Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 1 Fabio Camilletti, Martin Doll, Rupert Gaderer, Jan Niklas Howe, Catherine Smale
Introduction
Though first explored by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, it is through Freud’s acclaimed study of 1919 that the notion of the uncanny has entered into contemporary critical debate. From the 1960s onwards, the uncanny has become an increasingly protean and floating concept reflecting the various tensions within postmodern conceptions of temporality and subjectivity. Structurally close to other theories of “defamiliarisation” articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (for example the Marxist notions of “alienation” and “commodity fetishism”, the Russian formalists’ definition of ostranenie, Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit, Brecht’s “A-effect”), the uncanny has reverberated widely in twentieth-century debate, from psychoanalysis (Lacan) to deconstruction (Derrida, Royle), from literary theory (Todorov, Cixous, Kristeva) to the philosophy of history (Certeau), and ultimately to the theory of architecture (Vidler).
From the outset, Freud’s essay announces itself as a hybrid and indefinable contribution, mirroring the ungraspable nature of the concept. The uncanny, Freud writes, belongs to “the subject of aesthetics” (Freud, 219): however, since aesthetics can be understood in a broad sense and is therefore taken “to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling”, it follows that a “rather remote” province of aesthetics can be of interest even to psychoanalysis. Freud’s essay is steeped in ambiguity, not only because it shifts from linguistic to literary analyses, and eventually to more technically psychoanalytic evaluations, but also because it repeatedly juxtaposes the realms of individual psychology and cultural history. Uncanny sensations are linked to a “return of the repressed” occurring at both an individual and a historical level, thus producing a constant movement from the child to the adult subject, and from the “primitive” to the “enlightened” one. As Francesco Orlando points out, Freud’s definition of “surmounted” animistic beliefs that have become uncanny precisely insofar as they have been replaced by rationally grounded convictions can be identified with the process of the Enlightenment, if we read this as a repression through which “mistakes” re-traced in the text of tradition are “surmounted” (1997, 16). The uncanny can therefore be understood as a “toxic side-effect” of the Enlightenment (Castle 1995, 8), insofar as the Enlightenment operates a temporalisation of historical time that concerns both individual and collective history (Koselleck 2004). Such juxtaposition is evident, for example, in the Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica [discourse of an Italian on Romantic poetry] written by the Italian philosopher Giacomo Leopardi in 1818. In this text, Leopardi openly anticipates the Freudian equation between “primitive animism” and childhood beliefs:
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 2 What the ancients were, we have all been, and what the world was for some centuries, thiswe have been for some years, namely children, participating in that ignorance, in those fears and delights and beliefs, and in that immense operation of imagination; when the thunder, the wind, the sun, the stars, and the animals, the plants and the walls of our houses, everything appeared either as our friend or enemy, nothing indifferent and nothing meaningless; when every object we saw seemed, by somehow making sign to us, to want to speak to us; when, nowhere alone, we used to interrogate images and walls and trees and flowers and clouds, and we used to embrace rocks and trees, and as though offended we used to beat, and as though benefited we used to caress things that were unable of giving any offence or benefit. (Leopardi 1997, 85-86, our translation)
Both individual and historical past are, in the complementary forms of childhood and human prehistory, constructed as sites of alterity par excellence in Enlightenment thought, as something that “ought to have remained […] secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud, 224). Once temporalised, and therefore constructed as an otherness with respect to the “here and now”, the past can only return as a fragment of alterity, in the form of the disused and obsolete object, the archaeological finding, the symptom as the after-image of a past trauma, a sensation of déjà vu or a ghostly persistence.
Under the collective title of Hauntings, this double publication focuses on the uncanny by stressing the model of the “haunted house”, which even on an etymological level incorporates the Freudian tension between “Heimliches” and “Unheimliches”. The tension individuated by Freud between familiarity and un-familiarity denotes a strange proximity between the known and the unknown, either as something familiar presenting itself in an extraneous shape, or as something extraneous revealing an element of familiarity in its features. The main hypothesis behind the essays assembled here is that this tension can still be used as an approximate framework in which to situate the various aspects of the uncanny. Specifically, the semantic area of the “house” (Heim, intended as the perimeter of familiarity) can be interpreted as a constellation of sign relationships defining a horizon of expectation in which interactions, causes and effects, seem to follow a series of rules. The uncanny is related to scientific paradigms and epistemological practices, insofar as these define what a given cultural context interprets as natural or un-natural, or rather super-natural. The “haunting” epitomises the intrusion, within the set of paradigms through which models of identity and subjectivity are constructed, of a troubling and unnatural otherness/familiarity. This double-faced otherness is deeply rooted in the “culture of critique” emerging from the Enlightenment,
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 3 which actually witnesses a splitting of the subject, as reflected in the ambiguity conveyed by the expression “subject of observation”. By instigating a constant abstraction from individual experience to a common and collective level, the “haunting” can therefore be seen as a tension embodying the crucial challenges of modernity. In parallel, it can be thought of as a model for understanding the fissure of post-Enlightenment subjectivity, as well as a figure of transgression between the possible and the impossible, between norm and deviation.
The essays collected here are intentionally heterogeneous, and aim to explore several aspects of the notion of the uncanny from multiple angles that emerged in the course of the workshop “Phantasmata – Techniques of the Uncanny” held in April 2009 at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Several of the publishers were postdoctoral fellows at the institute, within the frame of the core project “Tension/Spannung”. The notion of the uncanny had been crossing our individual projects in many ways, and had become increasingly central in our common discussion. Fabio Camilletti, a scholar in Italian studies and Comparative Literature, was carrying out a research on images, time and the semantics of the past. Martin Doll, a scholar in Media Studies, shed light on the political aspects of the uncanny in his research on the interrelation between historical new media technologies and socio-emancipatory community concepts. Rupert Gaderer, a scholar in German Literature und Media Studies, focused on epistemological cross-currents between the science of electricity, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We started elaborating a common initiative, and were joined shortly afterwards by Jan Niklas Howe, who is working on monsters and monstrosities in nineteenth century literature and science. The group was augmented further by the Canadian philosopher Paula Schwebel, and by the Australian filmmaker Siouxzi Mernagh, who was creating an experimental film on dream logic and the representation of the unconscious. The workshop was particularly fruitful in terms of discussion and mutual exchange, and it was here that we were joined by Catherine Smale, from the University of Cambridge, whose doctoral thesis examines the figure of the ghost in German fiction.
The issue will be divided in two parts, under the common title of Hauntings: the first will focus on “Narrating the Uncanny”, thus stressing the presence of the uncanny in literature and other media; while the second, “Uncanny Figures and Twilight Zones”, will inquire into the political implications of the uncanny and the specific figures and themes that can be connected to it.
This work would have never been possible without the support of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School in Literary Studies. Our wholehearted thanks go to Christoph Holzhey, Director of the ICI, to Manuele Gragnolati, Luca di Blasi, Claudia Peppel, Florian Rosenbauer and to all the 2008-09 fellows at the ICI. A special note of thanks is due
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 4 to Siouxzi Mernagh and Paula Schwebel for their engagement in the concept of Phantasmata. We are also grateful to the following peer-reviewers for their diligent work: , and, finally, to Chagall.
Peer-reviewers:
Bruno Besana (ICI Berlin), Kathrin Bethke (Freie Universität Berlin), Philipp Ekardt (Freie Universität Berlin), Sebastian Giessmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Matthias Hein (Freie Universität Berlin), Rommany Jenkins (University of Birmingham), Eva Johach (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Univ. Trier), Oliver Kohns ((Humboldt-Universität Köln), Anna Maria König (University of Nottingham), Muireann Maguire (Queen Mary, University of London), Paul North (Yale University), Dora Osbourne (University of Oxford), Martin Roussel (Universität Köln), Ben Schofield (University of Cambridge), Clare Watters (University of Birmingham), Kai Wiegandt (Freie Universität Berlin).
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74. Vol. XVII, 217-56.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. by Keith Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Leopardi, Giacomo. Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, ed. by Rosita Copioli, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997.
Editors
Fabio Camilletti is Assistant Professor in Italian at the University of Warwick . He studied in Pisa, Oxford, Paris and Birmingham, and in 2008-10 was Fellow in Literature, Art History and Psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. His specialism is nineteenth-century literature viewed from a comparative angle. He has worked extensively on nineteenth-century literature and culture (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Giacomo Leopardi, the fin de siècle, Warburg, Freud), on problems of literary and cultural theory (quotations and intertextuality; ruins, fragmentariness and the semantics of the past), and on the relationship between images, time and the uncanny. His last book, Dante's Book of Youth: The “Vita Nova” and the Nineteenth Century (1840-1907), will appear in 2011 with igrs books (London). E-mail: fabio.camilletti@gmail.com
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 5 Martin Doll started his career as an editor and journalist for German public television. Later he studied Drama/Theatre/Media (Applied Theatre Studies) in Gießen and wrote his dissertation in Media Studies on Forgeries and Hoaxes, which is forthcoming under the title Fälschung und Fake: Praktiken der Diskurskritik (Berlin: Kadmos 2010). He taught as a Guest Lecturer at the University of Gießen and Frankfurt am Main, and was a Research Fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, within the framework of the PhD programme Zeiterfahrung und ästhetische Wahrnehmung, organised by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He co-edited the volume Mimikry: Gefährlicher Luxus zwischen Natur und Kultur (Schliengen: Argus 2008) and is currently working on a book on media and community with a focus on literary and social utopias in the nineteenth century. His research areas include the history of media and knowledge, politics and media, and utopias. E-mail: post@mdoll.eu
Rupert Gaderer studied electrical engineering at the Technologisches Gewerbemuseum in Vienna (1994-1998), followed by German Literature at the University of Vienna (1999-2004) and the University of Genoa (2002-2003). He received his PhD in German Literature at the University of Vienna with a dissertation on the relations between natural sciences, aesthetics, and literature around 1800 (Poetik der Technik: Elektrizität und Optik bei E.T.A. Hoffmann; Rombach, 2009). He has received grants from the University of Vienna (2002/2003) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2005-2007). He was a Fellow at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies (2006-2007), an IFK Visiting Fellow at the Humboldt-University of Berlin (2007-2008), and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2008-2009). Since 2009 he has been a researcher at the Graduate School ‘Mediale Historiographien’ (Weimar, Erfurt, Jena). His research areas include German literature, travel writing about Italy, and Media Studies. E-mail: rupert@gaderer.net
Jan Niklas Howe studied German Literature, Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the Free University and the Humboldt-University of Berlin. He completed his Magister Artium in 2007 with a thesis on the function of the ornament in Romantic political theory. He studied French Literature and Art History at Paris 8-Saint Denis and Comparative Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He has been the recipient of grants by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Fulbright Commission. Since October 2008, Jan Niklas has been working on a PhD thesis at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies. His dissertation focuses on the banalisation and universalisation of monsters in nineteenth-century literature, medicine, psychiatry and early
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 6 evolutionary theory. Current research interests include theories of emotion and political theory. E-mail: jhowe@gmx.de
Catherine Smale is completing her PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her current research examines the figure of the ghost in contemporary German literature, focusing in particular on writers of the former GDR. She has published articles on the Holocaust autobiography of Ruth Kluger, on the Expressionist poet Frida Bettingen and on the discourse of the uncanny in the writing of Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann. From January 2011 she will take up a Hanseatic Scholarship to carry out post-doctoral research at the Free University of Berlin. E-mail: chs33@cam.ac.uk
