This dissertation is divided into two sections. In the first section, the philosophical part of the dissertation, I shed light on Peter Weiss' treatment of the problematic of politics and art by taking Kant's ethics as my point of departure and contending that the experience of the sublime compels the recipient of the art work to take up a moral stance even in the face of the inexpressible. In the second chapter, I reconstruct Lukács' theory of reification - a 'totalizing' critique of the commodity exchange form designed to provide the proletariat with a philosophical blueprint for world revolution - with the intent to show how The Aesthetics of Resistance furnishes History and Class Consciousness with a revolutionary aesthetic that Lukács himself could never have written. In an endeavor to 'mimic' Weiss' cubist writing style, I set up a philosophical opposition between Lukács and Kant that preserves rather than negates the tensions between them - a juxtaposition of heterogeneous but complementary points of view that uncovers the contradictions inherent in the social practices of a proletarian resistance movement that is pointing to something new, but which contains the authoritarian, bureaucratic, and patriarchal stamp of the old social order within itself.

In the second part of the dissertation - the literary section - I bring the above philosophical perspectives to bear upon the novel for the purpose of illuminating Weiss' moral, political, and aesthetic vision. In the third chapter ("The Self-Expressive Body"), I show how the self-reflexive, self-actualizing power of language and art allows for the expression of desires, fears, and traumas that have been inscribed upon the workers' bodies but which hitherto have remained potential or inchoate. In the fourth chapter ("The Laboring Body"), I make reference to political and aesthetic concepts delineated by Marx, Brecht, and Benjamin to demonstrate how Weiss' critical appropriation of the historical avant-garde enables him to bridge the gap between art and the industrial labor process, on the one hand, and the artist and the worker, on the other. In the final chapter of this dissertation ("The Suffering Body"), where I return to Kant's concept of the sublime, I draw a contrast between the proletarian identity and acculturation process undertaken in the first two of volumes of Weiss' trilogy - which is characterized by the Weiss' workers capacity to 'objectify' their suffering and render it politically productive - and the kind of anguish encountered at the end of the novel, where Weiss' characters (many of whom are women) experience suffering on a level that exceeds their capacity to articulate it.