During this reading and that of Kant’s, I found myself wondering: why do we care about the noumenal? If it is ipso facto unknowable and we can only grasp objects obliquely, what is the implication of positing whether a noumenon exists or not?
I also found it interesting Nietzhsche’s idiosyncratic, flamboyant style that I find to be representative of much of continental philosophy. Is his poetic play of signs a synthesis of content and form which reveals the instability of language/truth, and thereby a potential bridge between literature and thought/philosophy as distinct disciplines? Freud’s reliance on literature seems to contribute further complexity with the introduction of the quasi-scientific field of psychology.
Finally, Freud’s conception of the repressed subject and its concomitant resistance of language has of course established what we know as the hermeneutics of suspicion, an approach that has at least for me been supremely influential and seems to predominate much of literary studies, even today. However, what do alternative projects like Sedgwick’s reparative reading look like in practice? Are they possible if the subject is necessarily repressed? Are they a means by which the subject can liberate themself (and we ourselves) from the tyranny of the subconscious?
Nietzsche states that we “possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities” (p. 755) – we can only express ourselves in concepts and relations. But does Nietzsche offer an alternative, one that would be more ‘truthful’, and is this alternative “an aesthetic way of relating” (p. 758)? Arguably, Nietzsche himself employs the form and language of metaphors in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for instance. But is this example perhaps also an example of this “aesthetic way of relating” since it bridges the gap between poetry, song, philosophy and even parody? Or is a language of metaphors just not adequate to relate truths – whereas Zarathustra’s goal isn’t to convey one single truth but rather to introduce abstract concepts.
Freud emphasizes that the uncanny found in literature is distinct from the uncanny one encounters in real life–so much so that his hypothesis may be “contradict[ed].” He goes on to say that this potential contradiction of his theory “may suggest a possible differentiation between the uncanny that is actually experienced, and the uncanny as we merely picture it or read about it.” I agree with this distinction and am wondering how to take it further. Is it because the uncanny is easier to spot and is found more frequently in literature than in real life? For instance, when I think of the uncanny, why do I think immediately of David Lynch rather than an uncanny experience of my own? I’m also thinking about the function of uncanniness in literature. It seems like a manifestation of the Formalist concept of defamiliarization?
I found Nietzche’s essay to have many resonances to Saussure, and I was thus wondering if we could argue for him to be a precursor of Saussurian linguistics. In what way is his description of language as a layering of metaphors that we universally use to express ourself different from the Saussurian notions of “signified” and “signifier”? Or in broader terms, couldn’t we dare to argue the solution of the paradox of the language that he poses (755) to be contained in the Saussurian “tout se tient”?
Freud’s “double”—what seems to be a precipitate, or manifestation, of the “uncanny”—can take many “shape[s] and degree[s]” (9). As in the case of Hoffman’s literary characters, “the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self” (9).
How can we relate Freud’s “double” with the Hegelian necessity of an Other for self-understanding and self-recognition? From his Lectures on Fine Arts, Hegel writes that “the universal need for art … is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” (559). Can we call Freud’s “double” such an object? If so, who is doing the “recognizing”—the author, the reader, the spectator?
what is the difference between the uncanny and irony – not just definitionally but by way of tone, usage, effect, predominance.
Does Freud perhaps underplay the importance of Olympia in his analysis of Hoffman? I think there is something uncanny about expecting one thing yet receiving another; perhaps Olympia was so beautiful because she was an impossibility; Then, if I’m understanding all this correctly, at issue is less the fear of castration (aka powerlessness) than a sense of being alienated from one’s own desires: why would I desire something/one that was not real?
The experience of having one’s desires reflected back to them in a form other than how they’re experienced is uncanny. This is the experience of psychoanalysis, as Freud concedes in the article. WHy does this seem out of step with his castration conclusion?
Quite a simple question/query actually, but I really would appreciate tracing out the fine-grained details of where Freud introduces the repetition-compulsion on p. 11 of “The Uncanny” all the way to the end of the right margin’s first paragraph on p. 12. When I read the last few sentences of that paragraph (on p. 12) about patients of Freud’s describing their “presentiments” which “usually” come true, to disclose a bit of myself for a moment, I really found this to be describing something I myself would say. And so, because Freud labeled those who would even hint at saying this as obsessional neurotics – well, tracing through this part of the text would, frankly, be helpful to understand myself (assuming for the sake of practice that Freud is “right”)! I also find this quite humorous.
Also, given that I know next to nothing about the “theories” behind Surrealism (e.g., I haven’t read André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto”), I do know (or at least would imagine that) what drove much of their aesthetics was an attempt to exemplify the “limits of the unconscious” and to depict, one might say, an uncanny viewing experience. Dali’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony” comes to mind: what an odd, odd work! To put this in question-form, and to relate this to literature as well: (a) are there any fruitful similarities we might draw out between Surrealism (specifically its visual art form) and the sort of “uncanniness” that Freud is mentioning (no doubt someone associated with the movement read this specific work of Freud’s); and (b) not to say that Kafka is surrealist, but, at any rate, what sort of examples in his work might we point to and “apply” a Freudian-psychoanalytic reading of that would in some sort of way effect or display the “uncanny,” either in us as readers (i.e., with regard to the uncanniness we come to “feel” in light of the Kafkaesque) or in the dynamcs of what’s going on in the text (not distinguishable from us as readers, but the point of emphasis, that is, being not in the effect(s) that we “get” in reaction to the text)?
I came across an article written about the early works of John Banville, a very different type of Irish novelist to Sally Rooney, which discusses the quest for “fixed and solid truth that exists independently of human minds” that his characters attempt and ultimately fail to complete. Reading through On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense presented a direct compliment to Jackson’s argument. Geniuses Copernicus and Kepler quest after fundamental knowledge, only to come to the conclusion that it seems to be just out of reach even as they get closer and closer. It’s a pretty good read, and I thought to mention it in the context of last week, and because its analysis of Banville’s characterization presents such a clear line alongside the progression from Kant through Hegel and Marx to Nietzsche.
There’s a scene in the Yorgos Lanthimos movie Dogtooth that combines futility of language and the idea of the uncanny. At one point, during a dinner scene, someone asks for the butter tray, and is passed the salt shaker. The viewer understands that this family has assigned the meaning of ‘butter tray’ to ‘salt shaker’, which disconcerts, repels, maybe revolts. But then, after all, why shouldn’t the image imitated by the sound “salt shaker” be a butter dish? If the two stage metaphor (755) is the foundation of language, what makes one metaphor more appropriate than another? Isn’t all of it false, because the concept of “salt shaker” is created by “making equivalent that which is not equivalent.” Anyway, the scene takes place as a family is having dinner. Very heimlich. Heimlich depends on familiarity, congeniality. What’s more familiar or congenial than passing someone something at the dinner table? Unheimlich presents alongside this familiarity a sense of the concealed, something kept out of sight. The monstrosity of betraying the agreed-upon meanings of words – out of cruelty, or entertainment, or for whatever reason – is indicative of some secret withdrawn evil. But it’s all contingent on familiarity.
Freud’s pairing of heimlich and unheimlich is the latest in our string of dualities that smoosh together to form some new and difficult to explain idea. Purposeless purposiveness, Hegel’s dialectic, the material in the personal, the social in the thing. I had fun this week thinking of examples of the uncanny, and of the implications Nietzsche’s discussion of language.
“What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm…o, be some other name. What’s in a name?”
In case anyone is interested:
Jackson, Tony E. “Science, Art, and the Shipwreck of Knowledge: The Novels of John Banville.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208977
**Ahh no, just rewatching Dogtooth, the daughter asks the mother to pass her the phone and receives the salt shaker, not the butter dish.
Also, another example of the uncanny which came to mind – the eponymous poem in Camilla Grudova’s excellent book The Doll’s Alphabet, which I was gonna scan but just found on Reddit.
While reading Freud’s discourses, one thing really made me think: Was he obssessed with his own mother as a child? Does he focus on trying to understand why men have fetishes and why they would want to have an intimate relationship with their mother because he was a man, but was not able to completely understand women (in this area of study)? He tells us that the reason why men develop fetishes is because they realize that women do not have a penis and thus are afraid of castration- obviously women do not have that problem. Even in “The Uncanny”, while talking about Hoffman’s “Sand-Man”, we could argue that being in love with that doll is a fetish, and it would have nothing to do with the fact that we are not sure if Olympia is alive or not. In addition, in the discourse on the Oedipal complex, he focuses on the sexual relationship a boy is dreaming of having with his mother, but does not talk about a girl wanting to be with her father.
Do we understand the Freudian Uncanny differently in the age of AI? The passage that particularly sparked this question is:
“Jentsch says: ‘In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton…'” (p.5 of Uncanny).
At the time of writing, people were already aware/fearful/enchanted of/by automatons, but how is this intensified in the ChatGPT era?
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13 Comments
Alex Lleras
During this reading and that of Kant’s, I found myself wondering: why do we care about the noumenal? If it is ipso facto unknowable and we can only grasp objects obliquely, what is the implication of positing whether a noumenon exists or not?
I also found it interesting Nietzhsche’s idiosyncratic, flamboyant style that I find to be representative of much of continental philosophy. Is his poetic play of signs a synthesis of content and form which reveals the instability of language/truth, and thereby a potential bridge between literature and thought/philosophy as distinct disciplines? Freud’s reliance on literature seems to contribute further complexity with the introduction of the quasi-scientific field of psychology.
Finally, Freud’s conception of the repressed subject and its concomitant resistance of language has of course established what we know as the hermeneutics of suspicion, an approach that has at least for me been supremely influential and seems to predominate much of literary studies, even today. However, what do alternative projects like Sedgwick’s reparative reading look like in practice? Are they possible if the subject is necessarily repressed? Are they a means by which the subject can liberate themself (and we ourselves) from the tyranny of the subconscious?
Joanna Ligon
Nietzsche states that we “possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities” (p. 755) – we can only express ourselves in concepts and relations. But does Nietzsche offer an alternative, one that would be more ‘truthful’, and is this alternative “an aesthetic way of relating” (p. 758)? Arguably, Nietzsche himself employs the form and language of metaphors in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for instance. But is this example perhaps also an example of this “aesthetic way of relating” since it bridges the gap between poetry, song, philosophy and even parody? Or is a language of metaphors just not adequate to relate truths – whereas Zarathustra’s goal isn’t to convey one single truth but rather to introduce abstract concepts.
Francesca Mancino
Freud emphasizes that the uncanny found in literature is distinct from the uncanny one encounters in real life–so much so that his hypothesis may be “contradict[ed].” He goes on to say that this potential contradiction of his theory “may suggest a possible differentiation between the uncanny that is actually experienced, and the uncanny as we merely picture it or read about it.” I agree with this distinction and am wondering how to take it further. Is it because the uncanny is easier to spot and is found more frequently in literature than in real life? For instance, when I think of the uncanny, why do I think immediately of David Lynch rather than an uncanny experience of my own? I’m also thinking about the function of uncanniness in literature. It seems like a manifestation of the Formalist concept of defamiliarization?
Irene Ferrami
I found Nietzche’s essay to have many resonances to Saussure, and I was thus wondering if we could argue for him to be a precursor of Saussurian linguistics. In what way is his description of language as a layering of metaphors that we universally use to express ourself different from the Saussurian notions of “signified” and “signifier”? Or in broader terms, couldn’t we dare to argue the solution of the paradox of the language that he poses (755) to be contained in the Saussurian “tout se tient”?
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
Freud’s “double”—what seems to be a precipitate, or manifestation, of the “uncanny”—can take many “shape[s] and degree[s]” (9). As in the case of Hoffman’s literary characters, “the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self” (9).
How can we relate Freud’s “double” with the Hegelian necessity of an Other for self-understanding and self-recognition? From his Lectures on Fine Arts, Hegel writes that “the universal need for art … is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” (559). Can we call Freud’s “double” such an object? If so, who is doing the “recognizing”—the author, the reader, the spectator?
Dana
Questions:
what is the difference between the uncanny and irony – not just definitionally but by way of tone, usage, effect, predominance.
Does Freud perhaps underplay the importance of Olympia in his analysis of Hoffman? I think there is something uncanny about expecting one thing yet receiving another; perhaps Olympia was so beautiful because she was an impossibility; Then, if I’m understanding all this correctly, at issue is less the fear of castration (aka powerlessness) than a sense of being alienated from one’s own desires: why would I desire something/one that was not real?
The experience of having one’s desires reflected back to them in a form other than how they’re experienced is uncanny. This is the experience of psychoanalysis, as Freud concedes in the article. WHy does this seem out of step with his castration conclusion?
Alex Riedel
Quite a simple question/query actually, but I really would appreciate tracing out the fine-grained details of where Freud introduces the repetition-compulsion on p. 11 of “The Uncanny” all the way to the end of the right margin’s first paragraph on p. 12. When I read the last few sentences of that paragraph (on p. 12) about patients of Freud’s describing their “presentiments” which “usually” come true, to disclose a bit of myself for a moment, I really found this to be describing something I myself would say. And so, because Freud labeled those who would even hint at saying this as obsessional neurotics – well, tracing through this part of the text would, frankly, be helpful to understand myself (assuming for the sake of practice that Freud is “right”)! I also find this quite humorous.
Also, given that I know next to nothing about the “theories” behind Surrealism (e.g., I haven’t read André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto”), I do know (or at least would imagine that) what drove much of their aesthetics was an attempt to exemplify the “limits of the unconscious” and to depict, one might say, an uncanny viewing experience. Dali’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony” comes to mind: what an odd, odd work! To put this in question-form, and to relate this to literature as well: (a) are there any fruitful similarities we might draw out between Surrealism (specifically its visual art form) and the sort of “uncanniness” that Freud is mentioning (no doubt someone associated with the movement read this specific work of Freud’s); and (b) not to say that Kafka is surrealist, but, at any rate, what sort of examples in his work might we point to and “apply” a Freudian-psychoanalytic reading of that would in some sort of way effect or display the “uncanny,” either in us as readers (i.e., with regard to the uncanniness we come to “feel” in light of the Kafkaesque) or in the dynamcs of what’s going on in the text (not distinguishable from us as readers, but the point of emphasis, that is, being not in the effect(s) that we “get” in reaction to the text)?
Peter
I came across an article written about the early works of John Banville, a very different type of Irish novelist to Sally Rooney, which discusses the quest for “fixed and solid truth that exists independently of human minds” that his characters attempt and ultimately fail to complete. Reading through On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense presented a direct compliment to Jackson’s argument. Geniuses Copernicus and Kepler quest after fundamental knowledge, only to come to the conclusion that it seems to be just out of reach even as they get closer and closer. It’s a pretty good read, and I thought to mention it in the context of last week, and because its analysis of Banville’s characterization presents such a clear line alongside the progression from Kant through Hegel and Marx to Nietzsche.
There’s a scene in the Yorgos Lanthimos movie Dogtooth that combines futility of language and the idea of the uncanny. At one point, during a dinner scene, someone asks for the butter tray, and is passed the salt shaker. The viewer understands that this family has assigned the meaning of ‘butter tray’ to ‘salt shaker’, which disconcerts, repels, maybe revolts. But then, after all, why shouldn’t the image imitated by the sound “salt shaker” be a butter dish? If the two stage metaphor (755) is the foundation of language, what makes one metaphor more appropriate than another? Isn’t all of it false, because the concept of “salt shaker” is created by “making equivalent that which is not equivalent.” Anyway, the scene takes place as a family is having dinner. Very heimlich. Heimlich depends on familiarity, congeniality. What’s more familiar or congenial than passing someone something at the dinner table? Unheimlich presents alongside this familiarity a sense of the concealed, something kept out of sight. The monstrosity of betraying the agreed-upon meanings of words – out of cruelty, or entertainment, or for whatever reason – is indicative of some secret withdrawn evil. But it’s all contingent on familiarity.
Freud’s pairing of heimlich and unheimlich is the latest in our string of dualities that smoosh together to form some new and difficult to explain idea. Purposeless purposiveness, Hegel’s dialectic, the material in the personal, the social in the thing. I had fun this week thinking of examples of the uncanny, and of the implications Nietzsche’s discussion of language.
“What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm…o, be some other name. What’s in a name?”
In case anyone is interested:
Jackson, Tony E. “Science, Art, and the Shipwreck of Knowledge: The Novels of John Banville.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208977
Peter
**Ahh no, just rewatching Dogtooth, the daughter asks the mother to pass her the phone and receives the salt shaker, not the butter dish.
Also, another example of the uncanny which came to mind – the eponymous poem in Camilla Grudova’s excellent book The Doll’s Alphabet, which I was gonna scan but just found on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/15u8yvk/opinion_need_help_deciphering_the_dolls_alphabet/
Serena Solin
Apologies, forgot to post my presentation link!
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w5f9tpqnu39br0mrwrt1v/Nietzsche-presentation.docx?rlkey=u8yy8zc3nxjfci4npgiwexgs0&dl=0
Nietzsche discussion question:
Why bother with truth?
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
I apologize for the late post!
While reading Freud’s discourses, one thing really made me think: Was he obssessed with his own mother as a child? Does he focus on trying to understand why men have fetishes and why they would want to have an intimate relationship with their mother because he was a man, but was not able to completely understand women (in this area of study)? He tells us that the reason why men develop fetishes is because they realize that women do not have a penis and thus are afraid of castration- obviously women do not have that problem. Even in “The Uncanny”, while talking about Hoffman’s “Sand-Man”, we could argue that being in love with that doll is a fetish, and it would have nothing to do with the fact that we are not sure if Olympia is alive or not. In addition, in the discourse on the Oedipal complex, he focuses on the sexual relationship a boy is dreaming of having with his mother, but does not talk about a girl wanting to be with her father.
Jodie Kahan (she/her)
My presentation!
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EqCtigzpThDjNgsrPdSsF2LeSDjLoPuPSR82coyy7sA/edit#slide=id.g2dcd43626f1_0_7
Coco Fitterman
Apologies also for the late post–
Do we understand the Freudian Uncanny differently in the age of AI? The passage that particularly sparked this question is:
“Jentsch says: ‘In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton…'” (p.5 of Uncanny).
At the time of writing, people were already aware/fearful/enchanted of/by automatons, but how is this intensified in the ChatGPT era?