Abstracts

Gal Hertz (Bio)

Ethics of Resistance: Peter Weiss’s Aesth-ethics

Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–1981) recounts the story of a group of German students - antifascist activists during the rise of the Nazi regime. Yet the novel’s long, insightful dialogues transcend their immediate historical context. The protagonists engage in sustained discussions of artworks that confront violence and class struggle—among them the Pergamon Altar, Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and Picasso’s Guernica. Weiss writes: “and yet it had never been so clear to me, how in art values can be created which can overcome entrapment and the sense of being lost, how with the fashioning of visions, art tried to overcome melancholia” (vol. 2, p. 33, trans. Inez Hedges). In this reflection, Weiss positions the novel itself as an inquiry into visual ethics—raising fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, representation and morality. How can an alternative history of art offer a pathway out of destructive political systems? In what ways can a form of conscious spectatorship initiate and inspire political resistance? What are the lesson from Weiss for our present lives, in which we once again face atrocities? In this talk, I will explore Weiss’s ethical project through the lens of visual ethics, drawing on Dror Pimentel’s concept of Aesth-Ethics to illuminate the novel’s engagement with the moral potential of aesthetic experience.