Camille Paglia: Passionate Intellectual
I have a brilliant young friend who sends me links nearly every day to fascinating material on the web. I like to think of myself as web-savvy but I guess I’m not a natural surfer — I’m not that good at finding the latest stuff out there.
So I’m especially grateful to my friend because today he sent me a link to an interview with Camille Paglia, one of the few intellectuals I get excited about these days. Paglia is like a rock star in a room of doddering old Oxford dons: she’s passionate and contentious and unafraid of paradox and inconsistency. She lights up the room in a way that few intellectuals today can do, with their dispassionate, ironic, knowing tone.
Paglia has made no secret of the way she sees her debt to her Italian Catholic upbringing.
The interviewer writes in his intro about her lecture on “Hollywood and the Bible”: “Paglia is bombastic and contentious in front of a crowd, inviting fans and detractors alike to listen and testify. Billed as an atheist who had come to defend religion, she spoke first of her Italian-Catholic upbringing, using it as a springboard for an argument about teaching religion in the classroom as a historical compass and a commanding cultural presence. In response to a question on Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, she said defiantly of its title, ‘I am willing to let my entire legacy rest on one sentence from Sexual Personae: ‘God is man’s greatest idea.’ Let his entire legacy rest on that.’”
There are other gems in the interview, such as: “We’re in a period of what Northrop Frye would have called the winter phase of irony and satire.”
And this exchange: “How is it possible to allow religion to enter back into curricula if we are, as you say, in the winter phase of irony and satire? Can religion ever be taken seriously from a secular-humanist point of view?
“Well, this is what’s wrong with education right now. It’s what’s wrong with post-structuralism. I don’t go in the direction of the cynical, looking for ways to question, to undercut, to dissolve meaning. As an Italian-American, as a very hot personality born under the sign of Aries, I’ve tried to drift things towards emotional extremes.”
Gotta love those Italian Catholic Arieses!
“she’s…unafraid of paradox and inconsistency.”
Agreed.
I’m a regular reader of her monthly column over at Salon.com, the more-than-a-little-liberal site. To judge from reader’s comments, most people there dislike and even despise her: a rather weird situation. But not so weird because she is essentially a contrarian, someone who, for instance, enjoys listening to Rush Limbaugh without necessarily agreeing with him.
http://dir.salon.com/topics/camille_paglia/
I wonder if she aspires to occupy the “Christian atheist” role that the fiery Oriana Fallaci perfected. Fallaci greatly admired Ratzinger and had an audience with him not long before her death.
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“I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.” I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.”
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/tvaradarajan/?id=110006858
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The growing numbers of what Europeans call “devout atheists” make up a very interesting subdivision of lapsed Catholics.
Gotta love those Italian Catholic Arieses!
The can certainly be *ram*bunctious!
Camille used to be stimulating years ago when she debuted as “the first internet intellectual” but that role has long been stolen by Andrew Sullivan, and Camille — after a period of burnout and silence — has re-emerged as a nutty Palin fan, in boring self-parody. Sad, but true.
No worse that Germaine Greer in her farewell to MJ.