Description: What do we mean when we speak of "beauty"? What do we experience? Beauty is no longer the human experience of the harmonious object; today an aesthetics of difference has revolutionised our ways of seeing the beautiful. Now, we live in a time of "extreme beauty." Extreme Beauty explores art, literature, politics, and philosophy in order to illuminate how the concept and experience of beauty has changed. The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, fascism and the consumption of the flesh, postcolonialism and imagination to Derrida and the glory and gift of death.
Review Quotes: The themes of difference, death, the postmodern, the simulacrum, and otherness, find their way into many of the different essays, as do references to Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as the French critics listed above. Such cross-references help to maintain a focus that all too easily can be obfuscated by the sheer number of different authorial points of view presented. The editors have done a heroic job keeping the whole from falling apart at the seams. Steve Bindeman, Janus Head, 7.1, 2004