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MLADEN DOLAR
The Extimate
Freud startsoff with a lengthylinguisticdiscussion of the German term
das Unheimliche.It was fortunatefor Freud thatsuch a paradoxical word existed
in the German language, and perhaps it gave him the idea for the paper in the
firstplace. The word is the standard German negation of heimlichand is thus
supposed to be its opposite. But it turnsout that it is actuallydirectlyimplied
by heimlich,which means familiar,homely,cozy,intimate,"arousing a sense of
agreeable restfulnessand securityas in one withinthe four walls of his house";
by extension,whatis familiarand securelytuckedaway is also hidden, concealed
fromthe outside, secret,"kept fromsight. . . withheldfromothers"; and by a
furtherextension,what is hidden and secretis also threatening,fearful,occult,
"uncomfortable,uneasy, gloomy,dismal . . . ghastly"-that is, unheimlich, un-
canny.2 There is a point where the two meanings directly coincide and become
undistinguishable,and the negationdoes not count-as indeed itdoes not count
3. "The way in which dreams treat the categoryof contrariesand contradictoriesis highly
remarkable.It is simplydisregarded. 'No' seems not to existso far as dreams are concerned. They
show a particularpreferenceforcombiningcontrariesinto a unityor forrepresentingthemas one
ofDreams(1900), in The StandardEdition,vol. IV, p. 318.
and the same thing."The Interpretation
4. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" p. 220.
The Quadruple
Let us see how the Lacanian "simplification"-the introductionof a com-
mon pivotal point-affects Freud's formulationson the uncanny. Freud takes
as the paradigmaticcase the well-knownshort story"The Sand-Man" by E. T.
A. Hoffmann, an example suggested by Jentsch and which serves Freud's
5. See James Donald's excellentaccount,"The Fantastic,the Sublime and the Popular; or What's
at Stake in Vampire Films?" in Fantasyand theCinema,ed. James Donald (London: British Film
Institute,1989).
6. See Slavoj Ziiek's articlein thisissue.
Nathaniel Father
de
7. H61kneCixous points out in "La Fictionet ses Fant6mes: Une lecturede l'Unheimliche
Freud," Poitique(1972), vol. 10, pp. 199-216, thatFreud makes some arbitrarycuts in Hoffmann's
storyand doesn't take into account the subtletyof his narrativestrategy.Although this is true to
some extent,one could show that those elementsdo not contradictFreud's reading. It seems that
Cixous triesto prove too much; for the veryact of interpretingoperates by arbitrarycuts and the
thatseemed
alleged wealthof the object interpretedis a retroactiveeffectof the veryinterpretation
to reduce it. Here, rather than claiming any fidelityto an original textual wealth, I proceed by
takingup only one essentialpoint thatinterestsme.
half," the missinghalf that could make him whole, but which turns out to be
the materialized,emancipated death drive. She presentsthe point where the
narcissisticcomplementturnslethal,where the imaginarystumbleson the real.
Olympia's position is conditioned by the tension of the second diagonal
that connects the two fatherfigures,the fatherand the Sand-Man. The threat
of a loss of sight,the menace to one's eyes,whichis the red thread of the story
and for Freud the main source of its uncanny character,is immediatelycon-
nected with the castration complex, the threat of the loss of what is most
valuable. Hoffmann'sstorytreatsthiscomplex in the simplestand mostclassical
way, with the duplication of fatherfigures.The fatheris split into the good
father,the protectorand the bearer of the universalLaw, and the bad father,
the castrater,the menacing and jealous figurethat evokes the fatherof the
primalhorde, the fatherlinkedwithterriblejouissance.The good fatherprotects
Nathaniel's eyes; the bad one threatenswithblinding.The good fatheris killed
by the bad one, who takes the blame for it, thus resolvingin a simple way the
essentialambivalencetowardthe father,the subject'slove forhim and his death-
wishagainsthim. But the tensionbetweenthe twofathersis irresolvable:behind
the fatherwho is the bearer of the Law, and as such reduced to the "Name-of-
the-Father"(i.e., the dead father),there is the horriblecastratingfigurethat
Lacan has called the "father-jouissance," the fatherwho wouldn't die and who
comes to haunt the Law (and actually endows it with its effectiveness).The
Sand-Man is the bearer of thisterribleand lethaljouissance.
For Freud, the uncanny effectdepends on castration,which also links
togetherthe two diagonals and centersthemon the relationto the object. The
Sand-Man as the castratingfigureand the figureofjouissance"alwaysappears
derLiebe]."He is the intruderwho alwaysemerges
as the disturberof love [St~irer
at the momentwhen the subjectcomes close to fulfilling a "sexual relation,"to
find his imaginarysupplement and become a "whole."'2 It is because of the
appearance of the father-jouissanceon the symbolicdiagonal thatthe completion
failson the imaginaryone. One could say thatin thisfirstapproach, the uncanny
is preciselywhat bars the sexual relation; it is the dimension that preventsus
fromfindingour Platonian missinghalves and hence imaginarycompletion;it
is the dimension that blocks the fulfillmentof our subjectivity.The objectal
dimension at one and the same time opens the threatof castrationand comes
to fillthe gap of castration.The uncannyemerges as a reality,but one which
has its only substance in a positivizationof negativity,a negative existence,
castration. The positive presence of the objectal dimension is the "positive
expression" of what Lacan, in one of his most famous dictums,has called the
absence of sexual relation("Ii n'ya pas de rapport sexuel").
The Double
The dimension of the double, another source of the uncanny,simplifies
the quadruple scheme of the Sand-Man into a dual relation where the tension
appears between the subjectand his double. Freud dwellson the omnipresence,
the obsession withthe theme of the double in Hoffmann'swork,and mentions
the then-recentexample of Stellan Rye's filmDer Studentvon Prag. The ex-
haustive studies by Otto Rank and more recentlyby Karl Miller have shown the
very extensive use of this motive in literature(and elsewhere), particularlyits
incredible proliferationin the romanticera.'3 The authors range (apart from
Hoffmann) from Chamisso (Peter Schlemihl), the Gothic novel, Andersen,
Lenau, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hogg, Heine, Musset, Maupassant, Wilde, etc., to
Poe (William Wilson) and Dostoyevsky(Golyadkin).
There are some simple structuralfeaturesof these storiesthat can them-
selves have a number of complex ramificationswith differentoutcomes. The
subject is confrontedwith his double, the very image of himself(that can go
along withthe disappearance, or tradingoff,of his mirrorimage or his shadow),
and this crumbling of the subject's accustomed reality,this shatteringof the
bases of his world, produces a terribleanxiety.'4Usually only the subject can
see his own double, who takes care to appear only in private,or for the subject
alone. The double produces two seeminglycontradictoryeffects:he arranges
things so that they turn out badly for the subject, he turns up at the most
inappropriate moments,he dooms him to failure; and he realizes the subject's
hidden or repressed desires so that he does thingshe would never dare to do
or that his conscience wouldn't let him do. In the end, the relation gets so
unbearable that the subject,in a finalshowdown,killshis double, unaware that
his only substance and his very being were concentratedin his double. So in
killinghim he kills himself."You have conquered, and I yield," says Wilson's
double in Poe's story."Yet henceforwardartthou also dead-dead to the World,
to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this
image, whichis thineown, how utterlythou hast murdered thyself.""5 As a rule,
all these stories finishbadly: the moment one encounters one's double, one is
headed for disaster; there seems to be no way out. (In clinical cases of
autoscopia--meeting or seeing one's double-the prognosis is also ratherbad
and the outcome is likelyto be tragic.)'6
Otto Rank gives an extensive account of the theme of the double in
differentmythologiesand superstitions.17 For all of them the shadow and the
18. There is also the traditional"animistic"belief that what befalls the image will befall its
owner-for example, the superstitionwhichis stillalive concerningcracked mirrors.See Heine, as
quoted in Rank: "There is nothingmore uncanny than seeing one's face accidentallyin a mirror
by moonlight"(p. 43). This explains whyghosts,vampires,etc.,don't cast shadows and don't have
mirrorreflections:theyare themselvesalready shadows and reflections.
19. That is why trading one's image in a kind of "pact with the Devil" or with some occult
substitutealwaysends badly: the Devil knowsthe importanceof the image,and the subjectoverlooks
it.
20. Robert Graves, The GreekMyths,2 vols. (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1960).
The Unique
So far I have considered the uncannyon a rathergeneral level, following
Freud's examples, which are, although he never explicitlymentionsit, histori-
callysituated.Hoffmann,the sudden emergenceof the doubles in the romantic
era, the extraordinaryobsessionwithghosts,vampires,undead dead, monsters,
etc., in Gothic fictionand all throughthe nineteenthcentury,the realm of the
fantastic-they all point to the emergence of the uncanny at a very precise
historicalmoment.It is Frankenstein,however,thatis perhaps the best example
of this.
I started with a quadruple scheme in Hoffmann'stale, which was then
reduced to a dual relationshipwiththe double. Now we can undertakea further
simplification or condensationof the problemby reducingit to a singleelement
best presented by the theme of the monster.
It appears at firstsight that Frankensteinis the direct opposite of the
theme of the double: the creaturecreated by Frankensteinis a monsterwithout
a name, and his basic problem in the novel is preciselythathe cannot find his
double.26It is a creaturewithoutfiliationor a genealogy,withoutanybodywho
would recognize or accept him (not even his creator). His narcissismis thus
thwartedfrom the outset,and the main part of the plot actuallyspringsfrom
his demand for a partner,somebody like him, a wife,so that he could starta
line, a new filiation.He is One and Unique, and as such he cannot even have a
name-he cannotbe represented bya signifier (which absence is often "sponta-
neously" filledin by his "father's"name), he cannot be a part of the symbolic.
The storyitselfhad the strangefateof becominga "modern myth,"a veryrare
occurrenceindeed. The huge numberof differentversionsin whichthe original
is virtuallylost testifiesto this fact. All these versions turn around the same
fantasmatickernel,retranscribing It is a mythin the L6vi-Straussian
itto infinity.
sense of the word: the mythas "a logical model to resolve a contradiction(an
insoluble task if the contradictionis real)"27-ultimatelythe contradictionbe-
tween nature and culture.
The mythhas its startingpoint in scientificdiscourse. Shelley's"Introduc-
tion" takes up Erasmus Darwin as the witness,along with the background of
research into electromagneticoccurrences,galvanism,etc. The possibilityof
creating a human being seems to be just a small extension of the seemingly
limitlesspossibilitiesof the new science. But the connectionwith the Enlight-
enment goes much further.
of the sublime. One can also see a politicaldimensionin it: the storytakes place
at the time of the French Revolution,whichwas already labeled as "monstrous"
by Burke (another theoristof the sublime) and which produced, in a whole
generation of young English intellectualsand poets, a mixtureof enthusiasm
and horror. Mary Shelley was best placed to draw the consequences of this
situation: both her parents,Mary Wollstonecraftas the "founder" of feminism
and William Godwin as the "founder" of anarchism, placed themselves in a
radical line of revolutionarydemands-"Englishmen, one more effort"-to
realize the revolutionarythrust,the effortparadoxicallyaccomplished by their
daughter. One could see in it the birthof the proletariatand the horror that
provokes-and conservativediscourse verysoon took hold of the monsteras a
metaphor of workers' upheavals and demands, a personificationof the mass,
"the rule of the mob."30
It is not that these interpretationsare not correct; they are all plausible,
and evidence can be found to support them. The point where the monster
emerges is always immediatelyseized by an overwhelmingamount of meaning
-and that is valid for the whole subsequent gallery of monsters,vampires,
aliens, etc. It has immediate social and ideological connotations.The monster
can stand for everythingthat our culture has to repress-the proletariat,sex-
uality, other cultures, alternativeways of living, heterogeneity,the Other.3'
There is a certain arbitrarinessin the content that can be projected onto this
point, and there are many attemptsto reduce the uncanny to just thiscontent.
The importantthingfroma Lacanian point of view,however,is thatwhile this
contentis indeed always presentin the uncannyto a greateror a lesser degree,
it doesn't constituteit. The uncanny is always at stake in ideology-ideology
perhaps basicallyconsistsof a social attemptto integratethe uncanny,to make
it bearable, to assign it a place, and the criticismof ideology is caught in the
same frameworkif it tries to reduce it to another kind of contentor to make
the content conscious and explicit. This criticismis always on the brink of a
naive effortto fix things with their proper names, to make the unconscious
conscious, to restore the sense of what is repressed and thus be rid of the
uncanny.The constantresurgenceof "right-wing"ideologies that find support
in the uncanny always comes as a surprise-the fascinationwon't vanish, the
historicizationfails,the "hidden contents"do not exhaust it. Thus the criticism
of ideology helplessly repeats the modernist gesture-the reduction of the
uncanny to its "secular basis" throughthe verylogic thatactuallyproduced the
uncanny in the firstplace as the objectal remainder. Psychoanalysisdoesn't
provide a new and betterinterpretationof the uncanny; it maintainsit as a limit
to interpretation.Its interpretationtries to circumscribethe point where inter-
The Fantastic
Before concluding, let us consider brieflyTzvetan Todorov's "theoryof
the uncanny" in his classical analysisThe Fantastic.36 His account seems to come
very close to the Lacanian one, yet it differs from it in the most important
respect.
For Todorov, the main source of "the fantastic"(roughlythe realm of the
uncanny,to simplifymatters)lies in an "intellectualuncertainty.""37 In Lacanian
termsit is the eruption of the real in the midstof familiarreality;it provokes
a hesitationand an uncertaintyand the familiarbreaks down. Of course this
hesitationis structural-it affectsthe internal,implicitreader who is inscribed
in the text, not the empirical or psychologicalone. For Todorov, in the last
instance,the fantastichas to be explained and dissolved.The hesitationcannot
be maintained indefinitely:eitherthe unexplainable turnsout to be just odd-
the hero was deluded, mad, victimof a conspiracy,etc.-or the supernatural
reallyexists,in whichcase we exchange our realityforanother one withdiffer-
ent rules (a mythicalworld,the world of fairytales,etc.). In both cases, the real
obtains a sense, it is allotted a meaning, and it thus evaporates. The uncanny
could onlysubsistin the narrowmiddle ground thatexistsbeforethe uncertainty
as to its nature is dissipated. And it was only in thatno-man's-landthat it could
produce anxietyand doom the subject to utterinsecurity,to floatingwithouta
point of anchor. Todorov then admirablydraws the implicationsof this simple
startingpoint, shows a number of supplementaryconditionsthat spring from
it, and demonstratesit on a number of convincingexamples.
The strengthof thistheorylies in its simplicityand especiallyin its purely
formalcharacter. It also offersan immediate link with the Lacanian view that
the real can never be dealt with directly,that it emerges only in an oblique
perspective,and thatthe attemptto grasp it directlymakes it vanish. Neverthe-
less, one could say that this theorycovers both too much and too little.Too
much because its formaldescriptionapplies also to a much broader area which
one could call thelogicofsuspense.In its simplestform,it consistsin the mech-
anism wherebyan essential piece of information(e.g., the identityof the mur-
derer) is withheldfrom the (implicit)reader and is disclosed only at the end.
That delay makes the hero and the reader uncertainas to whatis actuallygoing
on withoutnecessarilyproducing the effectof the uncanny.Most detectiveand
crime fictionis based on this,but with the advance certaintythat events will
have a plausible natural explanation (the certaintyembodied in that subject
supposed to know,who is the detective).38 Too little,since not onlydoes it leave
out a great number of instancesof the fantastic,but also because, ultimately,
the main source of the uncannyis not at all a hesitationor an uncertainty.
The instances not accounted for by this theoryare easily found. A large
part "fantasticliterature"has no intentionof makingthe reader hesitateas
of
to the true nature of eventsbut is builton the assumptionfromthe outsetof a
"supernatural" postulate. In Frankenstein we have to assume, for the duration
of the narrative,the possibilityof a "synthetic"productionof "human" beings;
in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, to take a contemporaryexample, we find the
possibilityof the "resurrection of the dead" under certainconditions.Once we
have accepted this hypothesis,no hesitationoccurs, and yet those stories are
definitelyuncanny.The firmknowledgethat"such thingsdon't normallyoccur"
doesn't diminishthe uncanny effect.The question may then arise of why we
are so easily inclined to swallowan improbablehypothesisthatruns counterto
all usual experience and be so easilyduped into anxietyby horror.
In his book on jokes, Freud quotes Lichtenberg'ssentence: "Not only did
he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightenedof them."39 Clearly,the
uncertaintybelonging to knowledge has to be distinguishedfrom the area of
unconscious belief. "I know very well, but all the same . . . I believe," the
formulaso admirablypinpointedby Octave Mannoni in his classic paper, is at
the basis of thisfabricationof the uncanny.40The knowledgedoesn't contradict
the belief,nor does the beliefsimplylose its forcethroughknowledge,since it
is fundamentallysituated in relationto the object-which is not the object of
knowledge.
We have a second, more basic distinctionto make. The knowledge,and
its (un)certainties,is to be distinguishedfromthe terriblecertaintyon the level
of the object. It is a certaintythat goes beyond any certaintywhichscience can
provide, or better,it is only here that we reach the level of certainty,whereas
science can onlyyieldexactitudeand remainssubjectto doubt,questioning,and
proof. Onlytheobjectcan givecertainty, as it is only the object thatprovidesone's
being. One can easilysee thisin good fantasticliterature(or itsmodernversion,
"horror fiction"):the logic of its uncanniness is even directlyopposed to the
logic of suspense-what is horribleis thatone knowsin advance preciselywhat
is bound to happen, and it happens. One could saythaton thislevelthecertainty