  The existentialists’ lack of interest in poetry (which, in the case of Sartre especially, turns into outright dismissal) is based on their view that poets make a misguided use of language. For the same reason, the other non-discursive arts attract almost as little interest as poetry (however, see Camus 1951, 257). Yet, when they are discussed, they are treated more favourably than poetry, since they do not have language as their medium, and this means that the accusation against poetry becomes irrelevant. The emphasis on language as the eminent medium for the representation of human freedom reproduces a classical argument that is already at the heart of Hegel’s aesthetics (a fact that the existentialists are fully aware of [Sartre 1948a, 5]). The implication for the other arts is that they are able to produce and convey ideal contents, meaning and beauty, but that these are never as transparently accessed as in linguistic expression. Rather, the ideal content in non-linguistic art-forms remains trapped, glued, as it were, in the materiality of the artwork: “… it is one thing to work with colour and sound, and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes, colours, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing exterior to themselves. (…) As Merleau-Ponty has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception, there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with significance. But the dim little meaning which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness, remains immanent or trembles about like a heat mist; it is colour or sound” (Sartre 1948a, 1).