The Birds 1998
  • The birds . The classic film by Alfred Hitchcock . Europa Verlag, Hamburg and Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-203-84107-X
• Audio commentary on Basic Instinct , the feature film by Paul Verhoeven . DVD, Kinowelt GmbH, 2005 (4 006680 034164).
• Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems 2005 ISBN 0-375-42084-3 ; New York, Vintage Books, 2006. ISBN 978-0-375-72539-5
• Glittering Images: a journey through art from Egypt to Star Wars . Pantheon, New York, 2012. ISBN 978-0-375-42460-1
• Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism . Pantheon, New York, 2017. ISBN 978-0-375-42477-9

literature

• Alan Soble (Ed.): Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, 2006, ISBN 0-313-32686-X .

Web links

• Literature by and about Camille Paglia in the catalog of the German National Library

In English:

• Camille Paglia Discussion Group
• Salon Articles by Camille Paglia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christina Patterson: Camille Paglia - 'I don't get along with lesbians at all. They don't. In: The Independent. August 25, 2012, accessed December 11, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Margaret Wente: Camille Paglia: Hillary Clinton can't win - and shouldn't. In: The Globe to Mail. October 18, 2007, accessed December 11, 2019 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Martha Duffy: The Bete Noire of Feminism: Camille Paglia . In: Time Magazine , Jan. 13, 1992. 
4. ^ Suzanne Fields: Gender feminists are on the wane . In: The Dispatch , June 16, 1994. 
5. ↑ The MIT lecture. On the crisis in American universities. In Sex, Art, and American Culture, Essays. By Camille Paglia. Vintage Books Publishing House; September 1992, ISBN 0-679-74101-1 , German The war of the sexes, sex, art and media culture. From the American by Margit Bergner, Ulrich Enderwitz and Monika Noll. Berlin: Byblos Verlag, 1993
6. ↑ Real inconvenient truths . salon.com. April 11, 2007. Retrieved November 26, 2017.
7. ↑ Anne-Catherine Simon: The Feminist Flirtation of the New Right , Die Presse, April 6, 2018
8. ↑ Camille Paglia in an interview “Shocked and repulsed” Interview by Lilli Heinemann, Süddeutsche Zeitung April 3, 2018
9. ^ Culture press review by Arno Orzessek, April 3, 2018, Feminist against right-wing publisher
10. ↑ Reactionary Feminism? - Camille Paglia in a dispute with the right-wing publisher ( Memento of the original from April 5, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Barbara Vinken in conversation with Michael Laages, broadcast time: April 4, 2018, 11:08 p.m. (audio 1/2 year online)