Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965276
K. Evers, J. Hell, Seth Howes
In this introduction the editors first trace the reception of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance in (West) Germany and the United States. Focusing on the relation between politics and aesthetics, some critics characterized this relation as fraught, arguing that the novel’s supposedly outdated politics ultimately rendered it obsolete. Others approached the novel as a writing experiment articulating politics and aesthetics in tense but productive ways. Proceeding and departing from these established views of Weiss’s text, the editors then propose a reading that understands the novel as deliberately opening itself up to future readings, a text conceived and structured to engage readers of not-yet-determined futures.
{"title":"Introduction: Peter Weiss and The Aesthetics of Resistance","authors":"K. Evers, J. Hell, Seth Howes","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965276","url":null,"abstract":"In this introduction the editors first trace the reception of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance in (West) Germany and the United States. Focusing on the relation between politics and aesthetics, some critics characterized this relation as fraught, arguing that the novel’s supposedly outdated politics ultimately rendered it obsolete. Others approached the novel as a writing experiment articulating politics and aesthetics in tense but productive ways. Proceeding and departing from these established views of Weiss’s text, the editors then propose a reading that understands the novel as deliberately opening itself up to future readings, a text conceived and structured to engage readers of not-yet-determined futures.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48683601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965318
Stefan Jonsson
Starting out from the interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, this essay discusses how, why, and for what purposes Weiss inserted extensive discussions of classical and contemporary artworks in his novel. More specifically, and by introducing the two notions of the foldout and political emergence, the essay investigates how the visual artworks in Weiss’s narrative reconfigure understandings of temporality, collectivity, and realism. A central question concerns the novel’s way of transforming representations of objective oppression, and even death itself, into figures of emancipatory subjective agency. Analyses of the novel’s interpretive engagement with visual artworks such as Guernica demonstrate how these sections of the novelistic text interrupt historical temporality, establish a transhistorical collectivity, and superimpose the experience of the victim with the perspective of the witness. In this way, it is argued, Weiss’s narrative enables an identification with the mute experience of destruction while converting that experience into a future-oriented political force: the emergence and continuation of collective struggle.
{"title":"Unfolding Political Emergence: The Knowledge of Visual Artworks in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance","authors":"Stefan Jonsson","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965318","url":null,"abstract":"Starting out from the interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, this essay discusses how, why, and for what purposes Weiss inserted extensive discussions of classical and contemporary artworks in his novel. More specifically, and by introducing the two notions of the foldout and political emergence, the essay investigates how the visual artworks in Weiss’s narrative reconfigure understandings of temporality, collectivity, and realism. A central question concerns the novel’s way of transforming representations of objective oppression, and even death itself, into figures of emancipatory subjective agency. Analyses of the novel’s interpretive engagement with visual artworks such as Guernica demonstrate how these sections of the novelistic text interrupt historical temporality, establish a transhistorical collectivity, and superimpose the experience of the victim with the perspective of the witness. In this way, it is argued, Weiss’s narrative enables an identification with the mute experience of destruction while converting that experience into a future-oriented political force: the emergence and continuation of collective struggle.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48363182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965304
Seth Howes
This essay explores how Peter Weiss’s anticolonial, anti-imperialist analysis, developed in the 1960s in response to the advent of decolonization and the emergence of neocolonialism, is woven into Die Ästhetik des Widerstands’ story of political self-education. Two central features of this analysis were Weiss’s concern with how solidarity can be forged between groups separated by geographic distance or cultural difference, and with the difference between national liberation and the more thoroughgoing emancipation Weiss described in 1965 as the “abolition of the reigning injustices in the world.” Examining key scenes in the novel, including the narrator’s recurrent engagements with the problem of solidarity and his historical inquiry into the deeds of the folk hero Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, this essay suggests that Die Ästhetik’s analysis of German fascism also incorporated Weiss’s long-standing concern with colonialism and imperialism and with how they were encountered and resisted.
本文探讨了彼得·韦斯在20世纪60年代为应对非殖民化和新殖民主义的出现而发展起来的反殖民、反帝国主义分析，是如何融入DieÉmerchik des Widerstands的政治自我教育故事的。这一分析的两个核心特征是维斯关注如何在因地理距离或文化差异而分离的群体之间建立团结，以及民族解放和更彻底的解放之间的差异，维斯在1965年将其描述为“废除世界上现存的不公正”，包括叙述者对团结问题的反复参与，以及他对民间英雄恩格尔布雷克·恩格尔布雷克松事迹的历史探究，本文表明，迪耶莫西克对德国法西斯主义的分析也融入了维斯对殖民主义和帝国主义的长期关注，以及他们是如何遭遇和抵抗的。
{"title":"We Can Come Very Close to Them: Solidarity and the Struggle for Liberation in The Aesthetics of Resistance","authors":"Seth Howes","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965304","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores how Peter Weiss’s anticolonial, anti-imperialist analysis, developed in the 1960s in response to the advent of decolonization and the emergence of neocolonialism, is woven into Die Ästhetik des Widerstands’ story of political self-education. Two central features of this analysis were Weiss’s concern with how solidarity can be forged between groups separated by geographic distance or cultural difference, and with the difference between national liberation and the more thoroughgoing emancipation Weiss described in 1965 as the “abolition of the reigning injustices in the world.” Examining key scenes in the novel, including the narrator’s recurrent engagements with the problem of solidarity and his historical inquiry into the deeds of the folk hero Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, this essay suggests that Die Ästhetik’s analysis of German fascism also incorporated Weiss’s long-standing concern with colonialism and imperialism and with how they were encountered and resisted.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43014771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965332
Kaisa Kaakinen
This article analyzes how paratactic and multisensory narrative strategies in Peter Weiss’s novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–81) contribute to the novel’s project of an aesthetics of resistance for future reference. The narrative mode of the novel emphasizes situated and embodied future acts of reading that generate new historical linkages and orientations across temporal, geographic, and medial gaps. Weiss’s novel mediates twentieth-century history of antifascist resistance with a perspective attuned to multiple possibilities inherent in historical instances. Furthermore, by sensitizing its recipients to differentiated ways of engaging with textual gaps, the novel presents itself as a medium of historical orientation toward futures not articulated in the text itself. The novel’s implied future readers share the novel’s concern with emancipation of the oppressed, but the protocols of reading suggested in the novel also imply that these future readers may interrupt overly rigid historical narratives that may prevent emancipation in specific contexts. The novel remains relevant because of both its historical material and its sophisticated form, which explores aesthetic mediation of experience and relational narrative strategies without losing the sense of historical materiality and without subsuming experience within a concept of a self-enclosed subject.
本文分析了彼得·韦斯（Peter Weiss）的小说《宽地之死》（DieÉmericak des Widerstands，1975–81）中的并列和多感官叙事策略如何为小说的抵抗美学项目做出贡献，以供未来参考。小说的叙事模式强调情境化和具体化的未来阅读行为，这些行为跨越时间、地理和媒介间隙产生了新的历史联系和方向。维斯的小说以一种与历史事件中固有的多种可能性相适应的视角，介导了20世纪反法西斯抵抗的历史。此外，通过让接受者意识到处理文本空白的不同方式，小说将自己呈现为一种历史导向的媒介，指向文本本身没有阐明的未来。小说隐含的未来读者与小说一样关注被压迫者的解放，但小说中提出的阅读协议也暗示，这些未来读者可能会打断过于僵化的历史叙事，而这些叙事可能会在特定背景下阻碍解放。这部小说之所以具有相关性，是因为它的历史材料和复杂的形式，它探索了经验的美学中介和关系叙事策略，而没有失去历史物质性的感觉，也没有将经验纳入一个自我封闭的主体的概念中。
{"title":"For Future Reference: A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Peter Weiss’s Poetics of Parataxis and Scenes of Walking","authors":"Kaisa Kaakinen","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965332","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes how paratactic and multisensory narrative strategies in Peter Weiss’s novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–81) contribute to the novel’s project of an aesthetics of resistance for future reference. The narrative mode of the novel emphasizes situated and embodied future acts of reading that generate new historical linkages and orientations across temporal, geographic, and medial gaps. Weiss’s novel mediates twentieth-century history of antifascist resistance with a perspective attuned to multiple possibilities inherent in historical instances. Furthermore, by sensitizing its recipients to differentiated ways of engaging with textual gaps, the novel presents itself as a medium of historical orientation toward futures not articulated in the text itself. The novel’s implied future readers share the novel’s concern with emancipation of the oppressed, but the protocols of reading suggested in the novel also imply that these future readers may interrupt overly rigid historical narratives that may prevent emancipation in specific contexts. The novel remains relevant because of both its historical material and its sophisticated form, which explores aesthetic mediation of experience and relational narrative strategies without losing the sense of historical materiality and without subsuming experience within a concept of a self-enclosed subject.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42852399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965374
A. Potts
This article explores an often overlooked, broadly realist aspect of Weiss’s engagement with visual art in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Analysis of the role played in the novel by painted depiction usually focuses on dramatic stagings of figures engaged in violent struggle. The focus here is on a different kind of art depicting generic situations rather than singular events, one that closely echoes aesthetic and ideological priorities evident in the conception of Weiss’s novel. The pictorial realism that particularly drew his attention consisted both of modern social realism, where a politics of class resonated with his powerfully committed and richly articulated Marxism, and the “epic” realism of the early modern artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The way in which in the latter, concrete, rationally graspable realities would merge into phantasmagoria and monstrous deformations spoke perhaps more forcefully to his politically activist aesthetics of resistance.
{"title":"Pictorial Realism in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance","authors":"A. Potts","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965374","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores an often overlooked, broadly realist aspect of Weiss’s engagement with visual art in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Analysis of the role played in the novel by painted depiction usually focuses on dramatic stagings of figures engaged in violent struggle. The focus here is on a different kind of art depicting generic situations rather than singular events, one that closely echoes aesthetic and ideological priorities evident in the conception of Weiss’s novel. The pictorial realism that particularly drew his attention consisted both of modern social realism, where a politics of class resonated with his powerfully committed and richly articulated Marxism, and the “epic” realism of the early modern artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The way in which in the latter, concrete, rationally graspable realities would merge into phantasmagoria and monstrous deformations spoke perhaps more forcefully to his politically activist aesthetics of resistance.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47239161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965290
K. Evers
Starting from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the openness of the future and the function of promises for political action, this essay offers a new understanding of the political pedagogy at work in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Rather than being narrated by the author’s proxy, as much of the novel’s reception assumes, Weiss plays subversively with mask narration. The narrator’s selective reading of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa guides readers to a complex assessment of the costs and deformations necessitated by the narrator’s promise to remain part of the antifascist resistance. Via its poetics of looking away, the novel discloses a probing of history, politics, and collective action that contrasts sharply with the narrator’s stated poetics and teleological expectations. The Aesthetics of Resistance prepares its future readings as an open, not-yet-determined pursuit of aesthetic and political education.
{"title":"Looking Away: On Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and the Narration of Political Pedagogy in The Aesthetics of Resistance","authors":"K. Evers","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965290","url":null,"abstract":"Starting from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the openness of the future and the function of promises for political action, this essay offers a new understanding of the political pedagogy at work in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Rather than being narrated by the author’s proxy, as much of the novel’s reception assumes, Weiss plays subversively with mask narration. The narrator’s selective reading of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa guides readers to a complex assessment of the costs and deformations necessitated by the narrator’s promise to remain part of the antifascist resistance. Via its poetics of looking away, the novel discloses a probing of history, politics, and collective action that contrasts sharply with the narrator’s stated poetics and teleological expectations. The Aesthetics of Resistance prepares its future readings as an open, not-yet-determined pursuit of aesthetic and political education.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41691911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965346
Richard Langston
Peter Weiss made no secret of the importance of form for his magnum opus The Aesthetics of Resistance. “Again and again [I’ve made] new attempts at finding a form for the book,” he wrote early on in its conception. This authorial search is, in fact, far more complicated than the long blocks of prose Weiss settled on for the novel. Exemplified in volume 2’s opening confrontation with Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, this search within the narrative vacillates between constituting erect forms and leveling them altogether. With the aid of Georges Bataille, the following essay illuminates not only how reading and writing embody these oppositions between form and formless but also how this tension culminates in Weiss’s poetic regeneration of a Marxism uncanny in nature despite what he perceived as dialectical materialism’s bureaucratic exhaustion in the Eastern bloc.
{"title":"Marxist and Formless: Uncanny Materialism in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance","authors":"Richard Langston","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965346","url":null,"abstract":"Peter Weiss made no secret of the importance of form for his magnum opus The Aesthetics of Resistance. “Again and again [I’ve made] new attempts at finding a form for the book,” he wrote early on in its conception. This authorial search is, in fact, far more complicated than the long blocks of prose Weiss settled on for the novel. Exemplified in volume 2’s opening confrontation with Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, this search within the narrative vacillates between constituting erect forms and leveling them altogether. With the aid of Georges Bataille, the following essay illuminates not only how reading and writing embody these oppositions between form and formless but also how this tension culminates in Weiss’s poetic regeneration of a Marxism uncanny in nature despite what he perceived as dialectical materialism’s bureaucratic exhaustion in the Eastern bloc.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47996493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965430
H. M. Enzensberger
{"title":"Peter Weiss and Others","authors":"H. M. Enzensberger","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965430","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49403919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9734777
A. Honneth
This article asks what it means to claim that secular reason is “postmetaphysical” and differentiates among understandings of that notion in Jürgen Habermas’s work. The article considers what secular reason would have to achieve to make good on the claim that it still can provide us with such a comprehensive understanding or worldview. From a theoretical standpoint, we should explore how reality has to be understood for us to understand self and world; from a practical standpoint, we need to ask which attitudes we would actually have to adopt toward reality to find in it the kind of orientation that Habermas believes his version of secular reason holds in store. The article concludes by showing that Habermas’s thesis that secular reason can survive only in the form of a tradition that reaches back to either Immanuel Kant or David Hume is problematic because it neglects a third alternative, namely, a revised Aristotelianism.
{"title":"Secular Reason? A Minor Query about a Major Work","authors":"A. Honneth","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9734777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9734777","url":null,"abstract":"This article asks what it means to claim that secular reason is “postmetaphysical” and differentiates among understandings of that notion in Jürgen Habermas’s work. The article considers what secular reason would have to achieve to make good on the claim that it still can provide us with such a comprehensive understanding or worldview. From a theoretical standpoint, we should explore how reality has to be understood for us to understand self and world; from a practical standpoint, we need to ask which attitudes we would actually have to adopt toward reality to find in it the kind of orientation that Habermas believes his version of secular reason holds in store. The article concludes by showing that Habermas’s thesis that secular reason can survive only in the form of a tradition that reaches back to either Immanuel Kant or David Hume is problematic because it neglects a third alternative, namely, a revised Aristotelianism.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45722648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：