What Is Uncanny About the Uncanny?

Abstract: The author re-examines Freud’s essay, The Uncanny ( Das Unheimliche ), placing it in dialogue with other authors who wrote on the same subject, such as M. Heidegger, J. Lacan, and T. Todorov. He also shows how Freud’s theory hovers between an interpretation of the uncanny as a “return of the repressed” or as a “return of surmounted beliefs”—the latter making the uncanny the product of a specific historic moment in civilization (the hegemony of modern rationalism)—and opens up the unresolved question of the history of the unconscious. The author dwells particularly on the uncanny in literature and cinema, with special attention to Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby . He highlights the mostly “demonic” character of the supernatural that emerges in uncanny works, and hence questions the deeper origins of belief, both in the divine and in the diabolical. His basic thesis is that the uncanny marks an uncertainty, a source of both anxiety and pleasure, between the world of things and the dimension of the signifier.