Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

1

What is Writing?

2
terms
2
notes

Sartre, J. (2001). What is Writing?. In Sartre, J. What is Literature?. Routledge, pp. 1-6

Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin; in Ethics, laid groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe

1

as if at bottom there were only one art which expressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes

—p.1 by Jean-Paul Sartre
notable
6 years, 5 months ago

as if at bottom there were only one art which expressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes

—p.1 by Jean-Paul Sartre
notable
6 years, 5 months ago
2

What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance. [...] they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.

Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from arresting.

weird but kinda beautiful

—p.2 by Jean-Paul Sartre 6 years, 5 months ago

What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance. [...] they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.

Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from arresting.

weird but kinda beautiful

—p.2 by Jean-Paul Sartre 6 years, 5 months ago
12

[...] We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it toward other ends [...]

I really like this for some reason (kinda Wittgensteinian)

—p.12 by Jean-Paul Sartre 6 years, 5 months ago

[...] We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it toward other ends [...]

I really like this for some reason (kinda Wittgensteinian)

—p.12 by Jean-Paul Sartre 6 years, 5 months ago

meaning "form" "essence", "type" or "species" (developed in Plato's theory of forms?)

26

If the prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of 'prose' is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense.

—p.26 by Jean-Paul Sartre
uncertain
6 years, 5 months ago

If the prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of 'prose' is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense.

—p.26 by Jean-Paul Sartre
uncertain
6 years, 5 months ago