In this dissertation I shed light on the problematic of art and politics by taking Kant’s aesthetic theory as my point of departure-specifically, by setting up an opposition between the beautiful and the sublime. My rationale for privileging the sublime over the beautiful is attributable to the sublime’s essentially unstable, non-discursive nature, inasmuch as the presentation of the sublime gives rise to an ethical vantage point the experience of which must necessarily exceed our capacity to articulate it. In contrast to the experience of the beautiful, wherein the literary text appears as a self-dependent and transparently coherent totality, the sublime precipitates a crisis of representation-one in which the reader becomes conscious of the limitations of cognition and, as a result, is given existentially-felt evidence of the need to take up an ethical stance even in the face of the unsayable.

My dissertation is divisible into two parts: a philosophical section, which presents a montage of philosophical perspectives within the Marxist tradition (extending from Lukacs and Brecht through Benjamin and Adorno to Lyotard and Fredric Jameson), and a literary section, which analyses the Aesthetics of Resistance in light of the above philosophical framework. I employ the term "montage" in light of my intent to create a multiplicity of philosophical standpoints, i.e., voices that will hopefully enter into dialogue with Weiss’ trilogy. In a word, my aim in the first section is to construct a philosophical trajectory (from the "beautiful" to the "sublime") that preserves the tensions between the individual moments, (e.g., between Lukacs’ concept of totality, Benjamin’s theory of allegory, and Adorno’s and Lyotard’s articulation of the problem of the presenting individual acts of human suffering). As a history of the German working class movement, Weiss’s trilogy clearly functions in accordance with a Marxist conception of history. The Aesthetics of Resistance is, however, more than this; it is also a testimony to what the language of philosophy and history must necessarily fail to capture, namely, the individual bodily acts of suffering that are produced in their wake.

The second section of my dissertation will comprise four chapters: "Art, Literature, Language and its Limits: Tracing Reason’s Other," "Beyond Modernism: Peter Weiss’s Dialectical Appropriation of the Historical Avant-Garde," "The Proletarian Search for the Revolutionary Subject: Identity, Alterity, and the Deconstruction of the Bourgeois Subject," and "Beyond the Limits of Representation: Auschwitz and Plötzensee." In this section of the dissertation I will examine various aspects of the trilogy with the intent of showing how the intersection of Weiss literary text and the philosophical frame outlined above has the synergistic effect of illuminating both.