“Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity’s claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being.”

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About Camille Paglia

American academic, social critic, and feminist

Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic, social critic, and feminist. She taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia from 1984 until its closure in 2024. She is known for her sharp criticism of modern culture and for books such as Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Paglia has also argued against aspects of contemporary American feminism and post-structuralism. Her writing and commentary range across American culture, including visual art, music, and film history, and she is often associated with forceful, contrarian criticism.

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