"Nostalgia is never very far away when we talk about authenticity or romantic ruins. The political critique of ruin nostalgia simply as regression corresponds to the philosophical critique of authenticity as a phantasm grounding stable identities. But such a critique misses the fundamental ambiguity of the ruin and the authentic. However justified it may be to criticize the ideological instrumentalization of authenticity claims, it will not do to simply identify the desire for authenticity with nostalgia and dismiss it as a cultural disease...neither will it do to understand the modern imagination of ruins and its link with the sublime as expressing nothing but fantasies of power and domination, though that is the case for Speer's theory of ruin value. The dimension present in any imagination of ruins but missed by such reductive critiques is the hardly nostalgic consciousness of the transitoriness of all greatness and power, the warning of imperial hubris, and the remembrance of nature in all culture." Andreas Huyssen, "Authentic Ruins"
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