Extreme Beauty : Aesthetics, Politics, Death

by Swearingen, James E.; Cutting-Gray, Joanne

• ISBN13: 9780826460097
• ISBN10: 0826460097
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Academic

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

General Introduction	vii
James E. Swearingen
Joanne Cutting-Gray
Part One: An Other Beauty
Introduction	3	(1)
Feeling the Difference	4	(13)
Mario Perniola
Part Two: Art and the Turn to the Postmodern
Introduction	15	(2)
Breton's Post-Hegelian Modernism	17	(12)
Jean-Michel Rabate
Postponing the Future: Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde	29	(11)
Dalia Judovitz
When Less Is More, More or Less: Subtraction and Addition in (Post)Modernist Poetics	40	(16)
Peter Williams
Part Three: The Impossible Place of Literature
Introduction	53	(3)
Chora and Character: Mimesis of Difference in Plato's Timaeus	56	(11)
Max Statkiewicz
The Place of Boredom: Blanchot Not Reading Proust	67	(11)
Pierre Lamarche
Literature, Film, and Virtuality: Technology's Cutting Edge	78	(16)
Joel Black
Part Four: The Rhetoric of the Political
Introduction	91	(3)
Rhetoric, Politics, Romance: Arendt and Heidegger, 1924--26	94	(16)
Theodore Kisiel
Hannah Arendt: Literary Criticism and the Political	110	(14)
David Halliburton
The Politics of Fascism, or Consuming the Flesh of the Other	124	(18)
Michael Clifford
Part Five: The Political Imaginary
Introduction	139	(3)
Post-Colonialism and History: Are We Responsible for the Past?	142	(10)
Moira Gatens
Indigenous-Becoming in the Post-Colonial Polity	152	(11)
Paul Patton
The Post-Colonial Threshold of Capacity: ``The Other! The Other!''	163	(17)
Alfred Lopez
Part Six: Extreme Beauty -- Death, Glory
Introduction	177	(3)
The Simulacrum of Death: Perniola Beyond Heidegger and Metaphysics?	180	(14)
Robert Burch
A Deadly Gift: To Derrida, from Kierkegaard and Bataille	194	(14)
Kenneth Itzkowitz
Glory in Levinas and Derrida	208	(15)
Bettina Bergo
Abbreviations	223	(2)
Notes	225	(20)
Bibliography	245	(10)
Index	255	(3)
Contributors	258	(2)
Editors	260