of his investigation, Freud qualifies the uncanny as an aesthetic
   experience. Aesthetic is here used in the broad sense of "the study of
   the qualities of our sentiments" as opposed to the narrow sense, "the
   study of the beautiful", which, according to Freud, limits its scope
--
   adjective is a qualifying addition, a supplement: it is not
   "necessary" in the strict sense, it merely adds something to the noun
   it accompanies.
--
   of discourse that has no denotation but only connotations" (122),
   meaning that literature has nothing to do with reference to an outside
   reality, but only refers to an intratextual reality. At first sight,
--
   Then, he will confront these results with a semantic and etymological
   study of the meaning of the adjective. The question of reference
   becomes problematic on both accounts. According to Kofman and Cixous,
--
   trapped in the hermeneutic circle, he is also unable to distinguish
   between literal meaning and metaphorical meaning, between denotation
   and connotation, between reality and fiction.^3
--
   negation of the adjective heimlich, derived from the semantic core of
   Heim, home. Except, it turns out that heimlich has two meanings. The
   first sense is the most literal: domestic, familiar, intimate. The
   second meaning departs from the positive, literal sense to the more
   negative metaphorical sense of hidden, secret, clandestine, furtive.
   One might say that a certain change of perspective has taken place: in
   the positive sense, heimlich takes the inside-perspective of the
   intimacy of the home. In the negative sense, by contrast, the walls of
   the house shield the interior and in the eyes of the outsider, the
--

   Unheimlich in the sense of strange, unfamiliar, uncanny, eerie,
   sinister... is then clearly the negation of only the first meaning of
   heimlich and as such, it almost coincides with the second, negative
   meaning of heimlich. This peculiar etymology runs counter to the
   intuition and already complicates the straightforward scheme of
--
   so-called objective knowledge of reality is no more true than fiction
   is. In trying to pin down the meaning of the uncanny, Freud is only
   confronted with its elusiveness. Every attempt to determine its
--
   However, in behaving like a writer of fiction, Freud does manage to
   convey a sense of the uncanny, not by what he says, but by what
   escapes him.^7
--
   terms of the classical hierarchical opposition of proper/figurative or
   in terms of the traditional scientific ideal of univocal meaning, for
   the opposition between conscious and unconscious allows for the
   simultaneous existence of ambivalent meanings in their own right,
   without cancelling each other out.
--
   discourse, in which the subject of scientific discourse clearly comes
   to the fore. That is, the sense of metaphoricity and subjectivity need
   not be repressed, because a certain ambiguity and indefiniteness are
--
   its endless displacement are accounted for and the process of
   signification is perceived as ambiguous, open and indefinite on the
   one hand and rooted in a subject on the other hand. Nevertheless, the
--
   like many other concepts, a word taken from common language, which is
   metaphorically charged with a certain meaning. Therefore, it is
   impossible to reduce the origin of these kinds of concepts to just one
--
   thematises the impossibility of conceptualisation in the traditional
   sense of a self-contained entity. Like the concept of the unconscious,
   it is a negative concept and hence internally contradictory, for by
--
   Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies
   of the Creation of Meaning in language. London: Routledge.

--
   reunited. The statement cannot be encircled: yet Freud, arguing for
   the existence of the Unheimliche, wishes to retain the sense, the
   real, the reality of the sense of things. He thus seeks out "the basic
   sense". Thus the analysis is anchored, at once, in what is denoted.
   And it is a question of a concept whose entire denotation is a