How to preserve the radical negativity of the revolutionary event? How to transmit the amnesiac rupture within history—to initiate a tradition of the impossibility of tradition? Our contemporary obsession with anti-monuments, by now a slightly weary topic in the memory industry, begins right here. Failing to keep pace with the events, revolutionary artifacts became instantly obsolete, thus needing to be destroyed, and the destruction in turn to be commemorated, sacralized, and eternalized, the ruins carefully preserved in their desecrated condition. Images would proliferate representing the violent destruction of images—scenes of passion involving smashing, burning, pillaging images, but also trampling, tearing, biting, chewing, swallowing images, or collecting the fragments, piling up the debris into monumental pyramids to form the foundation stones of a new order. — Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2011), 62.