"With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquility of reason itself...Henceforth, we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others." (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 170)
In an article published in 1906, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch published "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen ", an essay on the uncanny as an affective excitement -- a sensation of unease, of disorientation, of not being quite "at home" -- which a "fortunate formation" of the German language conveys quite clearly, since Heim specifically refers to the home. Thus, for Jentsch the experience of the new, the foreign, and the unusual can provoke mistrust, unease, and even hostility, as opposed to the familiar forms of the traditional, the usual, the hereditary which are a source of comfort and reassurance. While the familiar may even appear self-evident, the unfamiliar can create uncertainty and disorientation, and threats to the everyday sense of intellectual mastery. While the intensity of feeling associated with this disorientation can vary considerably, the sense of the uncanny is most particularly aroused in conditions of "doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate." (The point is taken up by Freud in Das Unheimliche ) Fear, terror, and horror can result. The impression of the uncanny is often provoked by wax figures, automata, panopticons, and panoramas, and in recent years the "uncanny valley" has been proposed to explain the unease that lifelike robots can provoke -- almost but not quite animate. To experience uncanniness in the presence of an animal is to be right up against a question—what is this other creature’s experience?—that will not resolve itself into one clear answer.
Whale’s eye
In Das Unheimliche (1919), Freud wanted to demonstrate at the outset, on the basis of a semantic study of the German adjective heimlich and its antonym unheimlich that a negative meaning close to that of the antonym is already tied to the positive term heimlich, "friendlily comfortable," which would also signify "concealed, kept from sight," "deceitful and malicious," "behind someone's back." Thus, in the very word heimlich, the familiar and intimate are reversed into their opposites. The immanence of the strange within the familiar is considered as an etymological proof of the psychoanalytic hypothesis according to which "the uncanny is that class of the frightening, which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar."
For Freud, the uncanny (Unheimliche ) is thus the estranged familiar (Heimliche ) "For this 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 the process of repression." (According to Gorgio Agamben, what has been repressed is emblematic form.) As Kristeva puts it, "The Other is My (own and proper) Unconscious. (Strangers to Ourselves, p. 183) Hans Bellmer's explorations of the pleasures and terrors of domesticity evoke this displacement of the familiar. (see Playtime) ncanniness expresses an uncertainty at the heart of the Anthropocene.
In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler describes the womb-house, what Tzara called "intra-uterine" architecture, as the very center of the uncanny. As Freud noted, "It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning." (p.245) (cf. Kiesler and the nanny)
Marcel Duchamp, "Mariée"
Death and its ambiguous incarnations in apparitions and ghosts is another site of the uncanny. For "Our unconscious has as little use as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality." For Jentsch, "the horror which a dead body (especially a human one), a death's head, skeletons and similar things can also be explained to a great extent by the fact that thoughts of a latent animate state always lie so close to these things."
Uncanniness has been interpreted as hereditary"instinct fear." For Kurt Goldheim, the uncanny is a shock to the total organism in its inability to react adequately to a situation. It is a primal experience that something does not "fit" into the total situation. For Freud, it is an "over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality."
For Deleuze and Guattari, "nature is like art, because it always combines these 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." (What is Philosophy?, p. 186)
"Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts.(...) It can be defined by the "frame." by an interlocking of differently oriented frames, which will be imposed on the other arts, from painting to the cinema. (...) But however extendable this system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe." (ibid). "Without a set of impossibilities, you won't have the line of flight, the exit that is creation." ("Mediators," in Negotiations, p. 133)