Abstract

In this chapter I try to explain why the nation, its unity and democratic legitimacy at a certain moment in history had to become visible, tangible, and more generally perceivable. There were indeed paradigmatic moments in which the nation was conceptualized, embodied and given sensory expression and it is to those events that this chapter refers, while trying to link the mediating power of aesthetics, the interrelation between sensible and intellectual knowledge, and the historicity of the single event and its exemplarity.