Tuesday, March 18, 2025
6PM
Room 9206
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CPCP) and the Center for the Humanities presents:
Join the CPCP 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.
Most known for the play Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss died shortly after publishing this last entry in his magnum opus, which Duke UP 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 will take place on Tuesday, March 18, at 6PM in room 9206 at the CUNY Graduate Center. Books will be available for purchase at the event.
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 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.
Moderated by Patrick DeDauw, PhD Candidate in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center and CPCP Dissertation Fellow.
Co-Sponsored by the Biography and Memoir Program, the Critical Theory Certificate, and the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
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