Apollo & Dionysus II: Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae

For Nietzsche, the Apollonian and the Dionysian are ‘elemental forces’ that arise, predominantly, in art, and disposes the artist toward either the visionary (Apollo) or the orgiastic (Dionysus). It is not until his last (and unfinished) manuscript that Nietzsche applies these forces to ordinary life — but even here, he brings it back to the artistic impulse:

There are two states in man in which art arises as an elemental force, and disposes of him whether he wishes it or not: on the one hand, an irresistible impulse towards the visionary, and on the other hand, an irresistible impulse towards the orgiastic. Both states are also present in normal life, though in the weaker forms of dreaming and of intoxication. But the same contrast as exists between the visionary and the orgiastic also exists between dreaming and intoxication: both states unleash artistic powers within us, but each of them does so in a fundamentally different manner: dreaming unleashes the power of vision, of association, of poetry; intoxication unleashes gesture, passion, song and dance

Following Nietzsche’s lead, several theorists have taken these two principles and applied them to non-artistic domains. Camille Paglia, inspired by both Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler’s use of the duality, created one of the most comprehensive accounts of the Apollonian and…