Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death (review)

Feeling Pretty and Queer

"I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and gay." It is perhaps the conceit of the camp queen that makes me feel that these lines—sung by Maria in West Side Story—were written just for me. In fact, in their association of feeling and aesthetics (the pretty), these lines might be said to define camp (to the extent that it can be defined) in addition to exemplifying it. For as Susan Sontag describes in her now canonical "Notes on 'Camp,'" camp is above all a way of feeling—"sensibility" is the word she uses—a feeling about the aesthetic: "It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon" (106). So when I lip-sync to these lyrics, I not only feel pretty (have a feeling about myself as an aesthetic object), I also have a feeling about what pretty is. In spite of the unnaturalness (read artifice) Sontag finds in camp, this link between feeling and pretty feels as "natural" to me as the "natural woman" "you make me feel like" when I lip-sync to Aretha Franklin. I was thus quite surprised to learn upon reading Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death (New York: Continuum, 2002) that the link between aesthetics and feeling is actually quite recent in the history of Western philosophy.

Edited by James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray, this collection assembles sixteen essays reflecting on "the topic of feeling [as it is] connected to a very long tradition of aesthetics," especially in relation to a more recent "thought of difference" (4). Mario Perniola's essay "Feeling the Difference," which begins the collection, as well as presents its key questions, points out, "Traditionally, aesthetics has implied the ideals of harmony, regularity, and organic unity; what is essential to aesthetics is to try to overcome a conflict and aim towards a relief of tensions…. In contrast, the 'thought of difference' started with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, who rejected the aesthetic reconciliation" (4). It is this "turning point" in Western thought that makes the collection of interest for literary critics, for what this collection refers to as the "thought of difference" is inseparable from what "we" often refer to in shorthand as "theory." Though the editors hail from the field of English, nine out of sixteen contributors are from philosophy. Extreme Beauty thus offers an opportunity to reflect on the relation between literary criticism and "theory," particularly in the context of an interdisciplinary conversation between literary studies and philosophy.

As the collection's title suggests, a fascination with extreme forms of beauty characterizes what one might call a postmodern aesthetics. As evidence of this fascination, Perniola lists "cyborgs" (9), "psychotic realism" (9–11), Derrida's conceptualization of disgust and "negative pleasure" (11), Kristeva's abject (11–12), and what he calls an "aesthetics of trash," which he rejects along with an aesthetics of abjection or disease as an undesirable aesthetics of difference (12). Yet, this "aesthetics of trash" (what I feel when I'm feeling a little trashy?), is also intimately intertwined with camp: "The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves" (Sontag 117). Furthermore, almost forty years before this collection, Sontag complicated the turning point Extreme Beauty seeks to theorize by positing camp as a third alternative to the traditional and modernist understandings of aesthetics described by Perniola: "Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of being.… The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary 'avant-garde' art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic" (Sontag 115). It is thus through camp that I...