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Camille Paglia citations
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Camille Anna Paglia est une écrivaine, polémiste et critique sociale féministe américaine d'origine italienne.

S'inspirant des œuvres de Sade, Nietzsche et Freud, ses travaux traitent divers sujets, dont les arts visuels, la littérature, la culture populaire, la sexualité, le féminisme ainsi que la religion et la politique.

Depuis la parution, en 1990, de son premier ouvrage, Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, elle s'est prêtée à quantité d'interviews et intervient fréquemment dans les médias sur les enjeux contemporains. Depuis 1984, elle est professeur de sciences humaines et des médias à la University of the Arts de Philadelphie, Pennsylvanie, aux États-Unis. Paglia a fait ses études à l'Université de Binghamton , puis à l'Université Yale . Wikipedia  

✵ 2. avril 1947
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Camille Paglia: 326   citations 0   J'aime

Camille Paglia: Citations en anglais

“Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 9

“Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy.”

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Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 10

“From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the horror of AIDS turned gay activists into raging nihilists and monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the government and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose errors of judgement materially aided the rise and consolidation of the far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily by gay men.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 68

“I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.”

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Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 204, on John Winkler’s claim that “Sappho’s consciousness is a larger circle enclosing the smaller one of Homer,” in Winkler’s Constraints of Desire.

“The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 4

“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 672

“I want to cry out to these young girls: Stop! Think!... For heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene. You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progression. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, comfortable, and dangerous.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 82

“After the Sixties there was a collapse in almost everything we believed in. It culminated in the biological disaster of AIDS — an answer to every one of us who preached free love. … AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong. It wasn't the Pope who was the problem. It wasn't the struggle with old-fashioned moral codes that was the problem. It was nature. Nature said, "Guess what? If you're going to be that promiscuous, I will off you."”

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… I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not.
Playboy interview (May 1995)

“In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.”

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Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. vii

“Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.”

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Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 242

“The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.”

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Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 37

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

“I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 104

“The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite — women and men — will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class.”

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Playboy interview (May 1995)

“Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. x

“In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 47

“Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power.”

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Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 91

“Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 125

“I am reverential to great stars. I don't want sexual congress with them. The writer in me reveres the artist in them.”

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Playboy interview (May 1995)

“[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.”

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Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 622

“Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 29

“That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 26

“Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes. … protect yourselves. See trouble coming.”

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Playboy interview (May 1995)

“What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.”

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Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 47

“The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8

“The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. […] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.”

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Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 237

“Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.”

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Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 53

“I loathe Meryl Streep. She was good in Silkwood, but she began to take herself very seriously. I'm reacting to the horrendous overpraise she has received. She is a calculated actress, a victim of her own WASP culture. I find her totally unconvincing. She has no passion. She has no deep elemental vibration. Jodie Foster is overpraised, too. I thought she was good in The Silence of the Lambs, and The Accused, but she's getting on my nerves.”

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Playboy interview (May 1995)

“Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.”

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Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 71

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