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   Issue 5. The Uncanny - Guest editor: Anneleen Masschelein

A Homeless Concept
Shapes of the Uncanny in Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture

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   Author: Anneleen Masschelein
   Published: January 2003

   Abstract (E): This article sketches the framework underlying the
   present thematic issue. A functionalist-discursive analysis of the
   linguistic form and evolution of the Freudian concept of the uncanny
   in the late twentieth century reveals a paradox: as a concept, the
   uncanny problematises the very act of conceptualisation and theory
   formation. And yet, as the various contributions to this issue show,
   precisely because of its structural vagueness/openness, the concept
   seems particularly suited to articulate certain tendencies in late
   twentieth-century thought and art.

   Abstract (F): Cet article esquisse le cadre théorique des
   contributions de ce numéro. L'analyse discursive et fonctionnaliste
   des formes et de l'évolution du conception freudien d' « unheimlich »
   (« inquiétante étrangeté », selon la traduction en usage) fait
   apparaître un paradoxe : le concept même d'unheimlich s'oppose en
   effet à sa propre conceptualisation et, plus généralement, à toute
   approche théorique du phénomène. Toutefois, les articles réunis dans
   ce numéro montrent aussi que l'ambivalence du concept d' « unheimlich
   », qui reste à la fois flou et ouvert, le rend particulièrement
   approprié à l'analyse de certaines tendances artistiques et
   philosophiques de la fin du vingtième siècle.

   Keywords: the uncanny, Freud, re-readings, discourse analysis,
   conceptualization

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   The present special issue of Image and Narrative is devoted to a
   somewhat intangible topic, the concept of the uncanny and its shapes
   in theory and culture. The various papers originate within a series of
   specialised seminars^1, which started from an abstract problem: what
   is a concept, how does it come into being and how is it as such
   recognised and acknowledged. We have tried to formulate a partial
   answer to these questions by concentrating on a particular case: das
   Unheimliche or the Freudian uncanny. By way of introducing the
   question, I would like to make some remarks concerning the relation
   between on the one hand, the specific content of a notion and, on the
   other hand, a more functionalist-discursive approach focusing on the
   particular historical conceptual development.^2 In the case of the
   concept of the uncanny, we are faced with a paradoxical situation.
   Although the history of its conceptualisation can be clearly traced
   because it is a relatively young concept, the uncanny has gradually
   come to signify the very problem or even impossibility of clearly
   defined concepts as such.

1. The "origin": Freud

   "Das Unheimliche" is an essay written by Freud in 1919 in which the
   phenomenon of the uncanny is approached from various angles: language
   and semantics versus experience; literature and myth versus everyday
   life and psychoanalytic practice; the individual feeling versus the
   universal phenomenon. Freud's essay is a direct response to the
   psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch's study "Über die Psychologie des
   Unheimlichen" (translated as "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"). For
   Freud, as for Jentsch, the uncanny is a specific - mild - form of
   anxiety, related to certain phenomena in real life and to certain
   motives in art, especially in fantastic literature. Examples of such
   phenomena or literary motives are the double, strange repetitions, the
   omnipotence of thought (i.e., the idea that your wishes or thoughts
   come true), the confusion between animate and inanimate, and other
   experiences related to madness, superstition or death. From the outset
   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
   to positive feelings. The fact that the uncanny is related to
   aesthetics also accounts for the subjectivity of the experience: Freud
   insists that not everyone is equally susceptible to the feeling of the
   uncanny, and the list of phenomena is neither conclusive, nor
   generally accepted. Especially in literature, it depends on the
   treatment of the material whether a motive is uncanny or not.
   Nevertheless, Freud does not doubt the existence of the sentiment as
   such: both in everyday life and in art, the uncanny occurs, otherwise
   there would not be a specific word for it.

   Freud's characterisation of aesthetic phenomena in terms of "the
   qualities of our sentiments" can be related to the peculiar
   grammatical form of the term das Unheimliche, which will turn out to
   be symptomatic for its paradoxical situation as a concept. Instead of
   the regular derivative substantive Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness), the
   title of Freud's essay consists of a substantivised adjective. Thus,
   grammatically speaking, the uncanny belongs to a category of concepts
   like the grotesque and das Erhabene (the sublime), unlike semantically
   related nouns like alienation (Verfremdung), or fear (Angst). The
   connotation of the substantivised adjective seems to lie somewhere in
   between the closedness and definiteness of the substantive on the one
   hand, which refers to a clearly demarcated entity or phenomenon, and
   the adjective on the other hand, which belongs to everyday language
   with the more versatile, indeterminate use this entails. As such, the
   adjective is a qualifying addition, a supplement: it is not
   "necessary" in the strict sense, it merely adds something to the noun
   it accompanies.

   This qualifying or embellishing function brings the adjective closer
   to the realm of the poetic metaphor, rather than to the scientific
   concept. In The Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur draws attention to Frege's
   postulate concerning the specific nature of literature as "that sort
   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,
   however, Freud clearly assumes that there is a stable referent for the
   uncanny in reality: the uncanny exists and hence it can be described
   and defined. In order to determine the "essence" of the uncanny, Freud
   proposes a double investigation. First, he will proceed inductively by
   finding the common denominator of a great many cases of the uncanny.
   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,
   Freud's complementary investigations are circular: the dictionary is
   called upon to corroborate the results of the case studies, but the
   one has no more reality than the other, because Freud merely confirms
   his interpretations by another interpretation. Not only is he thus
   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

   Let me consider for the moment the second, etymological research,
   which is presented first in the essay. In the lengthy display of
   dictionary entries Freud reproduces, there are several difficulties
   which have to do with the negativity of the notion. Un-heimlich is the
   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
   secludedness of the inner circle is associated with secrecy and
   conspiracy.

   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
   familiar versus strange and hence frightening, proposed by Jentsch.
   Freud concludes his lexicographic research by stating that the
   specificity of the sensation of the uncanny lies in the fact that
   something is frightening, not because it is unfamiliar or new, but
   because what used to be familiar has somehow become strange. He quotes
   a phrase by Schelling which formulates precisely this relation:
   "unheimlich is that what ought to have remained hidden, but has
   nonetheless come to light". And yet, the reader may be left wondering
   whether this 'definition' correspond to an 'actual' feeling, or
   whether we dealing with a metaphor?

   When discussing the examples of the uncanny - already problematic in
   themselves because of their divergent, almost incompatible nature -
   Freud relates the idea of the familiar which has become strange to the
   psychoanalytic notion of repression. What is frightening is the return
   of the repressed. In his view, the prefix un- is none other than the
   mark of repression. With this prefix we are of course but one step
   removed from the quintessential Freudian concept, the unconscious,
   which is in a way an equally 'unthinkable' concept. The very notion of
   the unconscious excludes the idea of a consciously thinking, rational
   subject which is, as Samuel Weber points out, the basis of Western
   thought since Descartes and Kant. Likewise, how can we think the
   unheimliche as the negation of an ambivalent word like heimlich, if we
   cannot be sure of a stable referent in the first place? According to
   Weber, this explains why (I quote from an excerpt of the introduction
   to a new edition of The Legend of Freud)

   the Uncanny, das Unheimliche, remains as abseitig, as marginal a topic
   as it was when Freud first wrote on it. Perhaps, because it is not
   simply a 'topic', much less a 'concept', but rather a very particular
   kind of scene: one which would call into question the separation of
   subject and object generally held to be indispensable to scientific
   and scholarly inquiry, experimentation and cognition (...). (Weber
   1998)

2. The conceptualisation of the uncanny: a functionalist-discursive
perspective

   To a certain extent, Weber is right about the marginality of the
   uncanny in psychoanalytic theory and practice.^4 In the years
   following its publication, the essay was hardly noticed. Only a few
   attempts have been made to examine the notion from a clinical
   perspective: Bergler (1934), Grotjahn (1948) and Lacan in his
   unpublished seminar on anxiety (1962-1963). However, in the seventies
   and the eighties, the uncanny starts to receive more attention,
   especially in Lacanian circles. In 1972, Mérigot characterises the
   shift in the following terms:

   Psychoanalytic concepts circulate on the theoretical scene. They wear
   out, become tired, lose their freshness. Other theoretical
   formulations succeed the concepts of the first hour, concepts of a
   second level appear. Thus it is with the unheimliche, which, although
   it does not occupy a central position in the Freudian development, is
   nevertheless, for those who pay attention to it, an important and
   complex concept: complex by its mode of functioning which is often
   allusive and subterranean in the texts inspired by psychoanalysis,
   important because it is situated at one of the nods of the theoretical
   articulation of analysis. (Mérigot: 100, my translation)

   Gradually, the notion is more and more accepted as a concept. The
   Revue Française de la psychanalyse (1981) and the Belgian journal
   Psychoanalytische Perspectieven (1992) both devote thematic issues to
   the uncanny. Moreover, the concept is included in a number of recent
   psychoanalytic dictionaries.^5

   Yet, the bulk of the critical and theoretical reception of "Das
   Unheimliche" is located in the field of aesthetics: literary theory
   and criticism, art history, philosophy, architecture and cultural
   studies. The growing interest in the uncanny in literary studies first
   occurred in the late sixties, early seventies, and coincided with the
   transition of structuralism to post-structuralism. On the one hand,
   Todorov briefly discusses Freud's essay in his structural study of the
   genre of the fantastic. Thus, he insured a lasting interest in the
   uncanny in the context of the genre study of the fantastic, the gothic
   and other related genres, which is still a vivid tradition in literary
   theory and criticism. On the other hand, a number of important
   readings of Freud's essay from a post-structuralist and/or
   deconstructive perspective have shaped the present form of the
   concept, and they function as theoretical landmarks in their own
   right. The most important examples are Cixous, Weber, Kofman and Hertz
   in the seventies and early eighties, more recent instances are Moller
   and Lydenberg.

   I refer to these studies as "rereadings" in order to stress the
   specific form they take. They all share an interest in the rhetorical,
   discursive and even literary or narrative qualities of Freud's
   writing, rather than a scientific or conceptual approach. Very often,
   the particular fictional aspect of the texts and the emphasis on
   reading (both Freud's reading and the critic's) is already hinted at
   in the titles. Let me quote a few examples: "Fiction and its Phantoms
   A reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche " (Cixous), The Freudian Reading,
   Analytical and Fictional Constructions (Moller), Reading Freud's
   Reading (Gilman), Quatre Romans analytiques (Kofman), Freud's
   Masterplot (Brooks), and "Freud's Uncanny Narratives" (Lydenberg).
   Other titles stress the supplementary and complementary function of
   the commentaries and interpretations: "The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a
   Canny Moment" (Weber), "L'inquiétante étrangeté. Notes sur
   l'unheimliche" (Mérigot) and "Quelques notes de lecture concernant
   "Das Unheimliche"" (Van Hoorde).

   All texts seem to take the phenomenon of the uncanny for granted, but,
   like Weber, most critics question not just the validity of Freud's
   study, but the very possibility and ideal of scientific knowledge and
   definite concepts per se. In Freud's oeuvre - in particular his
   notions of the unconscious and the uncanny - critics see either a
   forerunner of this deconstruction of Western logocentrism (positive
   attitude), or an example of this mode of thought to be deconstructed
   (negative). Cixous's reading is the first and most influential in this
   respect. Through strategies of parody and mimicry, she highlights the
   uncertainty and elusiveness that pervade Freud's attempts to define
   the uncanny. She reads his essay not as a theoretical study, but as a
   piece of fiction. As I have pointed out before, in "Das Unheimliche",
   Freud was faced with the problem of the uncanny in fiction. Literary
   discourse offers at once more and less possibilities for the uncanny,
   for the effect can be either fortified or toned down at the will of
   the writer. So any classification of uncanny phenomena is thwarted by
   fiction, for literary texts provide evidence and counter-evidence for
   every hypothesis and category.

   Cixous goes one step further when she questions whether any sharp
   distinction can be drawn between reality and fiction. After all, the
   subjectivity of reading and interpretation is not limited to fiction,
   it infects any attempt at interpretation, even if it presents itself
   as scientific. Cixous seems to agree with Ricoeur (against Frege) that
   it is not very fruitful to see the difference between fiction and
   reality in terms of reference. Fiction does speak a sort of reality^6
   , moreover, according to Cixous, reality is always also fictitious:
   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
   essence is doomed to failure, because it entails a necessary
   repression of the doubt that is inherent in the uncanny. And by
   Freud's own definition, the repressed always returns and thus the
   uncertainty that he had hoped to expel, is always reintroduced.
   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

   Neil Hertz also reads Freud's essay along similar lines, when he
   analyses the problem of figurative language in speculative texts. In
   Freud's Jenseits des Lustprinzips and in its precursor, "Das
   Unheimliche", he examines the theoretical presuppositions of the
   repetition compulsion and the death drive. Freud is unable to provide
   convincing, real evidence for these hypothetical constructions,
   notwithstanding the fact that he was forced to posit them by the
   confrontation with clinical data that could not be accounted for in
   psychoanalytic theory at that point. Therefore, these theoretical
   assumptions can only be described in figurative language, they are
   metaphors used to circumscribe certain gaps in the theory. Hertz also
   draws attention to the problem of an adequate meta-language: how can
   one speak about problems like metaphor, model and analogy without
   using figurative language? Furthermore, is it at all possible to
   distinguish between literal and figurative language, between content
   and form of discourse?^8 Hertz's problematisation of figurative
   language in Freud's theoretical speculations can be generalised to
   scientific language and models in general, as has been done by a.o.
   Ricoeur.

   In Métaphore et concept Claudine Normand (a linguist working in the
   field of the French analyse du discours in the seventies) specifically
   tackles these questions from the perspective of discourse analysis.
   She denounces the problem of a clear-cut distinction between metaphor
   and concept as somehow beside the point. In her view, psychoanalysis
   and discourse analysis may lead to a new perspective on science and
   the problem of metaphor and reference. Psychoanalysis as an overtly
   metaphorical science renders the opposition between metaphor and
   concept obsolete, because tropes and analogies function in a specific
   way. On the one hand, metaphorical psychoanalytic concepts like e.g.,
   repression, the unconscious and the drive, are illustrations of
   phenomena. They are images used for didactic purposes, but at the same
   time they also have a heuristic function. They stimulate the
   development of a science and make it dynamic. The tension between
   subjectivity and objectivity that is created cannot be settled in
   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.

   Thus the possibility of a new theory of representation is open, by
   putting into question the very "common and comfortable distinction
   between a term of reality and its representation" because "one and the
   same text, or better still, one and the same letter, at the same time
   constitutes and represents the unconscious desire". (Normand: 127)

   Like Cixous, Weber and Hertz, Normand also deconstructs the classical
   opposition between science and fiction, however, less radical than
   Cixous, she does not want to destroy the possibility of science and
   meta-language. Rather, she advocates a new type of theoretical
   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
   tolerated. More concretely, Normand proposes to distinguish between
   the level of production of discourse and the level of function. On the
   level of production of scientific language, the play of metaphor and
   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
   polysemy on this level does not prevent a concept from functioning,
   from producing effects, both intersubjective (the emergence of the
   truth of a subject), and in a socio-historically determined formation
   (ideological truth). Following Althusser, Normand states that the
   production of knowledge by scientific discourse is the result of a
   complex process, or the "synthesis of a multiplicity of
   determinations". The fact that knowledge is also metaphorically
   determined "does not invalidate the real historical effects of this
   discourse". (Normand: 142)

   How are we to relate this back to the conceptual history of the
   uncanny? What is attractive in Normand's proposal, is the possibility
   to approach the uncanny as a concept from a functionalist-discursive
   perspective, without obliterating its semantic complexity. Unlike
   Cixous or Weber, I am not inclined to characterise the notion in terms
   of a "coreless concept" or a "particular, marginal kind of scene". In
   the light of the current state of thought, I believe that the
   distinction between metaphor and concept in terms of content, origin
   and a traditional, monosemic view of science is highly problematic.
   Formulating the question in terms of either/or may, to a certain
   extent, have lost some of its pertinence. From a functionalist
   perspective, the uncanny is a concept because it is identified as
   such, as is testified by the numerous entries for the uncanny in
   various dictionaries and vocabularies, by its listing in indices and
   tables of content, by its inclusion as key word or subject category in
   bibliographical instruments and search engines on the internet, and
   lastly, by its occurrence in titles.

   I agree with Martin Jay that "in the 1990's the uncanny has become a
   master trope available for appropriation in a wide variety of
   contexts" and that it is so because, as Jay rightly points out, "by
   common consent, the theoretical inspiration for the current
   fascination with the concept is Freud's 1919 essay" (Jay: 20). Freud's
   text may provide an anchoring point for the history of the
   conceptualisation, but it only functions as a beginning or arche by
   common consent, by an unspoken agreement among a community of users of
   the concept. As Freud demonstrated in his article, the uncanny is,
   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
   text or to just one usage. On the other hand, there must always a
   "first" one to lift such a word from its ordinary context, and to put
   it forward as a topic for reflection, in this case Freud.^9 In order
   to survive, however, a concept must also take on a life of its own. A
   number of identifiable procedures in a body of texts may testify to
   that independent existence. I will briefly sum up three of these
   discursive procedures, the list is certainly not conclusive.

   A first strategy is the reduction of the concept to standard
   formulations which eventually get to function as definitions. For
   instance, many critics refer to Schelling's phrase ("what ought to
   have remained hidden, but has nonetheless come to light") as a kind of
   definition, even if this was not the case in the original text. Other
   such formulations are "the familiar which has become strange", or "the
   return of the repressed". Moreover, certain topoi associated with the
   concept may trigger its use. One such topos is the isotopy of home and
   homelessness, which has resulted in an alternative translation for
   unheimlich, namely unhomely (especially in architecture and
   postcolonial discourse). Another common association is the semantic
   field of haunting, ghosts, spectres and the return of the dead.
   Finally, the access to the founding text becomes mediated: for
   instance, when Homi Bhaba uses the concept, he no longer directly
   refers to Freud's essay, but to Cixous's and Weber's readings of it.

3. The Uses and Shapes of the Uncanny

   The uncanny is thus in practice a concept which paradoxically
   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
   virtue of its negativity, it indicates something which cannot be
   rationally and consciously thought. Like the sublime, the
   substantivised adjective denotes not an entity but a quality, which is
   why it is an aesthetic concept: it expresses a subjective sentiment
   which cannot be captured in words, for the generality of language
   always in a way betrays the individuality of experience. And yet, the
   problematic content of these concepts does not prevent them from
   functioning. For as humans, we are both individuals and social beings,
   we need a common language to communicate our experiences. All the
   articles in the present issue address various ways in which the
   concept of the uncanny has been "used" - performed, theorised and
   applied - in the twentieth century, be it in theory, in criticism and
   in art.

   In "A Trail of Disorientation" Michiel Scharpé has extensively
   compared Freud's and Sarah Kofman's readings of Hoffmann's seminal
   story "Der Sandmann", ultimately bringing the uncanny home to the
   story itself and to the essay that led Freud to Hoffmann, Ernst
   Jentsch's "On the Psychology of the Uncanny", in which the notion of
   doubt or intellectual uncertainty was posited as one of the main
   sources of the uncanny. Pieter Borghart and Christophe Madelein have
   undertaken a similar endeavour for another important aspect of the
   current concept of the uncanny in literary theory, its relation to the
   fantastic, as it has been developed in Tzvetan Todorov's study of the
   fantastic. They posit a structural relation between the uncanny and
   the fantastic, which hinges on the notion of hesitation. They conclude
   their elaboration with a brief reading of Adam Villiers de
   l'Isle-Adam's "Véra" in order to draw attention to some of the
   ambiguities in Todorov's theoretical model. Alex de Meulenaere follows
   the trail of the uncanny in the work of another French thinker, Michel
   de Certeau, who has dealt with the relation between historiography and
   psychoanalysis. Certeau's punning use of signifiers that play on the
   French term "inquiétante étrangeté" is symptomatic for his questioning
   of stable concepts and fits in with a proposal for a different kind of
   historiography.

   Anthony Vidler has successfully introduced the concept of the uncanny
   in the deconstructive theory of architecture, renaming it as "the
   unhomely". In his survey of various architects discussed by Vidler,
   Bart Van der Straeten examines how the concept of the uncanny has, in
   some cases very explicitly, shaped the practices and realisations of a
   number of the most important representatives of the deconstructive
   movement in architecture: Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Coop
   Himmelblau and Daniel Libeskind. In "Exploration # 6", Nele Bemong
   analyses Mark Danielewski's cult novel House of Leaves, a post-modern
   experiment, not only because of its intricate plot and radical formal
   experiment, but also because of its radically self-reflexive and
   meta-literary character. Incorporating many references, both to real
   and fictional theoretical works, the theory of the uncanny plays an
   important role in the novel. Starting from the uncanny, Bemong
   presents a post-Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the novel
   addressing themes like feminity and the death drive.

   The link between the uncanny and (post-)Lacanian has also proved
   fruitful in a number of critical approaches to works of art,
   especially in the case of film theory. Joyce Huntjens offers a "close
   viewing" of Hitchcock's classic Vertigo focussing on the relation
   between the protagonist John Ferguson and Madeleine/Judy in which the
   uncanny is related to the Lacanian conception of "the Woman" and the
   "object a". Maarten de Pourcq tackles Zizek's reading of another
   masterpiece of the cinematographic uncanny, David Lynch's Lost Highway
   in order to critically examine if and where the notion of the "object
   a" can be located in the film. Lost Highway is also juxtaposed to the
   Greek tragedy Medea in which the complex notion of "oikos" or home is
   examined. Both Trees Depoorter and Laurens de Vos have turned to Greek
   cultural history as well. They offer divergent perspectives on a
   motive that has often been associated with the uncanny: the snake-head
   Medusa, who with her deadly gaze petrifies the beholder.^10 Trees
   Depoorter tackles the question from a philosophical perspective,
   trying to analyse Medusa both as an art-historical motive and as an
   experience. The "Medusa-experience" is characterised in two ways: as
   frontality and as detour, and as such it is related to other concepts,
   like "suddenness", "immediacy" and metaphor. Laurens de Vos takes
   Freud's analysis of "Das Medusenhaupt" as his starting point and
   stresses the ambiguity of Medusa. After an excursion to mythology, he
   brings the motive home to a novel by Harry Mulisch, The Procedure,
   where it is intricately linked to another traditional literary motive,
   the golem. The last contribution of this issue, Lisa Copin's "Looking
   Inside Out", offers an analysis of the problem of vision in Alan Moore
   and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell. The problem of vision
   and the gaze guides not merely the analysis of the story and the
   graphic realisation of the novel, it is also examined from a
   psychoanalytical perspective, in the terms of the relation of the
   subject to the outside world.

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   Cixous, Hélène. 1976. "Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's
   'Das Unheimliche' ('The Uncanny')." New Literary History 7: 525-548.

   Clair, Jean. 1989. Méduse. Contribution à une anthropologie des arts
   visuels. Paris: Gallimard.

   Coates, Paul. 1991. The Gorgon's Gaze. German Cinema, Expressionism
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Footnotes

   1. The seminars were taught in collaboration with Prof. D. de Geest
   within the inter-university programme on literary theory, the GGS
   Literatuurwetenschap, in 2000-2001 and 2001-2002. I would also like to
   thank Michael Boyden for his help in editing a few papers in this
   issue.
   2. This has been further elaborated in my Mosaic-article (2002).
   3. As Cixous puts it, "Freud declares that it is certain that the use
   of the Unheimliche is uncertain. The indefiniteness is part and parcel
   of the "concept." The statement and its enunciation become rejoined or
   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
   connotation". (Cixous: 528)
   4. Weber explains "why the notion has remained marginal even to
   psychoanalysis itself. For psychoanalysis, today as to the time of
   Freud, has always sought to establish itself in stable institutions,
   grounded both in a practice and in a theory that rarely question the
   criteria of truth and value that dominate the societies in which it is
   situated."
   5. See for instance Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (A.P.A, 1990)
   and Elizabeth Wright's Feminism and Psychoanalysis: a critical
   dictionary (1992)
   6. "Fiction is connected to life's economy by a link as undeniable and
   ambiguous as that which passes from the Unheimliche to the Heimliche:
   it is not unreal; it its the "fictional reality" and the vibration of
   reality." (Cixous: 546)
   7. "If we experience uneasiness in reading Freud's essay, it is
   because the author is his double in a game that cannot be dissociated
   from his own text: it is such that he manages to escape at every turn
   of the phrase. It is also and especially because the Unheimliche
   refers to no more profound secret than itself: every pursuit produces
   its own cancellation (...) "Basically" Freud's adventure in this text
   is consecrated to the very paradox of the writing which stretches its
   signs in order to "manifest" the secret that it "contains"." (Cixous:
   547)
   8. "But we know that the relation between figurative language and what
   it figures cannot be adequately grasped in metaphors of vision; and we
   might well doubt that the forces of repetition can be isolated - even
   ideally - from that-which-is-repeated. The wishfulness inherent in the
   model is not simply in isolating the forces of repetition from their
   representations, but in seeking to isolate the question of repetition
   from the use of figurative language itself." (Hertz: 320)
   9. On the question of priority: see Hertz, Nobus and Morlock, who put
   forward Jentsch as another possible "origin" of the concept. Another
   candidate might be Schelling, but Vidler has demonstrated that
   Schelling's use of the term was never conceptual. Although the
   question of origin and priority is an interesting debate, it does not
   really significantly change the debate and the fact remains that in
   general, the concept is attributed to Freud.
   10. See for instance the word of Clair, Coates and Lloyd-Smith.








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   Anneleen Masschelein has recently finished her Ph.D on the
   conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in 20th-century theory and
   is currently employed at the department of literary theory at the
   K.U.Leuven. She is teaching seminars on literary theory and on
   psychoanalysis and literature. She has published on the uncanny, film,
   Julia Kristeva etc.

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