Description
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideasRed Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale?Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures?The book explores narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?
Table of Contents
Preface1. Thought Experiment2. Emancipation Narrative3. From Sea to Square to Sea4. Passages of Bohème5. Testament and Table6. Contesting Opera7. Sea Scenes8. Between Fact and Fiction9. Refiguring Exodus10. Bohemia-Bohemian-Bohème11. Egyptian-Jewish Bohème12. Mastering The Cant In The Cafe of Complaint13. Reds of Art and War14. Grey Days for a Gay Science15. Proverbs on the Path to the Absolute16. Thought Experiments in Color17. Red Thread18. Painter of Moods and Professions19. Street Signs of Libation and Liberation20. Spreading The Anecdote21. Tying The Knot
