The Defeated. The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026

What might an aesthetics of resistance look like today? The essays in this book all engage in different ways with Peter Weiss s major anti-fascist novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81) and with the question of its significance and relevance in our time, when a new far right and new forms of fascism are taking centre stage in public life and the political arena.

The book contains previously unpublished articles by Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, contextualising essays by the leading Weiss scholars Magnus Bergh and Werner Schmidt, as well as newly written texts by some of today s most prominent international poets, critics and intellectuals, including Jacques Rancière, Anna Hallberg, Alberto Toscano, Sven Lütticken and Esther Leslie.

The Aesthetics of Resistance argues that it is through engaging with art and culture that effective resistance to fascism can be forged. From its own perspective, its own time, it insists that the history of that resistance must still be able to be our history, in the present moment of reading. This book asks: what might such an idea mean today, in the autumn of 2026?

The book is published to coincide with the exhibition The Defeated: The Aesthetics of Resistance 2026, on display at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm from 25 August to 8 November 2026. The texts in the book respond in various ways to the same challenge posed to the artworks in the gallery s spaces. They extend the exhibition s montage in new directions and towards other durations.