The Provocations of Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book:<p><i>In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.</i><p>What does this really mean? Does it mean anything? I find it truly hard to say with any precision. If anyone is trying to make language destroy itself it is Paglia with her vague, circular, name-dropping arguments. If the rest of the book then tried to justify these assertions that'd be ok, but it continues in the same vein for hundreds of pages.<p>If you accept her vitriolic and reductive definitions of these interesting thinkers (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida), you are doing yourself a disservice.<p>Foucault to take one example is far from cheap cynicism and more rigorous and accessible than Paglia in every sense. Where is the cheap cynicism in The order of things (les mots et les choses) or Madness and Civilisation? These are really important works about issues that will be studied in 100 years, unlike Paglia's empty posturing. They're asking questions like What is normal? What is madness and how does the definition change? Questions which were ahead of their time and still vital and interesting today.