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The Resistance to Pathos and the Pathos of Resistance: Peter Weiss

In contemporary poetics, the term "pathos" does not seem to occupy much of a place and its former semantic range—external event and inner experience; spontaneous affect and reflective distance; passive and active—has become largely unavailable to us. The author enlists the concept "pathos" to reflect on the status of violence and pain in Peter Weiss. In keeping with the generation of authors writing and publishing in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, in Weiss's oeuvre, there is on the one hand an almost programmatic opposition to pathos, that is, a refusal to endow the spectacle of pain and suffering with any kind of transcendence, to "dignify" it with some meaning or purpose. On the other hand, the countless scenes of agony and torment so prominently on display in the works of art depicted in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands are for the most part striking instances of the pathos that Weiss seemed to avoid, and even denounce, elsewhere, especially in his Laokoon address. Recalling the semantic ambiguities inherent in the concept of pathos helps understand this tension: the novel's ambitious attempt to recover and redeem the pathos of the resistance, the pain and suffering that were its price, but also the example it set despite its defeat.