True “Soul”

“We are told, in tones of punitive hysteria, either that our culture is doomed—this being the Spenglerian model of rational apocalypse—or that it can be resuscitated only through a violent transfusion of those energies, of those styles of feeling, most representative of ‘third-world’ peoples. Theirs is true ‘soul,’ theirs the beauty of blackness and eros. …

Intensity as Sanctity

“Romantic ideals of love, notably the stress on incest, dramatize the belief that sexual extremism, the cultivation of the pathological, can restore personal existence to a full pitch of reality and somehow negate the gray world of middle-class fact . . . The artist becomes hero . . .” (George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p. …

The Uber-Goober

“In Nietzsche, the ethic of transgression has been stripped of scenes of explicit sexual torture and destruction and raised to an alluring intellectual Valhalla of lyric philosophy. We have no evidence that Nietzsche ever read the divine marquis. Nevertheless, the philosopher of the Overman offers a modified product with enhanced appeal for some: Sade without …