Reading the Aesthetics of Resistance

Peter Weiss worked for nearly ten years on his three-volume novel (The Aesthetics of Resistance), and since his death it has become a kind of legacy. In a sense, he spent his entire life at work on it. For all the works that have issued since the 1940s from the hand of this painter/printmaker/film-maker/author return here to form a peculiar alliance: a summa artistica andpolitica, also perhaps in its strict sense asumma theologica, of the atheist and communist Peter Weiss. The Aesthetics of Resistance has frequently been called one of the great works of the century, an opus magnum, an epic in the novel form's continuing time of crisis. One must read this great book the equal of Ulysses not three, but five or six times, before its structures become clarified and understood, Walter Jens remarked in his speech when Weiss was posthumously awarded the Btichner Prize. It is safe to assume that the celebrants at the Darmstadt Academy for Language and Literature they too had read but little of it. It is to be feared that Peter Weiss' Aesthetics remains just as unread as the most discussed books of this century: Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's Remembrance, and Musil's Man Without Qualities

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Reading (process) · Resistance (ecology) · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

• Introduction

  Noah Isenberg•The Germanic Review Literature…•2008

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• The quest for transformative politics and the circumstances of social complexity

  Open Access•Kolja Möller•European Journal of Social Theory•2025

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• Introduction

  Kai Evers, Julia Hell et al.•New German Critique•2022

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