Reds of Art and War

Chapter 13 follows the oceanic allegory over embattled fields and city streets into red rooms to ask when and why red appears everywhere before one’s eyes. It opens Part IV, which overall addresses the color red through examples linking the Red Sea Passage to the Red Square via the Red Thread. How has red, with its spread of terms and senses, been used to safeguard the monochromatic tendency against the wrong sort of spread—of black and white into every shade of grey? The middle chapters investigate the grey that was said to threaten the gay science and German Idealism given their engagement with formalism, abstraction, pluralism, perspectivism, relativism, and mood change. Everything contributes to the telling in Part V of the extraordinary history of the Red Sea anecdote.