Re:The Provocations of Camille Paglia
by grey-area on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @11:53AM
(#20810992)
I haven't read Intellectual Impostors, but suspect it is more about people like Paglia who find elaborate ways of saying nothing (or is it everything?), than about Foucault or Derrida. Indeed the authors said this themselves as someone linked lower down:
Des penseurs célèbres tels qu'Althusser, Barthes, Derrida et Foucault sont essentiellement absents de notre livre. [1]
Barthes is another quite obtuse but really wonderful writer (IMO) - who crucially has something to say. Paglia I suspect of having nothing to say I'm afraid.
Lacan I haven't read anything significant, but he does have a reputation for being obtuse and a bit of a fraud yes, so maybe the charge by her against him is accurate, though frankly Paglia should not be calling anyone else difficult or bombastic given her style. Note the person grouping these three very disparate thinkers is Paglia.
I didn't cherry-pick that quote, it's just the first para of her book. I honestly am not sure what she means by that first page of Sexual Personae (for example she doesn't define nature), and one paragraph is not enough to do her awful writing justice because it bludgeons the reader with paragraph after paragraph of the same thing, as if to bully them into submission; she flits about from pithy assertion to clever sounding reference, giving other authors an adjective and not much more, then moving on to her next thought, without any sort of research or backup for her bald gnomic assertions. Indeed her confident nonsense about the authors quoted above sums up for me her depth very well.
Des penseurs célèbres tels qu'Althusser, Barthes, Derrida et Foucault sont essentiellement absents de notre livre. [1]
Barthes is another quite obtuse but really wonderful writer (IMO) - who crucially has something to say. Paglia I suspect of having nothing to say I'm afraid.
Lacan I haven't read anything significant, but he does have a reputation for being obtuse and a bit of a fraud yes, so maybe the charge by her against him is accurate, though frankly Paglia should not be calling anyone else difficult or bombastic given her style. Note the person grouping these three very disparate thinkers is Paglia.
I didn't cherry-pick that quote, it's just the first para of her book. I honestly am not sure what she means by that first page of Sexual Personae (for example she doesn't define nature), and one paragraph is not enough to do her awful writing justice because it bludgeons the reader with paragraph after paragraph of the same thing, as if to bully them into submission; she flits about from pithy assertion to clever sounding reference, giving other authors an adjective and not much more, then moving on to her next thought, without any sort of research or backup for her bald gnomic assertions. Indeed her confident nonsense about the authors quoted above sums up for me her depth very well.
[1] https://next.liberation.fr/livres/1997/10/18/sokal-et-bricmo...