In this introduction the editors first trace the reception of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance in (West) Germany and the United States. Focusing on the relation between politics and aesthetics, some critics characterized this relation as fraught, arguing that the novel’s supposedly outdated politics ultimately rendered it obsolete. Others approached the novel as a writing experiment articulating politics and aesthetics in tense but productive ways. Proceeding and departing from these established views of Weiss’s text, the editors then propose a reading that understands the novel as deliberately opening itself up to future readings, a text conceived and structured to engage readers of not-yet-determined futures.

Starting from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the openness of the future and the function of promises for political action, this essay offers a new understanding of the political pedagogy at work in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Rather than being narrated by the author’s proxy, as much of the novel’s reception assumes, Weiss plays subversively with mask narration. The narrator’s selective reading of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa guides readers to a complex assessment of the costs and deformations necessitated by the narrator’s promise to remain part of the antifascist resistance. Via its poetics of looking away, the novel discloses a probing of history, politics, and collective action that contrasts sharply with the narrator’s stated poetics and teleological expectations. The Aesthetics of Resistance prepares its future readings as an open, not-yet-determined pursuit of aesthetic and political education.