The slimy

The slimy is a material quality that makes appropriation appear reversible: what seems ready to be possessed can instead compromise the possessor. Sartre treats it not as a bare physical property or a projected mental association, but as an ontological symbolism in which the for-itself encounters the possibility of being absorbed into the in-itself. Its defining force lies in this ambiguity: the slimy yields, yet does not simply submit; it seems to offer itself, yet turns possession into a snare.

Appropriation and Meaning

The slimy is first encountered within an appropriative project. The for-itself does not merely register a substance as a neutral object; it encounters the slimy as something to possess and, in doing so, seeks to establish itself as the foundation of that substance’s being. The slimy accordingly appears as a possible version of the self to be established. This psychic meaning does not depend on imagining that the substance has a soul, nor does it reduce materiality to a mental image. Rather, the slimy’s material character itself is disclosed through its symbolic relation to being-in-itself.

That project is free and belongs to the for-itself, but it also gives the substance room to reveal its own mode of being. The encounter begins from the slimy’s sheer existence; within the attempt to appropriate it, however, its sliminess takes shape as an answer to the subject’s project. Its qualities give the answer a peculiar density: they correspond to the project while remaining opaque, because the slimy’s materiality cannot be exhausted by a clear idea. In this encounter the substance makes the world present in a particular way and, at the same time, outlines the subject’s own wish to act as a founding power.

Sliminess thus becomes more than a classification of one material among others. It offers a way of apprehending the world’s things as a whole, giving the in-itself a distinctive mode of appearing. For as long as this encounter governs perception, the world can seem as though sliminess were its prevailing meaning. The quality crosses the usual division between the physical and the psychic: it is material, but its significance is the ontological relation that materiality discloses.

A Substance Between States

The slimy initially recalls liquidity. Like a fluid, it seems to escape in every direction while remaining continuous with itself: something that can be moved across, yet seems neither to retain a mark nor to leave one. In that image of perpetual change without a stable changing thing, fluidity suggests a possible fusion between the for-itself’s temporality and the in-itself’s permanence.

But the slimy is not simply water. Its movement is slowed by thickness; liquidity seems to be giving way to solidity. Sartre describes it as a substance between states, whose change does not have water’s brisk, readily grasped passage. The slimy drop slowly disappears into the larger mass, its absorption displaying both a resistance to being lost and a softness that eventually gives way. A drop of water joining a body of water vanishes at once; the slimy’s drawn-out incorporation makes its instability perceptible.

This difference shapes the possibility of possession. Water’s flight can itself be taken up as flight, while the slimy’s heavy, hesitant movement evades such mastery: it is already almost a fixed persistence, though not a settled solid. Its softness is likewise double. It yields under pressure and can be separated into a portion, making it seem graspable; yet the very act of handling it suggests that it is being destroyed. Possession therefore looks at once like the formation of an object and its undoing.

Possession Reversed

The decisive reversal comes when the subject believes the slimy is possessed. A solid object can be released at will; its inertia leaves the subject’s mastery intact. The slimy instead seems to continue the process of appropriation after the subject attempts to stop it. What had appeared docile now holds the possessor in relation to it. Its yielding is not the inert compliance of a solid, nor the unburdened escape of water: it is an action that makes the attempted separation uncertain.

This reversal unsettles the ordinary priority of the for-itself over the in-itself. In possession, the subject takes up the object while remaining the assimilating and creative power. The slimy symbolically inverts that arrangement: the in-itself may draw the for-itself into its contingency and indifferent, groundless existence. The encounter consequently discloses the possibility of a poisonous possession, in which the subject’s effort to establish mastery exposes it to being compromised by what it sought to possess.

The slimy’s apparent invitation is part of the trap. It seems fluid enough to allow movement, but that movement is held and degraded rather than simply permitted or refused. Its symbolism is therefore not that of a passive object resisting a subject from a distance. The substance’s characteristic mode of being makes the subject’s own project precarious: the attempt to appropriate it becomes an opening through which the in-itself appears capable of appropriating the for-itself.

The World as a Snare

Sartre connects this reversal to the slimy’s symbolic “revenge” of the in-itself. The substance is not merely a sign added to an otherwise separate psychic attitude. Its material qualities carry the meaning: its slow liquidity, yielding persistence, and seeming capacity to hold are what make it disclose the danger of absorption. The material encounter and its ontological significance cannot be cleanly detached from one another.

The same symbolism extends to sweetness. A sweetness that remains after swallowing supplies a parallel image of something that persists beyond the attempt to take it in and be done with it. The sugary ideal of sliminess represents the for-itself’s death in the in-itself; Sartre’s example is a wasp sinking into jam and drowning. The image sharpens the distinction between ordinary appropriation, in which the subject takes up an object, and this feared reversal, in which taking-in threatens to become being taken in.

Yet the slimy is also, in a sense, the subject’s own outline. The project of appropriation makes the substance meaningful as a possible self, and the connection imagined between the slimy and the subject registers both an attempted fusion and resistance to absorption. This tension explains why the slimy is more than a repellent or attractive quality: it concentrates a conflict between freedom seeking to found and incorporate the world, and an in-itself that offers no foundation and may seem to close around that freedom. Its significance lies in making that conflict palpable as a relation of possession that can turn against its initiator.