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"Red 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 a very long history of a very 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, the book follows the extraordinarily many 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?"--

Liberty --- Israelites crossing the Red Sea (Biblical event) --- Arts --- Crossing the Red Sea (Biblical event) --- Red Sea, Crossing of the (Biblical event) --- Red Sea, Israelites crossing of the (Biblical event) --- Exodus, The --- Jews --- Civil liberty --- Emancipation --- Freedom --- Liberation --- Personal liberty --- Democracy --- Natural law --- Political science --- Equality --- Libertarianism --- Social control --- Miscellanea --- Philosophy --- History --- Israelites crossing the Red Sea (Biblical event) - Miscellanea --- Arts - Philosophy --- 130.2 --- 246 --- 246 Art et symbolisme chretiens --- 246 Christelijke kunst en symbolisme --- Art et symbolisme chretiens --- Christelijke kunst en symbolisme --- 130.2 Filosofie van de cultuur. Cultuurfilosofie. Cultuursystemen. Kultuurfilosofie --- Filosofie van de cultuur. Cultuurfilosofie. Cultuursystemen. Kultuurfilosofie