Leeches

Leeches serve as the defining image of sliminess’s reversal of possession. What seems at first to be a yielding substance available to the For-itself instead clings and draws its possessor toward it, turning an act of appropriation into a threat to the self’s independence.

The Image of the Leech

The leech names the slimy substance’s characteristic mode of adherence. Unlike a solid object, which can be released at will, slime sticks to the hand and continues its pull when the holder tries to let go. Its yielding quality is therefore not simple passivity: docility conceals a power to retain and draw in the person who believed they were in control.

The comparison sharpens the reversal at the center of the passage. Possession ordinarily presents the For-itself as the active power that takes up the In-itself; with slime, the possessed substance appears to appropriate its possessor instead. The leech image gives this reversal a compact form: attachment becomes a danger to the boundary between self and object.

Reversed Possession and Its Threat

The slimy substance does not behave like a solid with reassuring inertia or like water whose movement consists in escaping. It yields while holding fast. The holder can neither simply slide across it nor make it slide away; its adherence compromises the supposed mastery that possession promises.

This reversal signifies the possibility that the In-itself could absorb the For-itself, drawing consciousness into contingency and indifferent, groundless existence. The leech is thus more than a likeness for stickiness: it makes palpable the danger that the self’s attempt to appropriate an object could become an entanglement in which the object seems to take possession of the self.

Relation to the Book’s Slimy Motif

The passage develops the leech image alongside the slimy’s other contradictory qualities. Slime seems possessable because it can be held and separated, yet handling it also seems to destroy it; it invites contact while making that contact compromising. Its apparent docility and its power to hold are not separate traits but two sides of the same disturbing reversal.

The figure belongs to a philosophical account of material qualities as disclosures of human relations to being. The leech-like hold gives physical shape to a feared collapse of the distinction between the For-itself and the In-itself, while the broader slimy motif presents that collapse as a trap concealed within apparent yieldingness.