Abstract

Peter Weiss' longstanding fascination with images of violence and pain is from the very beginning accompagnied by a certain anxiety and even a sense of guilt. These conflicting attitudes relate not only to descriptions of artworks in “The Aesthetics of Resistance,” but also to the author's two best-known dramatic productions. While the late novelistic trilogy stages the confrontation with iconic representations of violence and pain as one of overwhelming immediacy and presence, “Marat/Sade” effectively dismantles one such icon, David's famous portrait of the revolutionary slain in his bathtub. The other play, The Investigation, programmatically rejects the idea of representing atrocities committed in the concentration camps, but, paradoxically, the self-imposed proscription on images proves to be no less evocative than the ekphrastic ‘image-effects’ of the other two works.