76 quotes
Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Capitalism is an art form.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Mind is a captive of the body.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture — something that has inspired little belief since the period before World War I.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)