Camille Paglia stirs up passions on the other side of the Atlantic. She is criticised by some of the feminists due to her libertarian viewpoints on pornography and prostitution, while others worship her for her twisted, witty way of fighting against censorship in art, as well as of deconstructing prejudices about women – since her very first book Sexual Personae, which was published in 1990. This iconoclastic pamphlet has just been translated into French, at last. We seized the opportunity to ask this professor of Philosophy at the University of Philadelphia, who is influenced by Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir as much as by Freud and Sade, why, according to her, artistic and sexual dissidence is, more than ever, a virtue.



Camille Paglia, Introduction à Personas sexuelles. Hermann, 160 p., 20 euros.

Sarah Chiche : When it was released in the 1990, your book, Sexual Personae, appeared during a puritanical wave. The very great liberation of the manners of the 1960s and 1970s was followed by a new way of looking at art. We then began to flush out in fiction or visual works offenses or moral flaws. At the moment when the French translation of two texts extracted from Sexual Personae is coming out in France, some people propose to get a painting of Balthus representing a very young girl or a painting of Waterhouse out of museums. Would you say, with Nietzsche, that in art as in life everything proceeds from an eternal return and that we live a situation exactly similar to that of the 1980s?

Camille Paglia : My dark view of the forces of creation and destruction perpetually at work in human life was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, but my cyclic theory of history ultimately comes from Vico before him. After the radical impact of the sexual revolution upon my generation during the 1960s, it was shocking to witness the reactionary withdrawal of second-wave feminism into a strident puritanism in the 1970s. The pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belonged had been electrified by the sexual candor of daring European art films and by new translations of the Marquis de Sade and Histoire d’O. The sexual explicitness of rock ‘n’ roll, rooted in African-American blues, was our daily language. Young women like me were fearlessly entering theaters where pornographic films like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were being shown to audiences who were once possessively all-male. Emmanuelle, in which Sylvia Kristel played a charming bisexual adventuress in Bangkok, was a visionary dream of exotic pleasures.

Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig, Catherine Deneuve, and Stephane Audran were brilliant images of sexual sophistication, far beyond the provincial Hollywood « good girls » like Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, who had been forced upon us in our youth. When I arrived at the Yale Graduate School in 1968, I hung a large poster from Belle de Jour of Deneuve (provocatively turning her bare back toward the viewer) on the wall above my bed. It was a sacred icon—for which I was strangely rewarded by soon being led directly into the path of Deneuve in New York : we literally ran into each other, face to face, in front of Sak’s Fifth Avenue department store—into which, shocked, I impolitely pursued her to get an autograph. I was, of course, nobody—just a student—but it was an incredible episode that convinced me of certain irrational energies at work in sexuality that border on the mystical. Nature, magnetism, and animal instinct rule us in ways that we will never fully comprehend.

However, during the 1970s, a viciously man-hating dogma usurped feminism, which was also being distorted by philistines such as Kate Millett, who reduced the complexity and nuance of art to moralistic platitudes. As women’s studies programs were instantly created on college campuses by parochial bureaucrats (a new discipline forced into hasty existence with virtually no formal scholarly apparatus or professional guidelines), inflammatory ideological rhetoric became the standard approach to analysis of literature and culture. Great works of art were attacked and rebuked for their sinful lack of political correctness. Any sense of subtlety, ambiguity, paradox, or ambivalence was lost in these crude readings, where supreme artists were scolded like naughty children for failing to conform to a virginal schoolteacher’s humorless code of bourgeois respectability.

My philosophy of art and sexuality was heavily shaped by the gorgeous picture books that my father brought back from France in the early 1950s, when I was a small child. He had studied Romance languages at the Sorbonne for a year on the « G.I. Bill », granted by the U.S. government to veterans of World War Two (he had served as an Army paratrooper). The lavishly illustrated book, Art Treasures of the Louvre, with its cornucopia of sumptuous color plates, transported art history into the small factory town in upstate New York where I was born. Another purchase from Paris, a large portfolio of architecture and sculpture of the School of Fontainebleau, was absolutely phenomenal. During my adolescence, a splendid, exquisitely printed black-and-white photo from that portfolio—of a marble statue (then attributed to Goujon) of a reclining, nude Diane d’Anet, holding a bow in one hand and embracing a stag with the other–hung on my bedroom wall. It was a dreamlike spectacle of a graceful Amazon who ruled wild nature as well as the ornate gardens of love.

My theory of art began to take shape when, in high school, I discovered a collection of imperious witticisms from Oscar Wilde in a second-hand bookstore. A major figure of the nineteenth-century « Art for Art’s Sake » movement, Wilde was at total war with the humanitarian sentimentality and prudery of Victorian moralists. He believed that it was necessary to give offense, to provoke and violate, to destroy comfortable platitudes wherever they existed. In college, I expanded my range of references about art and morality to Baudelaire, Gautier, Verlaine, Gide, Sartre, and Genet. And I was drawn to the « Beat » school of poetry, which during the 1950s had adopted the syncopations of African-American « cool » jazz (a major presence in post-war Paris) and which used street slang and frank sexual allusions to push the limits of poetry.

Given the visibility and achievements of bohemian « outlaw » writing and art in the decades just before the 1960s sexual revolution, it is incomprehensible how second-wave feminism could have made such a giant step backwards into rigid censoriousness about sex. In the 1970s, my pro-sex wing of feminism struggled against the anti-male mania of the new women’s studies professors as well as that of Gloria Steinem and the mainstream women’s organizations. By the 1980s, the leading feminists were Catherine MacKinnon, a ruthless fanatic out of the Spanish Inquisition, and Andrea Dworkin, a raving neurotic who hated and maimed her body in aggressive obesity and who poisonously defined all heterosexual sex as rape.

The pro-sex wing of feminism was silenced and defeated for over 20 years. Although my first book, Sexual Personae, was completed in 1981, the manuscript was rejected by seven publishers, and the book was not published until 1990. It was really Madonna, with her Roman Catholic sensitivity to guilt and transgression, who changed the culture through her open embrace of sexuality in her music, videos, and stage shows. The pro-sex feminists made huge gains during the 1990s, when we also fiercely opposed the « speech codes » which were starting to appear at universities, now controlled by intrusive, philanthropic administrators who arrogantly viewed the faculty as serfs, mere employees. By the end of the millennium, the victory of pro-sex feminism seemed total and final. Even the younger puritanical voices of « third-wave » feminism who had been endorsed by Gloria Steinem, such as Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf (with their contemptuous hostility to beauty and fashion), had faded and lost the attention of the Anglo-American media.

Hence my present horror and alarm that the cycle of puritanism has destructively swung back yet again into feminism. A young, idealistic, but naive generation, raised in a noisy digital universe of dizzying immateriality, has reverted to the most extreme postures of feminist moralism, defining women as helpless, passive victims who are unable to exist in the perilous world of sexuality without an authoritarian structure of substitute parents to protect and avenge them. It is discouraging, appalling! Worse, these hysterical rages and masochistic toxins have now arrived in France, which was once the world capital of an enlightened, cosmopolitan view of both art and sex. If France too falls beneath the juggernaut of feminist fascism, how will this war ever be won ?

You said that what is feminine in you comes from nature and not from culture. But in a conference filmed on March 20, 2017, you have insisted for a long time on this point: You do not live like a woman, you have never felt admitted as a woman but you do not feel like a man either. When she was the first woman to be admitted to the French Academy, Marguerite Yourcenar said: “The literature ” called ” women created a ghetto we do not need. Writing is the product of intelligence. One does not write with one’s sex, even if, nevertheless, some emotions are sensual. Can we see in this sensuality of which Yourcenar speaks an equivalent in your wish to make in your essays coexist the intellect and the inspiration, the rigor of the analysis with what you name a “poetic prose of paterian type”?

In the introduction to my new book, Provocations, I say that the voice of Sexual Personae was “a transgender construction, using the materials of language and mind.” Long ago, I called Sexual Personae “the biggest sex change in history”. By whatever peculiarity of fortune, I have wandered the world as a vigilant alien, born outside the gender system. I seem to have always had the ability to see women through the eyes of men, and men through the eyes of women.

There is no doubt that I was inspired in my youth by the cold clarity, vast ambition, and monumental architecture of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Like her, I was enamored by the propulsive conceptual energy of the greatest male writers and artists. Only weak women deny the stunning creative power of male achievement through history, in every realm of life and art. Writing for me is an entrance into abstraction—an escape from the accidents and humiliations of biology and the banality of daily routine into an objective space occupied by carved and austere shapes. Like my Roman ancestors who built roads, temples, and stadiums all over the known world, I feel that I work in stone.

Walter Pater, a model for Oscar Wilde in his university days at Oxford, was indeed a crucial influence on me. Written in poetically heightened prose (prefiguring the Barthes of Mythologies), Pater’s eerily hypnotic tribute to Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” captures the enduring strangeness of that great painting and also unnerves us with its suggestion of women’s primeval intimacy with nature. When writing about art or poetry, I aim (like a reverent Egyptian scribe) for a complete description and transcription, while at the same time preserving the work’s taunting elusiveness. All great art mysteriously changes every time we return to it.

“Society is not the culprit, but rather the force that keeps crime under control,” you say. You maintain that there is innate cruelty. Do you believe, with Freud and before him, with Sabina Spielrein, that one can certainly be full of humanism and benevolence but that sex and eroticism is “daemonic” and that one cannot purge sex, by which I mean sex between perfectly consenting adults, of any power relationship? Reassure me, find joy and freedom in sex, it’s not a utopia?

As I argue in Sexual Personae, nature respects the species but never the individual. Only in society can individualism emerge. The sex instinct is a hormonally driven compulsion that was implanted in us by coercive nature for one purpose—heterosexual procreation. Sexual pleasure is a bribe, a lure by which nature drove innumerable generations of mutually uncomprehending men and women into physical contact for the preservation and expansion of the species. It is an inescapable fact, whether we resist it or not, that our bodies were fatefully designed for mating and breeding: the vagina as receptacle fits like a glove over the penis as seed-depositor.

As societies evolved and human survival was no longer urgent, sex as a recreational activity, with its attendant rituals of flirtation and seduction, flourished, and homosexuality as an optional practice emerged, sometimes discreetly permitted and at other times denounced and persecuted on religious grounds. Because it was nature that implanted sexuality in our bodies, I view homosexuality as perfectly natural. From my libertarian point of view, the state has no authority to control what we do with our bodies, including ingestion of drugs, sodomy, prostitution, or abortion. Our bodies were fully formed in the womb, prior to our birth—the moment that we gained citizenship in the social realm. Hence our physical beings cannot be regulated by the state. However, the state has a proper role in governing situations where our personal choices may negatively affect the lives of others, as when train engineers or bus drivers are rightly required to take drug tests.

However, what I see in both heterosexuality and homosexuality, as they exist in today’s advanced societies, is a surfacing of shadowy patterns originating in childhood. In this modern era of the isolated and claustrophobic nuclear family, whom we are attracted to or fall in love with seems strongly determined in childhood. Furthermore, from my long observation, exclusive homosexuality (as opposed to bisexuality) in today’s Western world has a distinct etiology in what Freud called “family romance”, a subject that has been foolishly avoided for decades. There is a prohibition on discussion, out of fear that repressive anti-gay forces would be strengthened. This suppression of free thought and free speech on the Left must be condemned. Self-knowledge, the Delphic ideal, should remain our ultimate principle.

Yes, I believe there are secret hierarchies and hidden power dynamics at work in every sexual encounter—some arising from biology and others from psychology. Some sexual adventurers may seek to sharpen identity, others to obliterate it. Our enduring excess or surplus of desire, diverted from the simple mechanics of procreation, spills into fantasy, hallucination, obsession, even murder, and remains a principal inspiration for art. Sex itself is partly or even wholly rooted in primitive areas of the brain that cannot be accessed by rational consciousness. Impulses and signals from that dark zone surface in our dream life, which most people block from awareness within moments of waking. Sexual Personae, following Sade, Nietzche, and Freud, maintains that civilization is simply a veneer, an artificial surface concealing the seething forces of the will to power.

All of that primeval barbarism will erupt again, should the comfortable structures of Western society break down for any reason, either through malicious sabotage or natural disaster, such as a cataclysmic earthquake or an asteroid hitting the earth. If or when terrorists finally learn how to paralyze the electric power grid, upon which the entire Western world now dangerously depends for basic daily operations, civilization as we know it would collapse within weeks, as interruptions in the food supply would inevitably lead to mob disorder and looting. The affluent sophisticates of Babylon or imperial Rome thought too that their imposing cultures would last forever. But humanity will always stubbornly survive, as it escapes step by step from the ruins of its intoxicating illusions.