Keywords
sublime
terror
Hegel
French Revolution
How to Cite
Abstract
When, in 1784, the revolutionary Architect Boullée conceives a cenotaph to honor the memory of Newton, he made visible in it subjects discussed by Hegel in a well-known passage of his Phenomenology of Spirit, “The absolute freedom and terror”: the relationship between absolute freedom, terror and the sublime. Designed as a machine to produce the feeling of the sublime, the cenotaph is beyond any possibility of representation and individualization. In a similar fashion, Hegel depicts the French Revolution as a descent into Terror of a freedom conceived as absolute. Unable to accept the representation of power and its individualization it celebrates death as the only deed that does not betray its absolute liberty. The aim of the essay is, therefore, to show Boullée’s artistic anticipation and Hegel’s philosophical conceptualization in parallel as an index of the future nature of space, vacuum and (political) representation, still a companion of us today.
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