Testament and Table

Abstract

Chapter 5 brings Kierkegaard’s contrast of a joyful and dismal economics of thinking into contact with the writers of the Parisian bohème, and with Murger most of all. The transfiguration of the commonplace is now a constant reckoning with the marketplace. The common sign, often carved with a knife of prejudice, becomes a shared contribution to a philosophical furniture art and to a modern discourse on property as theft, where the deepest theft is of a person’s selfhood. An existential thesis dominates, whereby, through unresolved patterns and paradoxes about artworks and thoughts, artists and philosophers constantly turn back to how they are living their lives. The patterning turns borrowed materials into thoughts owned, into a property for the self. Once owned, how are the thoughts expressed to render them public for others, if keeping thoughts to oneself cannot be the answer for the one who chooses to be a writer? How does talk about owning one’s self become a claim of one’s liberation from an external possession experienced as a servitude, and with what social and artistic results?