Book Launch, Conversation & Reading

Consciousness, Interpretation, and Underground Organizing: <em>The Aesthetics of Resistance</em> in Translation

Tue, Mar 18, 2025

6:00 PM–8:00 PM

Room 9206, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all.

Translator Joel Scott and museum educator Rachel Hunter Himes with the book cover of Volume III of the English translation of "The Aesthetics of Resistance", a novel by Peter Weiss.

Join the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Center for the Humanities for a celebration of the long-awaited English translation of the third and final volume of Peter Weiss’s antifascist modernist historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1981). Translator Joel Scott and museum educator Rachel Hunter Himes will take up the novel’s cascading themes: on repurposing skills of artistic interpretation, on organizing across the popular front of the Left, and on doing both effectively in periods of crisis, exile, and repression. Moderated by Patrick DeDauw, PhD Candidate in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center and CPCP Dissertation Fellow.

Most known for the play Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss died shortly after publishing this last entry in his magnum opus, which Duke University Press has now made available in English for the first time. Experimental and dialectical in form, the novel imagines the conversations of actual figures in the German antifascist underground as they try to figure out what to do at each step in the catastrophe. Staging debates about politics, history, consciousness, works of art, and the functions of writing, the characters grapple with understanding each other’s motivation to act in order to orient themselves to move together politically.

The event is free and open to all and will take place on Tuesday, March 18th , at 6:00 PM in Room 9206 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Books will be available for purchase at the event.

Participants:

Joel Scott

Joel Scott is a translator, editor, and writer. He is the translator of volumes II and III of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss and the author of several poetry chapbooks, the most recent being Bildverbot and Diary Farm.

Rachel Hunter Himes

Rachel Hunter Himes is a museum educator and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her writing on art and politics has appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Architecture, n+1, and elsewhere.

Patrick DeDauw

Moderator

Patrick DeDauw, PhD Candidate in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center and CPCP Dissertation Fellow.

This event is presented by the Center for the Humanities and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Gradaute Center, and is co-sponsored by the Biography and Memoir Program, the Critical Theory Certificate, and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center.