Mythos and Pathos

The figure of Herakles is one of the guiding images of resistance in Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. Rather than embodying ideological concepts or utopian perspectives of resistance, Herakles is presented as a social myth that, echoing the ideas of Georges Sorel, should inspire resistance against Nazism through the pathos of struggle and defeat. By highlighting the pathos of Herakles, Weiss re-envisions this ambiguous myth in the context of antifascism and connects it with a political iconography of resistance. This essay analyzes the aesthetic and iconological implications of Weiss’s use of the Herakles myth through readings of Georges Sorel’s theory of social myth, Walter Benjamin’s notion of redeeming violence, and Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula. By recuperating Herakles through his negative appearance in the Pergamon Altar, and by emphasizing the pathos of suffering, Weiss shows how the aesthetization of politics through fascism can be countered by a politicization of aesthetics that appropriates myth for the antifascist resistance

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Ideology · Literature · Mythology · Nazism · Pathos · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy