Edited by James Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray Continuum, 2002 288 pages $29.95 What does "extreme beauty" look like? Even more importantly, what does it feel like? These questions are the main themes around which James Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray have constructed their anthology Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death (Continuum, 2002). Such a title will no doubt call up strong associations with the work of the French critics who began writing in the late 1960's. Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, and Barthes, among others, were attempting in various ways "to think otherwise"-to develop a way of thinking that did justice to the kinds of changes they were noticing in the society around them, especially as reflected in its artwork. Barthes, for example, wrote about the relation between pleasure and literature found in the experience of "difference." Beyond pleasure he discovered bliss, a feeling that overcame the difference between pleasure and pain and included boredom, pain, and unpleasantness; beyond literature he found the text, the work of art unmoored from its ideological and historical context. This is the area within which the essays of the present anthology can be found. Mario Perniola's "Feeling of Difference" is the lead article of the anthology, introducing its general thematic; it is the only article in part one. Perniola looks to Barthes' work for his guiding question: How can we release sensations, affections, and emotions from the tyranny of the "I feel" in order to find experiences that are different from and extraneous to conventional feeling? In order to answer the question, Perniola applies the phenomenological concept of the epoche to Barthes' task. He consequently shows how, if we learn to disconnect ourselves emotionally from whatever situation we are in, we will be able to gain some control over its categories. Turning for an example of this disconnection to the subject of sex, Perniola recognizes the possibility of disconnecting it from the tyranny of orgasm and from male/female distinctions and locates "the sex appeal of the inorganic." With this phrase he means to refer to how an individual might discover its body to be that of a thing, as for example a piece of clothing or an electronic device. The person thus becomes an extraneous body, deprived of subjective