The Unconcept The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentie... - (Notes)

Notes

Chapter 1
1. As Freud puts it, the “uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien,
but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which
has become alienated from it only through a process of repression” (Freud
1919h, 241). Freud’s essay will be indicated as “The Uncanny” rather than
Strachey’s translation “The ‘Uncanny,’” When referring to the concept, “the
uncanny” capitals will be omitted. All references to and quotes from Freud’s
texts will be to the Standard Edition, unless otherwise indicated.
2. In his 1995 Salmagundi column “The Uncanny Nineties,” Jay criti-
cally examines the rise and popularity of “the uncanny” in theoretical and
critical discourse at the end of the twentieth century, pointing out how
the very idea of definition is problematized by the uncanny. Jay refers to
Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), where the uncanny is examined in the work
of Freud, Marx, and Heidegger. In this book, Derrida also coins the neolo-
gism “hauntology,” a pun on ontology. “Hauntology” examines the traces
of the repressed that haunt the stable meanings and certainties of Western
metaphysics and contemporary science: “[. . .] Derrida argues that ‘it is nec-
Copyright © 2011. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

essary to introduce hauntology into the very construction of a concept. Of

every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what
we would be calling here a hauntology. [. . .] Thus, the uncanny becomes
not a source of terror and discomfort—or at least not that alone—but also a
bulwark against the dangerous temptations of conjuring away plural specters
in the name of a redeemed whole, a realization of narcissistic fantasies, a
restoration of a true Heimat” (Jay 1998, 161). The positive critical function of
the uncanny is that the concept exposes the ideological closure of definitions
and concepts that haunts the pretense to conceptual discourse. Yet, Jay also
formulates critical remarks and cautions “against the complete conflation
of real and metaphorical phenomena, especially that of homelessness, which
can too easily legitimate the callous indifference that seems to have numbed
many of us in the ‘uncanny nineties’ to literal misery’” (Jay 1998, 12–13).
3. This is both the result of a programmatic decision and of the way
in which the book is compiled as a series of Royle’s articles and papers on
the uncanny over a very long period, which is more and more characteristic
of the present academic publication climate.
159
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160 Notes to Chapter 1
4. This is due to the eccentric or offbeat (abseits) position of its topic

(for instance Rey 1979, 19; Weber 1973; Weber 2000), as well as to the inde-
terminacy and the eclectic structure of the essay itself.
5. This questioning of the concept of the uncanny continues for a long
time. As pointed out above, Jay wonders whether “uncanny” is a buzzword
or whether it can be a genuine critical concept. Bal also cites the uncanny
as an example of a “mere label”: “[c]oncepts (mis)used as labels lose their
working force. They are subject to fashion and quickly become meaningless.
A few years ago, the ‘uncanny’ was such a label” (Bal 2000, 5). In 2002, she
calls this phenomenon “diffusion”: “‘Diffusion’ is the result of an unwarranted
and casual ‘application’ of concepts. Application, in this case, entails using
concepts as labels that neither explain nor specify, but only name. Such label-
ling goes on when a concept emerges as fashionable, without the search for
new meaning that ought to accompany its deployment taking place. I recall
vividly the sudden frequency of the word ‘uncanny,’ for example, and, also,
quite upsettingly, a certain abuse of the word ‘trauma,’” (Bal 2002, 33).
6. The notion of “Theory” refers to a more or less coherent body of
concepts and texts on society, culture, and modernity that circulates in various
disciplines of the humanities. In the Anglo-Saxon world, “Theory” is often
opposed to criticism on the one hand and to analytic and pragmatic philosophy
on the other hand. In the second sense, it coincides with twentieth-century
continental philosophy. “Theory” has become a kind of “common currency”
in the humanities, and yet, the notion is by no means univocal. Paradoxically,
the (post)structuralist questioning of the hierarchical, ideological, scientific
status of theoretical discourses (psychoanalysis, philosophy) has coincided
with an explosion of theory, which serves as the legitimization of a practice
and as an index of autonomy and professionalization. See Cusset 2008, Dosse
1998, Hunter 2006, Rabaté 2002, Sheringham 2006, to name but a few writers
who dealt with this phenomenon.
7. Following Rey, Normand takes the uncanny as an example: “In
order to manifest what can only be said by concepts (for instance the Unheim-
liche—generally translated by the uncanny [l’inquiétante étrangeté]—‘whose

significations keep on proliferating by the repeated perfusion of the negative
and the positive . . . which can never be resolved or completely covered by a
concept, or even simply be named’” ([Rey,] p. 137)), Freud refines and differ-
entiates his metaphorical register by putting to work what he calls ‘theoretical
fictions’ (Theoretische Fiktionen)” (Normand 1974, 155, my trans.).
8. “Fiction extends into the theory both of negation (Verneinung) and
of the uncanny (l’Unheimliche) simultaneously as the confirmation of funda-
mental basic axioma’s of the psychoanalytic practice and as guidelines for
the technique, a theoretical-practical conglomerate which could only let itself
be subsumed by concepts elaborated in the most rigorous way” (Normand
1974, 156).
9. Deleuze and Guattari focus on the creative aspect of making con-
cepts. However, not every new concept is successful: “Criticism implies new

Notes to Chapter 2 161
concepts (of the thing criticized), just as much as the positive creation. Concepts
must have irregular contours molded on living material. What is naturally
uninteresting? Flimsy concepts, what Nietzsche called the ‘formless and fluid
daubs of concepts’—or, on the contrary, concepts that are too regular, and
reduced to a framework” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 83).
10. Conceptual personae are the “voices” used in philosophy, as distinct
from philosophical authors as narrators are from literary authors. Examples
are the figure of Socrates in the work of Plato or Zarathustra in Nietzsche,
but the conceptual persona may also be more abstract types, e.g. the fool or
the friend (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 69).
11. For Deleuze and Guattari, the activity of thinking is in all three
cases executed by the “thinking brain”rather than by persons.
12. The notion of repression does not make sense in the philosophy of
Deleuze and Guattari, which is based on desire and production as a positive
force. However, they do occasionally refer to the uncanny: “But if nature is
like art, this is always because it combines two living elements in every way:
House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization,
finite melodic compounds and the great infinite plane of composition, the small
and large refrain” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 186). See Masschelein 2008.
13. To begin with, a word has to be recognized as a keyword before it
will be included in an index. Second, before a certain date, a lot of material is
not included in databases. Third, indexes are to a large extent English-biased.
French books, for instance, rarely include indexes. For smaller languages, like
Dutch, there are few (electronic) keyword indexes available.
14. See also Cusset 2008, Hunter 2006, and Welchman 2004.
15. In the late 1990s, the term “stickiness” was “Internet speak” for
the ability of a Website’s content and design to keep the user in the site for
as long as possible.
16. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out that the
mapping of a concept is to a large extent indistinguishable from the construc-
tion of a concept: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is
entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The

map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs
the unconscious. [. . .] It is itself a part of the rhizome” (Deleuze and Guat-
tari 2004, 13). In other words, a map of conceptualization is alwas a creation,
never just the objective rendering of a fixed state.
Chapter 2
1. The new French translation of Freud provoked a lot of contro-
versy, to which the team of translators replied with Traduire Freud, in which
they clarify and defend their vocabulary term by term. For “unheimlich,”
they propose “inquiétant” rather than Marie Bonaparte’s “inquiétante étr-
angeté.”

2. Although the popular Studienausgabe of Freud’s work is not a

complete edition—for instance The Psycho-Pathology of Daily Life is not
included—the “Namen- und Sachregister” serves as a reference point because
the authorative German complete edition of Freud’s work, the Gesamtausgabe,
has neither index nor editorial introductions or footnotes. For methodologi-
cal reasons, we have not used the electronic edition of Freud but the paper
indexes because we assume that words in indexes are considered to have
some conceptual value.
3. Nobus’s bibliography is not limited to Freud. It also lists occurrences
of the word in the work of Lacan, as well as the most important articles on
“The Uncanny” in psychoanalytic and literary theory until the early 1990s,
which is quite an achievement in pre-electronic ages.
4. For an etymological investigation of “unheimlich” in German, see
Masschelein 2005. It must be remarked that “unheimlich” is not used by
Freud as adverb, in the sense of “very, extraordinary.”
5. No information is provided on the editorial choices or the method
used in compiling the bibliography.
6. Nobus’s enterprise betrays a similar attachment to the signifier,
which he shares with countless other authors, who do not tire of reflecting
and punning on the word “unheimlich.” For some, the occurrence of the
word in Freud’s work has become a veritable Leitmotif throughout their own
oeuvre, e.g., Kofman, Rey, Weber and, of course, Royle.
7. The publication date of The Psycho-Pathology of Daily Life is 1901, but
the passages containing the substantivized adjective date from a later period.
The footnote reference to Hitschmann on page 261 indicates that this part must
have been added later than 1904, around 1915/16, but probably earlier than
1919. By that time, Freud had already made further inquiries into the theme
of superstition, the omnipotence of thought and chance in the case study of
the Rat Man and in Totem and Taboo.
8. Earlier on, in Chapter 5, the term “unheimlich” already occurs in
the speech of the young banker X, which could be considered as a case of
the omnipotence of thought: “I will add a further instance, in which the slip
of the tongue assumed the positively uncanny characteristic of a prophecy”
(Freud 1901b, 96).
9. In a later study on the topic, “Fausse Reconnaissance (déjà raconté)
in Psycho-Analytic Treatment,” Freud confirms his earlier views and highlights
the importance of the phenomenon during the psychoanalytic treatment. The
example given to illustrate the mechanism is a repressed memory dealing
with the castration complex (Freud 1914a, 204–205).
10. Royle has studied the remarkable exclusion of déjà vu from “The
Uncanny”: “Excluded, déjà vu is more uncannily active in Freud’s essay than
if it were included. And it is because it is excluded that it is included. Déjà
vu is present and absent in Freud’s essay; and it is neither present nor absent”
(Royle 1999, 12).
11. Analyses of the Wolf Man in terms of the uncanny can be found in
Lacan 2004, Wright 1999, Hofman, 1995 and in Creed 2005.

12. In Totem and Taboo Freud discusses this phenomenon in a slightly

different context, explaining that he borrows the term from a “highly intel-
ligent” patient, the Rat Man (Freud 1912–13, 86).
13. In Inhibitions, Symptions and Anxiety (1926d), Freud proposes to
reserve the term “repression” for the process where a representation is com-
pletely withdrawn from consciousness, which is typical for hysteria. The
term “defense” is suggested to indicate other ways of dealing with unwanted
impulses (Freud 1909d, 196 n1 and 1926d, 162–168).
14. Many of these themes also appear in “The Uncanny,” especially
the uncertainty about death. As Cixous points out, following the footnotes
of the Studienausgabe, Freud’s uncertainty about the length of his life crept
in the semi-autobiographical story of the continuous reappearance of the
number 62.
15. From a clinical perspective, the sensation of the uncanny is, according
to Quakelbeen and Nobus, first and foremost related to castration anxiety, “the
unsurmountable rock of theory formation on the neurotic structural moment”
(Quakelbeen and Nobus 1993, 80, my trans.).
16. Kittler convincingly demonstrates that the latter scene could also
be interpreted in terms of the (Lacanian) fragmented body (corps morcelé) or
the fear of literally falling apart, which is more typical of psychosis than of
neurosis.
17. A good discussion of Freud’s essay is found in Ronell 2002,
Chapter 4.
18. The final version of the essay still contains one almost literal rephras-
ing of a passage from Totem and Taboo (Freud 1919h, 240–241) and two footnote
references to the text by Freud (Freud 1919h, 241 and 243).
19. The editors remind the reader that “Abel’s pamphlet was published
in 1884 and it would not be surprising if some of his findings were not sup-
ported by later philologists” (Freud 1910e, 154). References to this essay in
relation to the uncanny can be found in Derrida 1970, Rey 1974, Mérigot 1974,
Ledoux 1979, Couvreur 1987.
20. The notion of the evil eye appears twice in “The Uncanny,” explicitly
on p. 240, and later in “that uncanny figure of Romantic superstition,” the
Gettatore, i.e., the thrower of the evil eye (Freud 1919h, 243).
21. In Totem and Taboo, Freud also illustrates omnipotence of thought
with the Rat Man’s experience in the spa, but he extends the phenomenon to
all neuroses, since symptoms in general are more determined by the reality of
thought than by outside reality (Freud 1912–13, 86–87). The neurotic’s obses-
sions are like the primitive taboos mostly related to death, and the protective
measures that he takes are based on the principle of magic formulas.
22. According to Freud, the primitive thought processes are sexualized.
This means that they are invested with libidinal energy until they reach
the status of “omnipotence.” The satisfaction is direct, even though it is
phantasmatic because in the narcissistic phase, the ego does not distinguish
between inside and outside, between reality and phantasm (Freud 1912–13,
88).

23. Later on, in The Ego and the Id, Freud will develop a similar reasoning
for the development of the ego which is secured by sublimated energy.
24. Following Derrida, a lot of attention has been paid to Freud’s writ-
ings on telepathy. An overview of this is found in Luckhurst (Buse and Stott
1999, 50–71). The reconceptualization of telepathy in narrative communica-
tion as a transference between writer, character, and reader, rather than the
theological notion of omniscience, as has been worked out by Royle 2003 and
Schwenger 1999, is a logical next step. Christopher Bollas relates the uncanny
and telepathy to the unconscious communication between patient and analyst
in Cracking Up (1995).
25. On several occasions, Freud puts forward that the narcissistic
overestimation of thought, which is a continuation of childhood play, is the
basis of fantasy and of artistic creation (Freud 1908e, 143–144, 1911, 221–223).
See also Enriquez 1983, 45–46. An interesting reading of this passage can be
found in Lehmann 1989.
26. The German editors remark that “One could, rightly so, consider
the present work with Freud’s writings about visual art and literature—the
author himself included it in his small collection Literature and Art—and one
should obviously read it in connection with the other writings about literature,
to which it provides an important contribution (especially with regard to E.
T. A. Hoffmann). At the same time though, this work treats the uncanny as a
psychical phenomenon of real life, and Freud’s investigations of the definitions
of the word and of the origins and conditions of appearance of the phenomenon
in itself lead to domains beyond literature” (Freud 1919h, 242, my trans.).
27. On the relationship between the mother, death, and female genitalia
in this essay and “The Uncanny,” see André 1995, 61–62.
28. In “La Judith de Hebbel” in Quatre Romans Analytiques Kofman
emphasizes the use of the word “unheimlich” in this text.
29. The desire for revenge is motivated by the little girl’s attachment
to the father: since the husband is a substitute for the father, he might not
live up to this ideal and disappoint the girl. Furthermore, the first coitus
reactivates penis-envy (Freud 1918a, 204).

30. This very short piece, hardly more than a page long, has been redis-
covered due to the renewed interest to the iconography of Medusa in art and
popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the wake of “The Uncanny.”
On the cover of Rey’s Parcours de Freud (1974), in which “The Uncanny” is
one of the seminal texts, is a picture of Rubens’s Medusa Head. Translations
of “The Medusa Head” are included in the thematic issue on “L’inquiétante
étrangeté” of the Revue française de psychoanalyse and in Lloyd Smith’s Uncanny
American Fiction. Medusa’s Face. An editorial footnote added to “The Medusa
Head” in the collection of Freud’s Writings on Art and Literature (Freud 1997,
264) refers to “The Uncanny.” See also Hertz 1997, xiv–xv, n1.
31. Many authors have drawn attention to the historical and biographical
circumstances in which “The Uncanny” was written, to which Freud briefly
alludes in the essay. On the one hand, he was unable to finish his research
due to the war. On the other hand, having survived his own death—he

superstitiously believed he would die at 62—and having suffered general and

personal losses in the First World War, Freud’s preoccupation with death also
leaves its traces in “The Uncanny.”
32. Freud’s analysis uncannily prefigures the Second World War, which
was to a far greater extent than the First World War determined by the cult
of leaders.
33. The ritual of Communion is based on the ancient practice of the
totem meal, and many elements in Christian faith entail a return to magical
practices (e.g., rituals and miracles) and ancient Mother-religions (the Virgin
Mary), which were surmounted in the highly spiritualized, elevated, and
abstract Jewish religion. This why Freud argues that although Judaism is a
Father-religion and Christianity a Son-religion, the elder of the two neverthe-
less presents the highest degree of spiritualization (Freud 1939a, 88).
34. It is strange that Freud at no point in his text mentions Reik’s The
Strange God and One’s Own God in which the uncanniness of circumcision is also
examined. More recently, several authors have elaborated this idea of the uncan-
niness of the Jewish people: Maciejewski 1999, Shapiro 1997, Stein 1984.
35. Freud emphasizes that the unconscious thing representation is not
an image in the conscious sense of the word: “What we have permissively
called the conscious presentation of the object can now be split up into the
presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing; the latter consists
in the cathexis, if not of the direct memory-images of the thing, at least of
remote memory-traces derived from these” (Freud 1915e, 201). The image of
the memory trace and the mechanism of remembering is poignantly expressed
in “The Mystic Writing-Pad” (1925).
36. The editors point out that Freud habitually uses the term in the first
meaning. In the analysis of the Rat Man, it is clear that ambivalence in all
three senses of the word is the main characteristic of obsessive-compulsive
neurosis.
37. In other words, we are dealing with a case of reversal of activity
into passivity and of the drive turning against the proper person.
38. In “The Uncanny” we get a version of this Oedipal constellation in

Freud’s interpretation of Olympia in “The Sandman”: “This automatic doll
can be nothing else than a materialization of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude
towards the father in his infancy” (Freud 1919h, 232).
39. Since it is repressed, the superego is fed and fuelled by drive ener-
gies from the id in its attacks on the ego. Moreover, in the id the superego has
more sources of energy than just the repressed. Part of the id, is constituted
by unconscious phylogenetic contents because experiences such as the father
complex and castration anxiety are universal and are passed on as an archaic
individual inheritance of this origin. Thus, we learn that, on a phylogenetic
level, the superego and the sense of guilt it installs lie at the heart of religion
and of fate (Schicksal) (Freud 1923b, 37, 58).
40. As the Standard edition indicates, the idea of “free will” as com-
pulsion from unconscious sources is also discussed in The Psycho-Pathology
of Daily life (1901b, chapter XII (B)].

41. In the New Introductory Lectures, Freud is unsure whether the aggres-
sion directed against the ego, which can in extreme cases lead to suicide,
comes from the superego or from the free, uncathected destruction drive in
the ego and the id (Freud 1933a, 110).
42. A very good overview of Freud’s theories of anxiety is Charles
Shepherdson’s solid “Foreword” to Harari 2001.
43. Following the same strategy as in “The Uncanny,” Freud turns
to the etymology of the word “Angst” as a confirmation of his hypothesis.
The Latin angustiae means “narrowness, tightness,” which may refer to the
biological roots of the affect, the primal anxiety, and the shortness of breath
experienced by the infant, caught in the narrowness of the birth canal (Freud
1912–13, 95).
44. Object-loss and castration anxiety are external threats, but the
child learns to establish a relationship to certain inner excitations, feelings,
and desires. Thus, the external danger is incorporated and can and must be
handled with internal measures (Freud 1926d, 145).
45. At the end of the twentieth century, the notion of “trauma” has
become increasingly popular, resulting in a specific area of studies, called
“trauma studies” in which the notion of the “uncanny” also plays a minor
but recurrent role, e.g., Caruth 1996; Hartman 1995 and 1997; LaCapra 1998
and 1999; Van Alphen 1997.
46. From a theoretical point of view, castration anxiety is in a later stage
phylogenetically reinforced and forms the basis of social anxiety. The impact
of castration anxiety and fear of object-loss or loss of love are so decisive in
Freudian theory that they cannot be but phylogenetic experiences: they must
be universal to mankind.
47. The idea that the unconscious cannot represent the death of the
subject is also voiced in “The Uncanny.” Here, we get a somewhat modified
version. The subject tries to construct a representation of death by analogy with
another fear: “the unconscious seems to contain nothing that could give any
content to our concept of the annihilation of life. Castration can be pictured
on the basis of the daily experience of the faeces being separated from the
body or on the basis of losing the mother’s breast at weaning. But nothing
resembling death can ever be experienced; or if it has, in fainting, it has left
no observable traces behind. I am therefore inclined to adhere to the view that
the fear of death should be regarded as analogous to the fear of castration
and the situation to which the ego is reacting is one of being abandoned by
the protecting superego—the powers of destiny—so that is has no longer any
safeguard against all the dangers that surround it (Freud 1926d, 129–130).
48. Freud is aware of the problem that birth is not actually experienced
as a separation by the infant because in the first years of life, the child expe-
riences his existence as a continuum with the mother’s body. The question
of the trauma of birth cannot be disconnected from the discussion between
Freud and Rank, which fundamentally shapes Freud’s theory of anxiety. In
the New Introductory Lectures, Freud is more certain of the relation between

castration anxiety (and loss of love) and birth. “Fear of castration is not, of
course, the only motif for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women,
for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being
castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is
evidently a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds the mother
absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this
anxiety. If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it
is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is perhaps exposed to
the most distressing feelings of tension. Do not reject the idea that these
determinants of anxiety may at bottom repeat the situation of the original
anxiety at birth, which, to be sure, also represented a separation from the
mother”(Freud 1933a, 87).
49. The essay also appeared in the journal Imago.
Chapter 3
1. An interesting analysis of the relation between Rank’s The Double
and Freud’s “The Uncanny” is offered by Webber, who points out that Rank
already alluded to “The Uncanny” in his 1919 version of his text (Webber 1989,
89). The motif of the double has in recent years continued to attract attention
in literary theory and criticism (especially of famous stories of doubles by
Conrad, Dostoevsky, Hoffmann, Wilde, Poe, etc.). Both Freud’s and Rank’s
studies are still topical to the subject. See Rogers 1970; Kofman 1975; Zins
1985; Jackson 1986; Johnson and Garber 1987; Coates 1988; Stoichita 1997, to
name but a few examples.
2. “Descending into hell would thus signify an incestuous union with
the mother. It seems to me to be related to the increasing strength of the incest
taboo, when the most homely idea, that of the body and the vagina of the
mother, turns into the most uncanny one, hell in such a way” (Reik 1923, 152).
On this topic, without referring to Reik, see also Jonte-Pace (2001).
3. Julia Kristeva uses the same mechanism to explain nationalism in

Strangers to Ourselves.
4. In his Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno again refers to “The Uncanny”
in a different perspective, i.e., the relation of the artwork to the historical
context and the alienation that is essential to the work of art: “The most
extreme shocks and gestures of alienation of contemporary art—seismograms
of a universal and inescapable form of reaction—are nearer than they appear
to be by virtue of historical reification. What is considered to be intelligible to
all is what has become unintelligible; what the manipulated repel as all too
strange is what is secretly all too comprehensible, confirming Freud’s dictum
that the uncanny is repulsed only because it is all too familiar” (Adorno 1998,
183). This line of thought fits within the association between the “Freudian”
uncanny and Marxist aesthetics that becomes prominent toward the end of
the century.

5. Salzman comes close to the literary theoretical conceptions of the

uncanny as related to the sublime. In his case study, he notes that “Uncanny
feelings often describe the quality of extreme pleasure and fulfillment which
comes with a sudden insight. It is the analogue of the religious experience
in which one suddenly becomes aware of one’s greater capacities for love
and relatedness. Thus it would be important to expand and correct Sullivan’s
conception of uncanny feeling and see it not only as an anxiety phenomenon,
but as a profound feeling accompanying an experience which rocks the foun-
dation of the personality structure” (Salzman 1954, 102).
6. After 1970, the phenomenon of doubling from a clinical perspective
is treated from a clinical perspective both in French and American psycho-
analysis, e.g., Arfouilloux 1987, Assouly-Piquet 1986, Feigelson 1993, Félician
1980, Sabbadini 1989, Tenebaum 1990.
7. According to Safouan, there is a clear distinction between the early
seminars and the later: “The last year of Lacan’s teaching at the hospital of
Sainte-Anne was also the one of the affirmation of his theory of the object of
psychoanalysis, relying both on data from experience as well as on his criti-
cal reading of major psychoanalytic writings, those of Freud, but also those
of pioneers and of contemporaries authors. His following seminars at the
Ecole normale supérieure will be mostly devoted to the elaboration of his own
doctrine and to the questions it entails. The references to psychoanalytic writ-
ings, apart from those of Freud, will become more and more rare” (Safouan
2001, 256, my trans.). Mérigot refers to one of those later seminars: “Jacques
Lacan, in his seminar of 21 january 1970 remarks the ambiguity of the pair
heimlich-unheimlich that ‘accentuates the not being inside while evoking what
is strange’” (Mérigot 1972, 102 n9, my trans.). Nobus lists eight sources to
the “second” Lacan, between 1962 and 1970, among which three unpublished
seminars (Nobus 1993d, 180–181).
8. Various unofficial versions of the seminar have been circulating
as an internal document in the Lacanian psychoanalytic community. Several
commentators on the uncanny do cite it, even before it officially appeared;
see André 1986; Baas 1995; Nobus 1993c; Nobus and Quakelbeen 1993, and
Vidler 1992. The best summary of the seminar, which devotes most attention
to the uncanny and anxiety, is Safouan 2001. In the same year, an English
introduction and paraphrase appeared by José Harari. Since the seminar
appeared in 2004, there have been a few longer texts by Jacques-Alain Miller,
and a thematic issue of Lacanian Ink.
9. According to Safouan, –ϕ (the negation of the phallus) indicates
precisely the imaginary castration by the metaphor of the father. In the case
of the boy, it is denied on the level of perception by the presence of the bio-
logical penis in the place where the missing phallus should be. Paradoxically
then, the missing phallus is missing. This entails that not all identification
is related to perception one can also identify with a lack, even though it is
denied by perception. “(. . .) this symbol –ϕ designates the imaginary castra-
tion induced by the paternal metaphor. Lacan does not say it explicitly, but

his discourse cannot be understood otherwise. This castration attests itself

in the tear that marks the image of the proper body both in the case of the
boy and of the girl. This is what gives to the former the sentiment of his
insufficience, gives to the latter the sentiment of her lack, and at that point,
which, save from investing in this image, stays as a reserve at the level of
the proper body” (Safouan 2001, 234).
10. Lacan remains close to Freud’s suggestions that Olympia is “a dis-
sociated complex of Nathaniel’s which confronts him as a person” (Freud
1919h, 232n1), but his reasoning can be applied to the earlier episodes in the
stories that precede Nathaniel’s crises: his discovery in his father’s study by
the sandman who wants to steal his eyes, the poem that he reads to Clara
in which she stares at him with the eyes of death, and even the ultimate
crisis on the tower, misinterpreted by Freud, when he sees Clara’s face in
front of his spy-glass. Weber offers a further reading of “The Sandman” in
terms of Lacan’s conception of castration (Weber 2000). For readings of “The
Sandman” in terms of psychosis rather than neurosis, see Kittler 1977 and
Bresnick 1996.
11. Lacan gives another, clearer instance of this mechanism later on:
“The specular image becomes the strange and invasive image of the double.
This is what gradually happens at the end of Maupassant’s life, when he
begins to not see himself in the mirror any longer, or when he perceives in
a room something, a phantom, that turns its back on him, and of which he
knows immediately that it is not without having a certain rapport with him,
and when the phantom turns around, he sees that is him” (Lacan 2004, 116,
my trans.).
12. See also p. 364, where Lacan describes the animation of Olympia
by Coppelius through the eye as object of desire. Apart from the etymology
of the uncanny, this is the only passage in Lacan’s seminar where Harari
tries to understand the position of the uncanny in relation to anxiety (Harari
2001, 226–227).
13. Baas relates this notion of Heim to Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit des
Daseins: “But, Heidegger specifies, ‘the outside oneself’ [‘hors-de-chez-soi’]

must be ontologically-existentially conceived as the most originary phenom-
enon, in other words, as the most intimate, in such a way, that in relation to
it, what habitually appears as the most familiar, the most reassuring, the ‘at
home’ [‘chez-soi’] constitutes precisely the uncanniness of Dasein: ‘The qui-
etly-familiar being-in-the-world is a modus of the uncanniness of Dasein, not
the other way round’ [‘Das beruhigt-vertraute In-der-Welt-Sein ist ein Modus der
Unheimlichkeit des Daseins, nicht umgekehrt’]. (. . .) Put differently: in anxiety, the
‘chez-soi’ becomes strange and the strange reveals itself as originary, familiar
and intimate. The subject cannot but lose itself there, faint there” (Baas 1994,
115–116, my trans.).
14. Badiou singles out this passage to indicate how Lacan throughout
the seminar strives to enlighten the affect of anxiety under “the unary trait”
or “simplest signifier” that constitutes the divided subject S. “And anxiety,

signified canonically as affect, is no less at the service of this Enlightenment.

Enlightenment co-present with that untranslateable appearance, Freud’s famous
unheimlich—more ‘inhabited’ than ‘unhabitual,’ Lacan comments—that ‘strange-
ness’ (étrangeté), that is impossible-to-say, which emerges in the word and
attests, according to the affect of anxiety to a sort of incorruptibility of the
real. In such a way that ‘the veritable substance of anxiety is the what does
not deceive, the outside of doubt’” (Badiou 2005, 70). Again, this is another
way of saying that anxiety confronts the subject with the dimension of the
Real and its existential strangeness to itself.
15. Hook 2003 goes into the same direction, via Kristeva’s notion “the
abject,” which he seems to consider as equivalent to “uncanny,” but does not
use the term extimacy.
16. On the one hand, “the success of the ghost story in banishing these
‘imaginary’ fears depends on the reality of the foundation. Thus a healthy-
minded even if very imaginative person will benefit more from the reading of
weird fiction that a neurotic, to whom it will only be able to give a momentary
relief.” On the other hand, “ghost-story writers who always reverted to the
same themes were the neurotics. Their tales were desperate attempts to free
themselves from particular complexes. Authors who frequently changed their
themes may be supposed to have successfully fought the remnants of their
animistic beliefs” (Penzoldt (1952) 1965, 7).
17. This series from the Presses Universitaires de France aims at introduc-
ing and outlining a variety of academic subjects within the boundaries of a
pocket book. The fact that Que sais-je devotes a volume to fantastic art and
literature indicates that the topic is at that moment both a canonized topic of
academic research and a widely recognized theme of public interest.
18. The textual position of these “sciences,” in between occultism and
metapsychics or parapsychology, already suggests that he does not to seem
to hold them in high esteem.
19. Like Freud, Vax distinguishes between “accidental strangeness”
occuring in everyday life, and the “concerted strangeness” staged or provoked
for esthetical purposes, rather than “natural or artistic strangeness.”

20. Vax grants that Freud did intuit difficulties of his theory (as in the
case of the motif of separate body-parts which can work both in an uncanny
or in a comic way in fiction), but he did not think them through by relating
them to the “field of perception.” In the context of ‘The “Uncanny,” Vax says,
for instance, that “It is not the motif that makes the fantastic, it is the fantastic
which accepts or does not accept to organize its universe around a motif” (Vax
1965, 34) or “Around the same motif, the human conscious organizes different
fields of perception. It is the situation which makes the object humorous or
disturbing, indifferent or tempting” (Vax 1965, 37).
21. “If he stays careful and modest, the critic is worthy of esteem. By
revealing to me the beauty that had escaped me, he inspires in me a certain
gratefulness and a little envy. But the superb of certain adepts of metaliterature
is as pleasing as it is puerile. They relish, like Philaminte, in each other’s
inventions of the marvels unknown by the author of the text. They throw

themselves on the storytellers like schoolmasters that correct homeworks on

the pupils that make them; or like the adolescents of the higher classes that
lecture, to the small children that are good only to compose stories. That they
gloss, that they divide, that they snobbishly straighten their ties at their ease!
‘Was bleibt aber, stiften die Dichter’” (Vax 1979, 9).
22. Vax refers to the “etymological games” of thinkers like Jacob Boehme,
Georg Friedrich Hegel, or Martin Heidegger. Morever, he is one of the few
readers of “The Uncanny” who traces Schelling’s definition to its original
context in Philosophy of Mythology (1985). See also Vidler 1992.
23. Hunter also draws attention to the close relation between phenom-
enology, structuralism, and poststructuralism.
24. In 1965, Vax already described how Freud, as it were, becomes the
victim of the uncanny. In trying to define the essence, Freud is trapped by
the sense of mystery and the illusion of depth that provokes the sentiment
of the strange and acts this out in his essay rather than finding the origin of
the sentiment. “But, in applying this schema to the sentiment of the strange,
Freud seems to have been duped at the same time by the general schemas
of psychoanalysis and by what is insidious in the consciousness of language.
And his theory which seems to find the profound root of a sentiment that
presents itself as profound, appears profound at the same time. In fact, it
plays the sentiment of the strange and prolongs it instead of considering it in
itself” (Vax 1965, 36). As we will see, Cixous concludes her reading of “The
Uncanny”—which is in many ways equally anti-theoretical—along the same
lines, arriving at her point from a Derridian tradition.
25. Fraiberg’s article appeared in The Partisan Review, a literary journal.
She was, however, acquainted with Hecht’s paper (Fraiberg 1956, 55 n 1).
26. “Das Erhabene” can be translated as “the sublime” or “the numi-
nous.” The two terms are related, but there is a difference in connotation.
“The sublime” is an aesthetic concept that signifies a transcendental experi-
ence; “the numinous” is a theological concept that expresses a religious or
sacred experience.
27. A contemporary of Prawer who uses the notions of the sublime,

the demonic, and the uncanny in a similar sense is Angus Fletcher. Although
Fletcher’s Allegory. The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) is influenced by
Freud’s phylogenetic works, the two references to “the uncanny” in the index
do not refer to “The Uncanny” but to Otto’s notion of the demonic-uncanny
(Fletcher 1964, 41n30) and to the motif of the robot in science fiction (Fletcher
1964, 55 n59). When he does refer to “The Uncanny,” he relates it the sublime
(Fletcher 1964, 245 n39).
28. This is somewhat remedied by Michael Steig’s response to Kayser,
which emphasizes the role of the comic in the grotesque and the reaction of
ambivalence. Steig distinguishes between the grotesque and the uncanny in
terms of their successfulness as defense mechanisms (Steig 1970, 258).
29. Like Freud, Kayser devotes a relatively large share of attention to
Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” focusing on various grotesque motifs: the isolation
of the motif of the eye in the story, the function of the doll Olympia, Nathaniel’s

madness, the estrangement of the artist from the everyday, common-sensical

reality (personified in the character of Clara) surrounding him, and especially
the reader’s doubt between the various perspectives in the story.
30. A revised version of this inaugural lecture can be found in Caligari’s
Children. The Film as Tale of Terror (1980).
31. Prawer’s perspective is comparative, even though he focuses mainly
on German literature and expressionist cinema.
32. Very few critics have related “The Uncanny” directly to Jung. Excep-
tions are Cusick 1994 and de Martelaere 2000.
33. Prawer will return to Marxism in Karl Marx and World Literature,
however he clearly warns his readers “[t]hat this is not a book about Marx-
ism nor an attempt to construct yet another Marxist theory of literature”
(Prawer 1976, vii).
34. In his reading of “The Sandman” Prawer showed that the figure of
the bourgeois—the lawyer—is frequently depicted as uncanny (Prawer 1965b).
In Karl Marx and World Literature, Prawer establishes a new link between
Hoffmann, Marx, and Freud when he suggests that Marx not just anticipates
Freud’s sexual interpretation of the motif of blinding in “The Sandman” but
surpasses Freud by adding a social dimension. “What ultimately matters
about the blinding of the Schoolmaster in Sue’s story is not simply that it
provides an ‘acceptable’ substitute for castration. Marx presents it as an act
of sadistic aggression perpetrated by one fictional individual against another
in the guise of even-handed justice” (Prawer 1976, 98).
35. In the beginning of his lecture Prawer states that “there is much in
my personal history, as in that of so many others of my age and background,
which will never let me forget the dangers attending any exaltation of the
irrational, the chthonic and the daemonic” (Prawer 1965, 3).
36. Prawer’s theory did not leave many traces in the work of other
scholars. Theodore Ziolkowski approvingly cites “The ‘Uncanny’ in Literature”
in his Disenchanted Images. A Literary Iconology (1977) on several occasions.
Ziolkowski’s analysis of the historical “disenchantment” of the literary images
he discusses (the talking statue, the animated portrait, and the magic mir-
ror) is closely related to Prawer’s idea of the gradual “secularization” of the
numinous and the uncanny in literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth
century. Later references to Prawer’s inaugural lecture are found in Todorov
1970; Tatar 1981; Jackson 1981.
37. The main structure of the argument is kept intact, but some of the
theoretical points are updated and new theoretical sources (Todorov and Lacan)
are introduced. The most substantial modification is found in the psychological
approach to the uncanny. The work of Lacan, “with its conjunction of neo-
Freudianism, structural linguistics and structural anthropology” and concepts
like the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real, suture, the gaze, and the other
scene, constitute a third important theoretical source for the psychoanalytic
research of literature and film, even if Prawer admits that he has “not found
Lacan’s writings helpful, and that I doubt whether his influence—so strong
at the time of writing—will long outlast him” (Prawer 1980, 121).

38. Wright made a PhD on E. T. A. Hoffmann under Prawer ’s

supervision.
Chapter 4
1. Lyotard repeatedly refers to “The Uncanny” in his Discourse, figure
(1971), a reading of the figure in terms of image and metaphor in the work
of Freud and twentieth-century art. Baudrillard examines the notion in rela-
tion to the death drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Symbolic Exchange
and Death (1976, 1993). Other eminent French scholars from that era have also
briefly dealt with the uncanny, e.g., Michel de Certeau who plays on the signi-
fier “inquiétante étrangeté” in The Writing of History (1975, 1988) and Histoire
et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (1987)) or René Girard who discusses the
essay in a short critical piece on the work of Lenz (1988).
2. Eleven years later, the Belgian Lacanian journal Psychoanalytische
Perspektieven devoted a thematic double issue to “Het on-heimelijke.” The
volume is predominantly the work of one person: Nobus. Nobus’s research
stands out for its broadness in scope: not limiting himself to Lacanian sources,
he includes the early “ego-psychological” case studies as well as a number
of deconstructive and literary readings of Freud.
3. The text, which was based on Weber’s Habilition, was published in
German in Kahane 1981.
4. Norris also distinguishes between “‘canny’ and ‘uncanny’ critics, the
latter being those (Paul de Man among them) who pursue deconstruction to
its ultimate, unsettling conclusions” (Norris (1982) 1992, 100).
5. Dosse distinguishes between two periods in structuralism with 1967
as turning point, but I endorse his strategy of maintaining the overall denomi-
nation “structuralism” for the post-war intellectual climate in France.
6. In Todorov’s account, he and Genette shared a more empirical inter-
est, hence the explicit scientific ambitions of the journal that presents itself as
“a place of study.” It is perhaps important to note that Todorov and Genette

are at the time appointed by the C.N.R.F, the French national research fund
(Dosse 1998, 154–155).
7. According to Lucy Armitt, whose rhetorical reading of Todorov
is in certain respects close to mine: “It is unfortunately the case that while
most fantasy critics continue to recognize the centrality of Todorov’s work
to contemporary studies of fantasy and the fantastic, few fully appreciate the
crucial role he has played in our understanding of the application of literary
theory to such works” (Armitt 1996, 30).
8. It is remarkable that Richard Howard opted for the inverse choice
when he translates Todorov’s 1968-essay “Poétique” as Introduction to Poetics.
9. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Todorov finds a confirmation of
Freud’s theory. However, once more he sticks to a conditional mode, leaving
the reader in doubt as to his own stance: “The sentiment of the uncanny
originates, then, in certain themes linked to more or less ancient taboos. If we

grant that primal experience is constituted by transgression, we can accept Freud’s

theory as to the origin of the uncanny” (Todorov 1980, 48, my emphasis).
10. Incidentally, Todorov does not use the phrase “inquiétante étran-
geté” at this point. As we will see, later in the work he does refer to the
proper French term. The question of the translation of “étrange” is not an
easy matter, for the term seems to have more the connotation of queer, odd,
miraculous in French than the more neutral “strange” in English. The fact
that Todorov explicitly points out that his use of “étrange” does not overlap
with “unheimlich” could have been an argument to opt for two different
words in the translation.
11. The latter theme is in the final analysis the result of remedying “a
deficient causality” by “an imaginary causality”: things that cannot be explained
according to natural laws are explained by appealing to the supernatural. This
mechanism is called “pandeterminism” (Todorov (1975) 1980, 110). A conse-
quence of this principle is what Todorov calls “pan-signification,” according
to which all elements of the world are experienced as meaningful and inter-
related. This description is partly based on stories describing experiences of
madness and drugs, and it is not hard to see the connection with what Freud
calls “the omnipotence of thought.”
12. When Todorov elucidates his terminology, he sticks to a discursive
explanation in which “je” and “tu” refer to the primary interlocutory posi-
tions of speaker and addressee.
13. Howard deviates from Todorov in his translation of the second
group, “les thèmes de tu” (the themes of you) as “themes of the other,” pos-
sibly because the structuralist linguistic background is not so familiar to an
English audience.
14. Whereas the series “ego—perception-consciousness—gaze” could be
regarded as classically Freudian, the equation of the “other—unconscious—
discourse” brings to mind Lacan’s famous dictum that “the unconscious is
structured like a language” and his opposition between (barred) subject and
other (Other).
15. The examples selected by Todorov foreshadow some of the important

emphases that will be made in later readings of the text: the woman as figure
of the uncanny on the one hand, and “The Sandman,” and the problematiza-
tion of reading it entails on the other hand: “The equation Freud establishes
no longer links merely an image and a meaning (though it still does that),
but links two textual elements: the doll Olympia and Nathaniel’s childhood,
both present in Hoffmann’s tale” (Todorov 1980, 150).
16. This criterion, casually interjected, returns several times throughout
Todorov’s argument, often in relation to psychoanalysis. For instance, Todorov
explicitly approves of Freud’s structural interpretation of “The Sandman,”
because the two textual elements, Olympia and Nathaniel’s childhood, are
“both present in Hoffmann’s tale” (Todorov 1980, 150). In Chapter 4 on
poetry and allegory, Todorov singles out a psychoanalytic interpretation of
Gogol’s “The Nose” on the basis of the same argument: “The psychoanalytic

interpretation (the disappearance of the nose signifies, we are told, castration)

even if it were satisfactory, would not be allegorical, for nothing in the text
explicitly invites it” (Todorov 1980, 72).
17. As the example of Nerval’s Aurélia demonstrates, ambiguity and
hesitation are explicitly inscribed in the text as “procedures of writing,” e.g.,
the use of the imperfect tense and modalization (more specifically, the use
of “hedges”).
18. This is all the more so since—as Todorov pointed out in Chapter
3—the pure fantastic, where the ambiguity persists until the end, is relatively
rare (Todorov 1980, 43). Mostly, we are dealing with mixed or transitory
genres where the hesitation of the fantastic is ultimately solved. In these
cases, a second reading may indeed change the genre of the story to either
“the uncanny” or “the marvelous” from the beginning.
19. These intertitles have disappeared in the English translations. The
general chapter titles have been preserved (in French and in English), but the
subtitles have been left out. This editorial change, combined with the modified
title, comes down to a pruning of much of the irony of the original.
20. According to Genette, this type of intertitle placed at the beginning
of a chapter is typical for popular and comical stories: “Cervantes’ model,
after becoming the norm (antinorm) of comic narrative lived on well into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuy, with variously sustained teasing effects: we
find examples in Dickens (Oliver Twist, Pickwick, David Copperfield), Melville
(Mardi, Pierre, The Confidence-Man), Thackeray (Henry Esmond, Vanity Fair),
Anatole France (La Révolte des anges), Musil (in direct style), Pynchon (V.),
Barth (The Sot-weed Factor), Jong (Fanny Jones)—and in Eco (The Name of the
Rose), the last one as of now” (Genette 1997, 301). The formal outline of the
intertitles may also be a parody on the then-popular fashion to start each
chapter of a critical or theoretical chapter with an epigraph.
21. A similar tongue-in-cheek edge is found in the last, slightly hyper-
bolic intertitle of the third chapter, “Elegy of the marvellous” (Todorov 1970,
46, my trans.) or in the hesitating “Reserved conclusion” of Chapter 9.
22. “Why our work is not finished” (Todorov 1970, 80); “The way in
which we are going to proceed” (Todorov 1970, 97); “Let’s specify what we
have been doing” (Todorov 1970, 148).
23. This hypothesis has been examined by numerous scholars of the
fantastic and especially of the gothic, which is seen as a reaction to eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century rationalism and positivism. See for instance
Castle 1995, Dolar 1991, Park 2003, and Von der Thüsen 1997.
24. From the Freudian corpus, Todorov selects “A Seventeenth-Century
Demonological Neurosis” (1923d) and the idea of pan-determinism or the
omnipotence of thought in The Psycho-Pathology of Daily Life.
25. Ecriture féminine is usually associated with diverse theorists as Luce
Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig. However, the movement is far
less homogeneous than it appears in many accounts about the movement,
such as those by Moi 1995 and Bowlby 1992.

26. So far, not much of Cixous’s early work has not been translated.
It, therefore, is much less known in the Anglo-Saxon world. All translations
from the 1974-French edition of Prénoms de Personne are mine. The most
elaborate comment on Prénoms de Personne is found in the second chapter
of Conley 1992.
27. This is confirmed by Susan Sellers’s characterizations of Cixous’s
early works in the first chapters of Authorship, Autobiography, and Love (1996),
in which the death of the father is a central theme.
28. According to Breton, surrealism strives to attain a “réalité supérieure”
or a “surréalité.” As in Cixous’s description of “le pluréel,” contradictions and
oppositions are transcended in the moment of the surreal.
29. At the end of the first part of the “Prédit,” the notion of “Personne”
is connected to Joyce’s Ulysses: “It is not a coincidence if No One was at a
crucial moment the name of Ulysses and if Ulysses gave rise again to the
Ulysses with a thousand singularities of Joyce” (Cixous 1974, 6, my trans.).
This allusion refers both to the Odyssey and to Joyce’s punning on the name
Ulysses. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus escapes the the one-eyed giant Cyclops
(who could in Cixous’s perspective be read as a symbol for the suffocating
monoperspectivism of the Western subject) by calling himself “No one” in
order to exploit the confusion between proper name and pronoun. Zarathustra,
Nietzsche’s philosophical persona, is also described as one-eyed.
30. The two fronts are not separate or mutually exclusive, they are bound
up with each other. “All have dismanteled the great Proper, the denominated
someone, but in order to pass the word to the infinite No One:—the artist
in subjectivity will have to fight on the front of intersubjectivity as well”
(Cixous 1974, 6–7). The blank line behind the colon indicates both the separa-
tion and the connection between the two fronts; the one goes over into the
other, although they are not the same.
31. “Germeurs” is a pun on “cousin germain” (full cousin), “Germain”
(German), and the French “germer” (“to germinate”).
32. So, for instance, there are the multiple connotations of words and
expressions like “le Propre,” “Personne,” and “le (pré)nom de Personne.”

Neologisms are created to open up existing words and to let new meanings
arise, e.g., in the combination of homonyms into a new word: “le pluréel”
and “le pluriel/surréel,” or in the association of words: “cousins germeurs”
or “text-cimes” (literally “texts-summits”). This neologism is proposed in the
context of the double reading practice and fits within the isotopy “pousser
le texte au seuil” (pushing the text to the brink), “lire au sommet” (reading
at the top), and “faire pointer” (make pointed).
33. One instance of this is the title “Prédit” itself, which operates in
the tension between “foreword” of Prénoms de Personne and “prediction,” a
manifesto-like statement that exceeds the limits of the book—as Sellers puts
it—an introduction “to Cixous’ view on literature and practice as a literary
critic” (Sellers 1994, 27). Finally, “pré-dit,” before language, connotes the
theme of a return to pre-phallogocentric/prelapsarian language, to suppressed

and repressed meanings that can no longer be expressed by language as an

instrument of power.
34. This is most apparent in the chapters on Hoffmann, “Les noms du
pire” (The names of the worse, which contains a pun on the Lacanian Name-
of-the-Father, “le Nom-du-père”) and “L’incertitude intellectuelle” (intellectual
uncertainty), which obviously refer to “The Uncanny,” but it equally applies
to the other chapters.
35. The full title of the first part of Prénoms de Personne dealing with
German authors is “Du côté de l’autre. Regards sur les cousins germeurs.”
The other two parts are entitled “Ensemble Poe” and “Ensemble Joyce,”
36. The link with the fantastic is stated explicitly in the last part of
the text, “To translate the Unheimliche,” which was added in Prénoms de
Personne. Here, Cixous returns to the semantic analysis made by Freud and
reflects on the French translation of the term. She concludes that the French
are not receptive to the specific type of fear which is called the uncanny.
She relates this strong capacity of repression to the hegemony of the cogito,
in other words to the strong rationalist streak in French thought. “That the
critique of the truth—by philosophy and by psychoanalysis—has first been
produced elsewhere than in France is not surprising for those who perceive
the repressive power in our soil of logocentrism. A power more pressing and
sustainable than with our German or Anglo-Saxon neighbours. It is not a
coincidence that there is no fantastic literature in France (the traces that one
finds of it are by the way infiltrations of the German fantastic). In general,
we do not like disturbance, trouble, being decentered [decentrement]: that is
also why it is so difficult to imagine a ‘French humor’” (Cixous 1974, 37). As
was already implicit in the “Prediction” this opposition between French and
German/Anglo-Saxon (also found in the work of Gilles Deleuze) is a version
of the opposition rationalism/romanticism.
37. New Literary History responds to this structure by including “The
Uncanny” at the end of the volume in which “Fiction and its Phantoms”
appeared. Although it is far from flawless, I will mostly use Robert Denom-
mé’s translation, unless in quotes from the French text, indicated as Cixous
1974.
38. This phrase is used by Freud in “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory
of his Childhood” (Freud 1910c), although the allusion is not attributed. The
term also plays an important role in Kofman’s work.
39 Ricarda Schmidt is very critical of Cixous’s reading of “The Sand-
man” in “Les Noms du pire.” “Cixous says of her reading of ‘The Sandman’
that it is a reading from within; she dissociates herself from the alternative,
‘external’ and rational interpretation. The category ‘within’ manifests itself in
Cixous’s endeavor to comprehend Nathaniel’s inner life, to follow his desire.
Although she states at the beginning that the reader identifies briefly with
any passing character, rather than with any one single person, it is neverthe-
less only Nathaniel with whose desire Cixous identifies. [. . .] By adopting a
perspective from within Nathaniel, Cixous alters Hoffmann’s tale in favor

of her analytic interest much as she accuses Freud of doing in his famous
interpretation of ‘Der Sandman’” (Schmidt 1988, 25).
40. Denommé translates the term “aérienne” as “lofted in the air,” I
prefer the term “air-born.”
41. Lacan also drew attention to Freud’s remarks about losing his way
in Hoffmann’s labyrinth (Lacan 2004, 61).
42. Conley points out that “most readings in Prénoms de Personne
approach the question of limits between self and other, masculine and
feminine, from the angle of the daughter, Cixous’s own position in her early
writings” (Andermatt Conley 1991, 20). I find this perspective on “Fiction
and its Phantoms” rather limiting.
43. The link to German romanticism and the history of the motif of
the puppet is explicit in footnote 2, page 26 of “La fiction et ses fantômes”:
“What to do with these puppets that have haunted the scenes of German
romanticism?” (my trans.).
44. According to Cixous, the notion of character is always negative in
Cixous. It is based on an outdated view of the unified subject that is imaginary
and restrictive. Instead, Cixous “urges for figuration, not characterization,
with possibilities of reading in different directions” (Conley 1991, 26).
45. A very interesting analysis of Cixous’s dealing with titles, that
draws attention to Derrida’s “La double séance” is found in Stevens
1999.
46. This image from Derrida’s text reappears literally in Cixous: the
notion of the in between as well as the notion of a double session/double
science that operates in between literature and philosophy or theory: “To take
this double inscription of concepts into account is to practice a double science,
a bifid, dissymetrical writing” (Derrida 1981, 208 n25). The image, in relation
to the uncanny, is found in Kofman’s introduction to The Childhood of Art,
translated as “The Double Reading” (Albrecht 2007).
47. “We shall allow ourselves to be guided at times by and against
Freud’s design, by what is certain and by what is hypothetical, by science
and fiction, by the object that is symbolized and by that which ‘symbolizes.’
We shall be guided by ambivalence and in conformity with the undecidable
nature of all that touches the Unheimliche: life and fiction, life-as-fiction, the
Oedipus myth, the castration complex, and literary creation” (Cixous 1976,
526).
48. In the first line of the quote Cixous almost literally echoes Derrida
(Derrida 1981, 268 n 67).
49. This argument is similar to Todorov’s claims that the supernatural
is representative for the functioning of language.
50. It remains to be seen whether it was actually the first reading.
Kofman’s “Le double e(s)t le diable” appeared around the same time (1974)
in Revue Française de la psychoanalyse, and Rey was also intensively working
on the text. However, Kofman and Rey were only translated in the 1980s and
never achieved the same status as Cixous.

Chapter 5
1. For instance: Kofman 1970, 1973; Milner 1980; Mahony 1982; Apter
1981; Wright 1984; Møller 1992; Assoun 1996; Memmi 1996; Weber 2000;
Parkin-Gounelas 2001.
2. To give a few titles: Wright’s Feminism and Psychoanalysis. A Critical
Dictionary (1992), Hawthorn’s Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (1994),
Bennett and Royle’s An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory ((1995)
1999), Payne’s Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (1996), Belton’s Words
of Art (1998), Jay’s Cultural Semantics, Mulvey-Roberts’s Handbook of Gothic
Literature (1998), Brooker’s Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory (1999), Wolfreys’s
Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (2004) and Barck’s Ästhetische
Grundbegriffe (2005).
3. According to Derek Hook (2003), the discursive instability of the
uncanny is due to the ontological, bodily experience of the uncanny which
has to do with unstable boundaries.
4. According to Foucault, “the author [. . .] is a certain functional
principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in
short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the
free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we
are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging
of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the
opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since
we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a
historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has
an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by
which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning”
(Foucault in Masschelein 2002, 65). See also Royle 2003, 14.
5. Noteworthy are Granoff and Rey 1983, Adams 1983; Ronell 1989;
Royle 1991 and 1999; Rostek-Lühmann 1995.
6. Inspired by Derrida, Royle wrote a study on telepathy and litera-
ture and devotes a chapter to it in The Uncanny (Royle 2003, 256–276 and
Culler 2004).
7. Royle coins the term “portmanteau” for this type of concepts (Royle,
2006, 242–243).
8. In this essay, Weber demonstrates that Freud misreads the end of
“The Sandman”: what drives Nathaniel crazy is not the sight of the sandman
in the crowd but Clara who stands in front of the haunted binoculars.
9. This more personal perspective is found in many psychoanalytic
approaches, such as Nobus, “Freud versus Jentsch: een kruistocht tegen de
intellectuele onzekerheid” [Freud versus Jentsch: a crusade against intellectual
uncertainty] (1993), but it is not limited to it. See also Hertz 1985; Armitt 1996,
48–53; Lydenberg 1997, Wright 1998; Morlock 1995; Ellison 2001.
10. Among others, Milner 1982; Lyotard (1971) 1985; Castle 1995; von
der Thüsen 1997; Sturm 1995; Park 2003.

11. See, among others, Cohen 1993; Coates 1991; Krauss 1993; Foster
1993; Rabaté 2005.
12. Gelder and Jacobs 1998; Bergland 2000. Others have established a
link between Jewishness and uncanniness, starting from Freud’s last text Moses
and Monotheism, where the uncanniness of the Jews is related to castration and
the primitive murder of the father (Shapiro 1997, Jonte-Pace 2001).
13. Stein 1984, Bauman 1991, Shapiro 1997, Jonte-Pace 2001.
14. See for instance Hartmann 1997; LaCapra 1998 and 1999; van
Alphen 1997.
15. Ronell 1989; Vidler 1992; Krell 1992; Derrida 1993; Baas 1994; Därman
1995; Weber 1997 and 2000; Bowman 2003; Wolfreys 2002; Bernstein 2004.
16. Sadler 1996 and West 1999.
17. Bowman, for instance, finds fault with Royle’s blend of Freudianism
and deconstruction: “[. . .] he believes that deconstructive criticism attempts
to make the familiar unfamiliar, and thus in this regard deconstruction is a
strategy grounded in uncanny thinking, in bringing the unfamiliar to light.
Hence [. . .] its familiarity with psychoanalysis. But any form of interpretation
is supposed to take what is already familiar to us and make its unappreciated
elements known to us” (Bowman 2007, 3).
18. Ruth Ronen wrote an article about the doll, the uncanny and con-
temporary art, but does not refer to any of these art shows. (2004)
19. In the book, the notions occur in the Derridean and Heideggerian
sense. Danielewski, who who collaborated as sound assistant on Derrida The
Movie, is overt about his being inspired by Derrida. The book is both a parody
of and a tribute to deconstruction.
20. According to MacDorman, “Mori, like Freud, linked the uncanny
valley to a ‘human-specific’ notion of death, and many have suggested that he
had Freud in mind when he penned ‘The Uncanny Valley’—which is possible
since Freud’s concept of the uncanny, unheimlich, was translated in Japanese
as bukimi prior to the publication of Mori’s paper. But MacDorman, who co-
authored the definitive English translation of ‘The Uncanny Valley,’ has his
doubts: ‘There is nothing wrong with connecting Mori’s ideas to Freud,’ he

says. ‘But I don’t think Mori was inspired by him’” (Kloc 2009).
21. E.g., MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006; Hanson et al. 2005; Bartneck
et al. 2007, 2009; Oyedele 2007, Walters 2008.
22. Bryant 2006; MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006; Geller 2008; Duffy
2009; Kloc 2009.


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essary to introduce hauntology into the very construction of a concept. Of

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

4. This is due to the eccentric or offbeat (abseits) position of its topic

liche—generally translated by the uncanny [l’inquiétante étrangeté]—‘whose

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

2. Although the popular Studienausgabe of Freud’s work is not a

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

12. In Totem and Taboo Freud discusses this phenomenon in a slightly

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

reactivates penis-envy (Freud 1918a, 204).

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

superstitiously believed he would die at 62—and having suffered general and

38. In “The Uncanny” we get a version of this Oedipal constellation in

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

3. Julia Kristeva uses the same mechanism to explain nationalism in

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

5. Salzman comes close to the literary theoretical conceptions of the

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

his discourse cannot be understood otherwise. This castration attests itself

Daseins: “But, Heidegger specifies, ‘the outside oneself’ [‘hors-de-chez-soi’]

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

signified canonically as affect, is no less at the service of this Enlightenment.

for esthetical purposes, rather than “natural or artistic strangeness.”

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

themselves on the storytellers like schoolmasters that correct homeworks on

27. A contemporary of Prawer who uses the notions of the sublime,

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

madness, the estrangement of the artist from the everyday, common-sensical

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

38. Wright made a PhD on E. T. A. Hoffmann under Prawer ’s

“a place of study.” It is perhaps important to note that Todorov and Genette

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

grant that primal experience is constituted by transgression, we can accept Freud’s

15. The examples selected by Todorov foreshadow some of the important

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

interpretation (the disappearance of the nose signifies, we are told, castration)

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

expressions like “le Propre,” “Personne,” and “le (pré)nom de Personne.”

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

and repressed meanings that can no longer be expressed by language as an

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

doubts: ‘There is nothing wrong with connecting Mori’s ideas to Freud,’ he

Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept

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