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January 21, 2007
Camille Paglia On The Duke Case
No, actually I couldn't find anything by Camille on the case. However, I did find a LOT on line that speaks to the acedemic issues involved. Feminist ideology has totally failed to deal with humanity's instinctual drives. No matter what garbage you hear from Foucault's minions, sex is ultimately about procreation. It's in the best interests of the species for fertile women to mate with the strongest, most vital and resourceful males.Paglia Speaks
Foucault's analysis of "power" is foggy and paranoid and simply does not work when applied to the actual evidence of the birth, growth and complex development of governments in ancient and modern societies. Nor is Foucault's analysis of the classification of knowledge particularly original -- except in his bitter animus against the Enlightenment, which he failed to realize had already been systematically countered by Romanticism. What most American students don't know is that Foucault's commentary is painfully crimped by the limited assumptions of Saussurean linguistics (which I reject). As I have asserted, James Joyce's landmark modernist novel Ulysses (1922) contains, chapter by chapter, far subtler and more various versions of language-based "epistemes" inherent in cultural institutions and epochs.Catching on are we? Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax. Again and again -- in memoirs, for example, by trendy but pedestrian uber-academics like Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt and Brown's Robert Scholes -- one sees the scenario of Melancholy, Bookish, Passive, Insecure Young Nebbish suddenly electrified and transfigured by the Grand Epiphany of Blindingly Brilliant Foucault. This sappy psychodrama would be comic except for the fact that American students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded of a genuine education in intellectual history and political analysis (a disciplined genre that starts with Thucydides and flows directly to the best of today's journalism on current events).Paglia on "Junk Bonds..."
How should the humanities be taught, and how should scholars in the humanities be trained? These pivotal questions confront universities today amid signs of spreading agreement that the three-decade era of poststructuralism and postmodernism is over.I bolded the bit above. Duke - are you listening? Uh. Oh. I did finally find something on the Duke Case from Paglia. It was April 5, 2006. During questions and answers after her talk at GW the other night, Paglia was asked about the situation at Duke. Here's what she said, more or less:It was still early in the case, before a lot of information came out, so maybe she deserves some slack.University athletes these days are a kind of master race. They get special favors, special dispensations. Does this sense of entitlement lead to crime? How does the ethos of the college sports team turn into Attila the Hun? Cross Posted at Power and Control posted by Simon on 01.21.07 at 04:10 AM |
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I agree with her premise about student athletes "...get(ing) special favors, special dispensations."
The she asks questions that I read as "Does this treatment lead to criminal behavior, and if so, how?"
The snippet you quote doesn't seem, to me, to be accusatory toward the players.