has anybody read or studied about Sartre??

Question

what does his quote mean?

"slime is the agony of water"

in short what does it generaly mean?

Answer 1

Here's a previous answer:

"The European adventurers hated slime. Jean-Paul Sartre describes it thus: “Slime is the agony of water. It presents itself as a phenomenon in the process of becoming; it does not have the permanence within change that water has. . . . Nothing testifies more clearly to its ambiguous character as a ‘substance between two states’ than the slowness with which the slimy melts into itself.” [i] White, Western man wants clear edges and sharp delineations between land and water, differences as obvious as those between Christian and Savage, man and nature. Where native North American cultures hone capacities for kinship and transformation, European psychic and social organization relies on the difference and distance between self and other, male and female, human and animal, us and them. When one state melts into another, what might not be destabilized by the stink and slime of intense diversity?



Basically he means that slime is a matter that is hard to define. Is it liquid? Is it Solid? Water on the other hand is clear cut an ever changing liquid. At that time people wanted things to be clearly defined, including themselves. Hence they were not as excepting of the African Americans who were willing to mingle (like slime)"

and here's another

"In Nausea the organ of taste itself is slimy, and it telling that when Ricks cites Sartre as the final word on Keatsian taste, he quotes from Sartre's extended meditation upon le visqueux—both slime and the slimy—in Being and Nothingness (1943). For Sartre, the slimy resists the standard categorizations of solidity and liquidity, maintaining itself in a disgusting physical condition somewhere between the two: "Slime is the agony of water. It presents itself as a phenomenon in the process of becoming; it does not have the permanence within change that water has but on the contrary represents an accomplished break in a change of state. This fixed instability in the slimy discourages possession" (774). The slimy presents an existence that will not qualify it for (as Bataille would say) the world of things, and so it cannot be perceived as object. It will not circulate through the restricted economy of aesthetic perception, to be converted into expression, and the inevitable result is nausea. As a mucous substance that collects in the mouth, Sartre's phenomenological concept of le visqueux enters the metaphorical world of Nausea, where, disgusted by his own slimy tongue, Roquentin struggles to maintain the consistency necessary to exist as a subject in the world of things. When he finds himself devolving into a gelatinous pool of fat, he struggles to pull himself together, to feel his "body harden and the nausea vanish."10 Yet as the act of aesthetic perception yields to the aftertaste of existence, the existential man is blocked from tasting his way into a higher ideal of selfhood."

and a "google book" has a good explanation (can't be copied - try link 3 )

Answer 2

Well I dont expect a medall for this one but hay I think
malejisa does as she is truly knowledgeable..!


Love Always