Call for Papers: Peter Weiss‘ „The Aesthetics of Resistance“ at Fifty
Graduate Conference, Princeton University
Peter Weiss’s monumental novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81) remains one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious attempts to articulate the relation between politics and aesthetics within a revolutionary tradition. While telling the stories of organizers against fascism during the Nazizeit, the novel foregrounds the engagement with art as a legitimate and necessary form of political work. Here, in contrast to elitists' conceptions of art and aesthetics, proletarian autodidacticism is represented as a dialogical process of defending and developing perceptual abilities against the totalitarian pressures of fascist violence and revolutionary dogmatism. The “slow” and “circuitous” processes of subject-formation take precedence over heroic deeds. In this alternative Bildungsroman, the struggle against fascism becomes reflexive and transformative only through the inquiry into art and the unconscious.
At the same time, The Aesthetics of Resistance represents political violence as an assault not only on bodies, but on perception itself, one that extends from the Holocaust and Vietnam to contemporary acts of systematic and genocidal violence. Placing such experiences in relation to one another, Weiss’s work opens onto a wide horizon of political and aesthetic expressions of humanity and resistance, from the anti-apartheid “cultural work” of the Medu Art Ensemble to the poetry and political writings Walid Daqqa, written during his thirty-eight years of imprisonment in Israel. In navigating the tension between the necessity of solidarity and the risks of its unconditional proclamation, the novel insists that perception, study, and aesthetic practice themselves constitute forms of political labor that are never finished and must remain subject to ongoing critical evaluation.
The novel’s historiographic ambition and referential sweep invite us to reflect on how scholarship represents the relation between experience, narration, political struggle, and collective aesthetic inquiry. This conference invites papers that depart from The Aesthetics of Resistance as a touchstone for exploring questions that may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How might we reflect the novel’s timeliness half a century after the publication of its first volume—exploring questions of art and resistance through different archives, methodologies, struggles, and theoretical frameworks?
- How might Weiss’s work illuminate engagements with tradition that register both as the expression of domination and as a resource for its possible overcoming?
- What does it mean to approach Western art history not as a closed canon of determinate meanings but as a field of open, contested, and potentially emancipatory forms?
- How are these debates refracted in other cultural and political contexts and within other archives?
- How do questions of resistance, defeat, organization, and perception emerge across different historical or geopolitical settings?
- How might the novel’s temporal structures inform broader reflections on political duration, crisis, and endurance?
- How do the tensions, frictions, and possible convergences between modernist aesthetics and socialist partisanship meet within a work that is at once a political reflection, a historiographic reconstruction, and a meditation on perception? How does the novel represent the internal debates, conflicts, uncertainties, losses, and wins that shape collective political movements?
- How might these dynamics be understood through the novel’s (de-)formal dimensions—its monumental scale, its three-volume architecture, its resistance not only to rapid consumption but even to attentive reading, and its density and accumulation of detail, which can be disorienting and demand sustained reading work, as well as its complex temporalities in which imminent danger coexists with prolonged contemplation and expanded historical depth?
- How can we understand its tonal registers and shifts from sobriety to intensification, from mourning to pathos?
- What forms of collective study, attentiveness, or disorientation does the novel make thinkable?
- And how might The Aesthetics of Resistance help us reconsider what resistance has been—and what it might yet be?
The conference is open to graduate students and emerging scholars working in German Studies and related fields. We greatly look forward to welcoming Professor Emerita Julia Hell (German, Michigan) and Professor Jackie Wang (Literary Arts, Brown) as keynote speakers at our conference.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words along with a short CV (1-2 pages) to Sam Nimmrichter (
Sam Nimmrichter, Princeton University (
Nico Cläsgens, Princeton University (
Ariana Croese, Princeton University (