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The challenge which Brecht set himself was to make theater a means of emancipation by placing it in the service of the revolution. His work dealing with the exemplary figure of Galileo, which mobilized his energies between 1938 and his death in 1959, testifies to the succession of problems he came up against in his attempt to carry out this program. For Brecht, the attempt to arrive at a scenic presentation of the complex relations between science and its social environment implied the endeavor to engage the audience in the formulation of a problem for which the theatrical performance eschewed the option of any ready-made solution. To do so could only be way of the representation of a model which was both attractive and repulsive, and by highlighting what was a fluctuating complex of contradictions. For Brecht, the status of art is thus to constitute an open-ended inquiry rather than the presentation, for propaganda purposes, of a set of cut-and-dried ideas.