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." This text 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. Contributors include Joel Black, Bettina Bergo, Robert Burch, Michael Clifford, Moira Gatens, David Halliburton, Kenneth Itzkowitz, Dalia Judovitz, Theodore Kisiel, Pierre Lamarche, Alfred Lopez, Paul Patton, Mario Perniola, Jean-Michel Rabate, Max Statkiewitz, and Peter Williams.