Sylvain Creuzevault L’Esthétique de la résistance

In L’Esthétique de la résistance by Peter Weiss, a landmark novel of the XXth century, Sylvain Creuzevault continues to probe, onstage, the workings of the history of political struggles, and the capacity of human beings, and the works they create, to resist.

After the last fifteen years spent digging deep into the XIX^th century and the work of Dostoevsky, Sylvain Creuzevault continues, in the XX^th century, with an unrelenting excavation of a very specific history of socialism and social struggles – and with it, the theatrical potential of monuments of literature. With L’Esthétique de la résistance by the German author, Peter Weiss, published in three volumes between 1971 and 1981, Sylvain Creuzevault tackles a new world-novel, a testamentary masterpiece that has been compared to Proust and Walter Benjamin. It details a collective (and melancholic) history of resistance to fascism and German workers' struggles, via the itinerancy, from 1937 to 1945 and from Berlin to Spain, of a young anti-fascist worker and his comrades. Their meetings take place in museums and galleries, in front of the masterpieces called upon by art in response to barbarism. Might political resistance be an art? Or is it the work of art itself that constitutes a weapon? And for how long? Through this Dante-like history of the art of resistance, Peter Weiss and Sylvain Creuzevault probe the workings of political commitment, the refusal of to give up, and what remains when societies set their sights on the worst.