Barcelona Haggadah (Spain)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Barcelona Haggadah emerges from the Sephardic Jewish world of 14th-century Spain—a vibrant intersection of Jewish intellectualism, Islamic science, and Christian courtly aesthetics. Through Foucault’s framework in The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, this manuscript can be interpreted as a visual and textual dispositif of ethical self-formation. The Haggadah, meant to be read aloud during Passover, transforms ritual recitation into a reflective practice of self-stylization, where the subject constructs their ethical being through communal memory and reenactment.

The humanized biblical scenes—Moses parting the sea, the Exodus, the Plagues—are not merely narrative; they are aesthetic acts of ethical dramatization. Foucault notes that the ancient subject cultivated truth not through doctrine, but through practice: the Barcelona Haggadah is such a site of practice. It operates not by imposing a code but by offering visual invitations for a reflective and imaginative embodiment of the Exodus story—a dramatized pedagogy where participants enact liberation as an internal mode of ethical subjectivity.

The richly adorned marginalia—often humorous, surreal, or folkloric—introduce multiplicity and even play into what Foucault would recognize as the resistance to the normalizing gaze of power. These whimsical figures refuse canonical order, allowing for an aesthetics of the self that is not rigidly law-bound but open to laughter, difference, and creative speculation. This aligns with Foucault’s rejection of moral absolutism in favor of cultivating life as a work of art.

Thus, the Barcelona Haggadah is both a technology of the self and a sanctuary of collective becoming: it binds memory, law, and imagination in a recursive ritual of freedom. It is not only a tool for preserving identity, but for ethically creating oneself anew through participatory engagement with sacred time.