Even before the French Revolution, there were occasional executions by guillotine, but it was not until 1791 that death on the scaffold was used across the board and for everyone. Until then, social status and the nature of the crime determined the choice of the execution method. Now the industrialisation of killing began. Because everyone becomes equal in front of the guillotine.
And while contemporaries are still puzzling over whether the consciousness of the decapitated can live on separate from the body in the face of all the severed heads, László F. Földényi creates his very own narrative of the long 19th century in his richly illustrated essay – based on our entry into headlessness. At the same time, the new technology of photography was introduced. Only its widespread dissemination made it possible to free the moment from the transience of life, to immortalise it as much as to kill it. This leads not only to a new understanding of time and space, but also to a change in perception itself. From then on, everything appears fragmented, as if the cut of the falling axe continues indefinitely: the bodies, the city, the poetry and the painting. A completely new image of man emerges, which portrays him as a bizarre, violent, headless being and which continues to have an effect right up to the present day.
Non-fiction
László F. Földényi, born in 1952 in Debrecen, is a Hungarian art theorist, literature specialist and essayist. He holds a chair for art theory at the Academy for Theater and Film in Budapest. He has edited the complete works of Heinrich von Kleist in Hungarian. Since 2009 he is a member of the German academy for language and poetry.
