The Sartrean Viscous: Swamp and Source

Abstract

As Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Age de Raison (The Age of Reason) opens, Mathieu learns that he has inadvertently impregnated his long-time lover, Marcelle. The primordial given of individual freedom, thrown into crisis by vagaries of human reproduction, constitutes guiding theme in this 1945 novel. The next several hundred pages are like a dissection table upon which Sartre lays bare workings of Mathieu's mind, where repulsion at female anatomy intermingles with horror at embryogeny. By end of ontological meanderings in L'Etre et le ndant (Being and Nothingness), published two years earlier, Sartre had managed to navigate beyond descriptions of for-itself's bodily life in everyday experience: he had readied his readers for a long-awaited landing in harbor of ethics. Yet Sartre is never far from carnal desire and puzzlement at how our body connects with world. The treatise's last chapter, entitled On Quality as a Revelation of Being (EN 661-78), proves to be an increasingly lurid account of means by which an unmistakably feminine slime may afford (masculine) for-itself that euphoric experience of total being. In a last stab at synthetically embodying ideal ontological totality, Sartre's famous surrogate in this odyssey of for-itself, Pierre, corporeally enters a netherworld where he knows that le visqueux (slime, or the viscous) will imperil his monolithic, existentialist freedom. Yet, risking his life, Pierre cuts deeply into this voracious quality of being, final metaphor for Other in L'Etre et le niant, managing to emerge unscathed by coital contact with dark side of being. But rather than recapture his stolen being by figuratively killing or ingesting Other in manner usual to Sartrean for-itself, Pierre will leave the viscous as an ever-thriving threat.