The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory

Chapter 1. Introduction

1 Introduction Imperfection is, paradoxically, a guarantee for survival. (Todorov 1980, 23) 1.1. A Genealogy of the Uncanny In 1965, professor Siegbert S. Prawer concluded his inaugural lecture at Westfield College, London entitled “The ‘Uncanny’ in Literature. An Apology for its Investigation,” with the following words. I hope to have demonstrated this evening that for all the dangers which attend a too exclusive preoccupation with it, for all the crude and melodramatic and morally questionable forms in which it so often confronts us, the uncanny in literature does speak of something true and important, and that its investigation, therefore is worth our while. (Prawer 1965, 25) This cautious plea, uttered almost half a century ago, reminds us of how fast things change in a relatively brief period of time. Nowadays, the topic of the uncanny no longer begs for an apology. On the contrary, it is an accepted and popular concept in various disciplines of the humanities, ranging from literature and the arts, to philosophy, film studies, theory of architecture and sociology, and recently even crossing over to the “hard” field of robotics and artificial intelligence. In the most basic definition, proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1919, the uncanny is the feeling of unease that arises when something familiar suddenly becomes strange and unfamiliar.1 However, 1 2 The Unconcept by the time of the first monograph devoted to the subject, Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny (2003), the concept had expanded far beyond this concise definition. Perpetually postponing closure, Royle’s uncanny is a general perspective, a style of thinking and writing, of teaching that is synonymous with “deconstruction.” The uncanny becomes an insidious, all-pervasive “passe-partout” word to address virtually any topic: politics, history, humanity, technology, psychoanalysis, religion, alongside more familiar aesthetic questions, related to genres, specific literary texts and motifs commonly associated with the uncanny. Because the uncanny affects and haunts everything, it is in constant transformation and cannot be pinned down: “[t]he unfamiliar [. . .] is never fixed, but constantly altering. The uncanny is (the) unsettling (of itself)” (Royle 2003, 5). Royle’s understanding of the term places him in a tradition of “uncanny thinking,” to paraphrase Samuel Weber, most commonly associated with the works of Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Jean-Michel Rey, Weber, Neil Hertz, Anthony Vidler, Elizabeth Wright, and Julian Wolfreys, to name but a few authors who extensively wrote on the uncanny. As we will see, this type of thinking fundamentally questions and destabilizes the status and possibility of concepts and the uncanny has become a concept that signals this questioning. However, the present study also shows that this is but one side of the coin. The consequence of Royle’s conception of the uncanny as a strategy and attitude of perpetual defamiliarization, deconstruction or “hauntology” is that the teaching practice he envisions and practices is highly individualistic and creative.2 As a result The Uncanny consists of a horizontal collection of introductions to various subthemes of the uncanny, of different perspectives, of case studies, of essays, and of pieces of creative writings held or glued together by the signifier uncanny.3 The fact that Prawer’s apology is not listed in Royle’s impressive bibliography cannot be considered as a flaw: Royle’s book does not want to offer a systematic history of the uncanny, even if it accumulates a wealth of information, especially about the development of the uncanny in the last decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, it is unlikely that the name Prawer will ring a bell among contemporary scholars working on or interested in the uncanny, even if his extensive work on the uncanny was in many ways ahead of its time. His words remind us that the rise of the concept in different disciplines of the humanities is not a tale of straightforward ascent to conceptual clarity and complexity. Prawer’s apology is part of the genealogy of the uncanny, which is the topic of the present study. In accordance with Michel Foucault’s 3 Introduction methodological conception of genealogy (1977 and 1979), a conceptual genealogy is not simply a historical account that describes the teleological development from origin to final concept, a history of ideas. Instead, it is a dynamic mapping of the processes of conceptualization —an oscillation between contingent and motivated transitions, based on material traces of conceptual awareness found in various types of discourse. A genealogical perspective also...