Chapter 1

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Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading
of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The
‘Uncanny’)

Let us propose here a bifurcated reading, between literature and psychoanalysis, with double attention paid to what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of the text, sometimes led by Freud and at other times bypassing him in this trajectory that strikes us to be less a discourse than a strange theoretical novel.1 There is something ‘savage’ in the Unheimliche, a breath or a provocative air which at times catches the author himself off guard, overtaking him and restraining him. Freud and the object of his desire (i.e. the truth about the Unheimliche) are fired by reciprocal inspiration. This long essay by Freud is a text of uncertainty: a tightly woven net that strangely inscribes a system of anxieties [inquiétudes] in order to track down the concept das Unheimliche, the disquieting strangeness, the uncanny.2 Nothing turns out less reassuring for the reader than this niggling, cautious, yet wily and interminable pursuit (of ‘something’ – be it a domain, an emotional movement, a concept, impossible to determine and variable in its form, intensity, quality, and content). Nor does anything prove to be more fleeting than this search whose movement constitutes the labyrinth which instigates it; the sense of strangeness imposes its secret necessity everywhere. The movement's progress is all-enveloping and its contradictory operation is accomplished by the author's double: Hesitation. We are faced with a text and its hesitating shadow, and their double escapade. Knotting [Nouements]: but what is brought together here is quickly undone, what is asserted becomes suspect; each thread leads to its sectioning or to some kind of disentanglement. In the labyrinthian space, many characters are called to witness, interrogated, illuminated and quickly relegated to the corner of some street or paragraph. What unfolds without fail before the reader's eyes is a kind of marionette theatre in which real dolls and mock puppets, real life and false life, are manipulated by a sovereign but capricious machine operator. The net is tightly stretched, bowed and tangled; the scenes are centred and dispersed; narratives are begun and left in suspension. Just as the reader thinks he is following some demonstration, he senses that the surface is cracking: the text slides a few roots under the ground while it allows others to be lofted in the air. What in one instance appears a figure of science seems later to resemble some type of fiction. This text proceeds as its own metaphor, as Mallarmé recalls Hamlet, reading in the book of himself while noticing that memory, in retrospect, serves to prophecy. Oh, my prophetic soul!

A text dealing with the nature of incertitude is approached by the reader with a sense of distrust and fascination, for in the exchange which takes place between the text itself and its reading, in this play of seduction where the text always emerges a step ahead, the doubtful elements of the text necessarily engender doubt in its reader. This phenomenon may account for the reader's sense of pleasure and boldness.

We shall examine the strange pleasure incurred in the reading of the Freudian text and what parallels it inseparably: an uneasiness which conforms to Freud's own, describes it, and which can hardly be distinguished from it.

Freud leads his investigation of the frightening thing which constitutes the nucleus of the Unheimliche in two different ways. We shall allow ourselves to be guided along two reading paths, by and against Freud's design, by what is certain and by what is hypothetical, between science and fiction, or between the ‘symbolised’ and the ‘symboliser’. We shall be guided by ambivalence and in conformity with the undecidable nature of all that touches the Unheimliche: life and fiction, life-asfiction, the Oedipus myth, the castration complex and literary creation. Undecided, the analyst, the psychologist, the reader, the writer, the multitude of named and anonymous subjects which are brought up and which disappear into the fabric of the text (starting with Freud, himself thwarted by himself) go along at least two routes which lead us back to our dissatisfaction. First of all, in allowing ourselves to be led, we are submissive to Freud's entreaty, and thus we share in his disillusionment: because the complexity of the analysis and its suffocation go hand-in-hand with the uncertainty of the analyst. Is not the analysis which brings up the whole question of folded repressions imprinted here and there by the effects that its production brings out in the one who leads the analysis? Everything takes place as if the Unheimliche turned back on Freud himself in a vicious interchange between pursued and pursuer; as if one of Freud's repressions acted as the motor re-presenting at each moment the analysis of the repression which Freud is leading: the Unheimliche is at the root of the analysis Freud does of it. It secretes the Unheimliche of the analysis that is done of it. Our role as readers caught in the Unheimliche is a curious double of the role of the other reader, with whom at times we are spectrally identified, that of The Sandman.3 According to Freud, the dangerous eyeglasses which pass from the narrator to the unfortunate protagonist leap out at the reader's eyes, throwing him into the horrible peculiarity of the world of doubles.4 There can be no doubt concerning the doubtful identity of the menacing characters. However, what is perceived by the complementary eyes has no place either in reality or in verisimilitude, but only in the Unheimliche, in the unknown or the unrecognisable. If it is true that the story of the eye always refers to castration, it is not a simple Oedipus story. Through the unending series of substitutions, the eye becomes multiplied, and the familiar work of the eye, in turn, becomes the enigmatic production of the scattered doubles, sparks of fire, stars, lorgnettes, eyeglasses, vision from too far or too close, the theatrical secret which the Freudian text brushes up against, mimics and still flees.

On three different occasions, Freud proceeds to a confrontation with the Unheimliche and attempts to describe it, from the starting point of doubt. The whole enterprise, from its inception, may be designated as an act of theoretical boldness and as the answer to a solicitation issued from a domain yet to be explored. This is a subtle invitation to transgression on the part of the Unheimliche, and an answer or perhaps an anticipation on the part of Freud. Desire is no stranger to this adventure: desire ensures its coming and going. It articulates its detours and its interludes.

As prologue (in the first four paragraphs) Freud seeks to justify himself to the point of exoneration: how and why he takes possession of an area which does not appear to fall under the jurisdiction of analysis, the domain ‘next door’. Psychoanalysis takes over an aesthetic domain neglected by aesthetics; but this does not constitute the first time this type of incursion has been made. For a long time, the work of art has been ‘beckoning’ to Freud and he has been casting a sidelong glance on its seductive effects: his excuse here is based on the question of emotion, on the necessity of someday studying its frustrating economy. Emotional movement does not, as such, comprise the objective of the psychoanalytical study; it only forms the network of effects submitted to aesthetics. Psychoanalysis is interested in ‘psychic life’, in the ‘profound’ domain. There arises here the mystery of literary creation; the secret of this enviable power possessed by its creator who manages to seduce us: this is what fascinates Freud. ‘The freedom of the author, the privilege accorded fiction in order to evoke and inhibit’ the emotions or the phantasms of the reader, the power to lift or impose censorship.5 Therein resides the motivation behind these many attempts at initiating a theory of this power, under the term of the bonus of seduction or of preliminary pleasure: a theory of pleasure which frequently comes as a bonus to some adjacent development. Thus, in Der Dichter und das Phantasieren (1907),6 the theoretical proposition emerges only as an afterthought in a text which deals primarily with the phantasms of its creator. One feels this mixture of distrust and attraction with which Freud approaches this pleasure (which goes all the way to the pleasure principle and beyond7) made of two types of jouissance: from the bonus of seduction (Verlockungsprämie) produced by formal success, which, in turn, permits ‘veritable’ pleasure, the convergence of several sources of pleasure. First of all, Freud calls upon the creator's technique by which he may overcome the repulsion which causes the phantasm of the other as other. The ars poetica would favour such a process of identification; it works ‘upon limits existing between each ego and the other egos.’8 Formal pleasure – which is linked to representation – would hide and permit the liberation of another pleasure with more profound sources. It is perhaps possible that we, then, return to our own phantasms after having taken the detour by the other, for the ‘assuagement’ of our ‘soul’. Yet if, as Derrida shows, the theory of the bonus of seduction appears to rest primarily on a hedonist ‘thematism’,9 it does not capture – thus the need for a displacement of theory – what no theme or signified can cover, and that is precisely the Unheimliche.

Freud considers the Unheimliche as, at the same time, a ‘domain’ and a ‘concept’, an elastic designation. The fact of the matter is that the ‘domain’ remains indefinite; the concept is without any nucleus: the Unheimliche presents itself, first of all, only on the fringe of something else. Freud relates it to other concepts which resemble it (fright, fear, anguish): it is the one in the ‘family’ that is not really a member of the family. Freud declares that it is certain that the use of the Unheimliche is uncertain. The indefiniteness is part and parcel of the ‘concept’. The statement and its enunciation become rejoined or reunited. The statement cannot be encircled: yet Freud, arguing for the existence of the Unheimliche, wishes to keep to the meaning, the real, the reality of the meaning of things. He thus seeks out ‘the basic meaning’. Thus the analysis is anchored, at once, in denotation. But all the denotation of this concept is connotation.

In the third paragraph, Freud rigorously refocuses on the question of the utility of aesthetics and the medico-psychological disciplines. He underscores the limits of aesthetics which are on the order of repressions and ideological determinations. Aesthetics deals with positive feelings and casts aside contrary sentiments (ugliness as a positive value has scarcely a place in this tradition). Then, there appears the neuro-psychiatric study of E. Jentsch.10 Freud considers it both interesting and disappointing; as an insufficient yet respected precursor, Jentsch will represent, henceforth, the ‘layman's’ attitude, which is ‘intellectual’ and in fact anti-analytical because of its phenomenological approach to strangeness. Freud offers, straightaway, a subjective explanation for Jentsch's failure: he has not sufficiently delved into literature; he concerns himself only with everyday experience. Thus he loses ‘all claim to priority’. Literature is what psychoanalysis wants to interrogate. A hierarchy is created through the system of priorities.

Freud calls upon the not-yet-theorised, notably upon ‘sensibility’, and, more precisely, his own, because it is exemplary and yet different from the average sensibility, being ‘singularly insensitive’ to the Unheimliche. Assuming the personality of ‘the author of this essay’, Freud brings Jentsch into relief here and enters the scene in a double role: actor and ‘mechanician’, analyst and subject of analysis. ‘It is long since he had experienced or heard of anything which had given him an uncanny impression.’11 Put into question by the author's undertaking, the subject that he is becomes a place of astonishment since what was familiar to him is now strange. Things no longer know how to reach him . . . He must, thus, go to them; it is in this way that the scholar, in order to experiment upon himself with the states he is studying, pushes himself forward and comes to life again so that the representation which will stand in for experience may emerge. This provokes a first return of what was lost: the procession of ghosts is furtively inaugurated. Then, as if in reaction to a desired nostos yet which rejects melancholia, Freud reverts from the particular to the universal, or nearly so; he appeals to ‘the majority of men’, to a nearly impossible consensus, as if the Unheimliche were recognised in the same way by everyone. A rather paradoxical hope, one might think, since it is in the nature of the Unheimliche to remain foreign. But the hope should not be repelled. The pathetic dimension of the risk taken in supporting the scientific with the non-scientific recalls the constitutive disjunction in the Unheimliche – between the familiar and the strange – which Freud posits as the cornerstone for his research. Just as the still undetermined Unheimliche benefits from the status of concept, so too is the non-scientific clothed with the dignity of the scientific.

In this equivocal area, in which the author admits that he is the hesitant subject of his enquiry, the text bifurcates toward the choices in method, thus making indecision the occasion of some progress. Bifurcation: ‘Two courses are open to us at the outset.’12 Each produces in a different manner the same result, which starts the process over again; one (linguistic experience) or the other (everyday experience) or the two. From ambivalence to ambivanence, or else language as a general phenomenon, or else the world as a series of particular cases; nevertheless, these two paths are only proposed to us once the choice has been made by Freud and the path already followed. Freud assigns us an inverted order in relation to the one he has followed. After the event, the history of the enquiry presents itself by the other path, as if he had wanted to begin with the undecidable of the Unheimliche, which is lodged in language.

The opposite path

A history of Un: Freud proposes a lexical study, beginning with the point where Jentsch leaves off. Does anything new exist beyond the unfamiliar domain? The psychological viewpoint presented by Jentsch (the Unheimliche as an intellectual uncertainty), the part concerning seeing, knowing, occupies the first stage of the enquiry: the Unheimliche appears as coming from the world toward the subject. Once Jentsch's position has been displaced and set down, what does its language say?

The lexical continuation, a voyage of reference through foreign languages, constitutes a polylinguistic dictionary article. Through such a display of definitions, the world returns, a sampling of everyday experience, of home economics, of domestic problems. And yet . . . this hotchpotch, far from winning us over, this chain of quotations which Heimliche or Unheimliche threads together, appears to us an overlong, delirious discourse in which the world is seen as a deceptive reduction, not without the polymorphic perversity of a ‘child-dictionary’ [dictionnaire-enfant]. The body of articles exhales a dreamlike fog, for all lexical inventories necessarily play on the limit between the literal and figurative meanings. And it is Freud himself who extricates from the confusion the added thing; it is in extremis that the dictionary provides us with the sign: ‘“Unheimliche” is the name for everything that ought to have remained [. . .] hidden and secret and has become visible.’13 Thus, on the one hand, the lexicological undertaking is undermined by the article which also functions as the metaphor of its own scene. On the other hand, Schelling at the end suddenly draws a curtain: ‘everything that ought to have remained [. . .] hidden’. Schelling links the Unheimliche to a lack of modesty. It is only at the end that the sexual threat emerges. But it had always been there, in the coupling itself and in the proliferation of the Heimliche and of the Unheimliche: when the one makes contact with the other, the dictionary ends and closes the history of meaning upon itself, delineating through this gesture the figure of the androgyne. The word joins itself again, and Heimliche and Unheimliche join together, pair up.

At the end of this strange crossing of languages, the Unheimliche can consider itself a part of this myth: from Heimliche to Unheimliche, the meaning reproduces itself as it goes. Where it becomes extinguished, it is rekindled. The opposition has been blunted; the divergence opened just enough space for it to be reclosed. The phoenix reproduces itself. Already Freud's commentary attempts to mitigate the disquieting character of the junction by contriving a sort of dislocation of contraries: a remarkable repugnance to acknowledge the absolute reclosing that takes place. The coincidence of contraries emanates, he claims, from the fact that the Heimliche belongs to two groups of representation which ‘are . . . very different’. This indirectly brings up the question of hierarchy in the dual relationship of two terms: is there an inversion of the Heimliche into the Unheimliche, or else, starting from Heimliche, is there the emergence, through the Unheimliche, of a new concept? Therein, exactly, rests the stake of the pursuit; what, in effect, holds Freud's attention is precisely this something absolutely new spelled out by Schelling with respect to the content of the concept, which, nevertheless, cannot be ‘found’ there, but which slips in by way of the baroque forest of the dictionary, this disturbing domain of the very close, threat of non-distinction.

We recall that, for the reader, Freud employs an approach diametrically opposed to his own: what has finally emerged is sex, as what was ignored at the beginning, since Freud began with sublimation. Two threads have been tied together: a first thread for the ambivalence of meaning, which goes as far as meeting with its opposite; a second thread, which links Schelling's remark: the acknowledgement of lexical ambivalence is thus sexually charged. Freud places his finger on the nodal point. He pulls on the threads and tightens them.

The choice of a happy example

We find ourselves back at the crossroads, and we take the one that goes through the world. Once again, we allude to Jentsch's opinion in order to outstrip it immediately. Instead of a dictionary, we now have the double scene of animated ‘objects’ – Freud's summary of Jentsch's position itself being a lively little scene. The ‘author’ introduces here the preoccupation with the theatre, with everything which the theatre represents as a simulacrum of the living and with the theatricality that can be hidden in life as a tableau. On the stage of the stage [scène de la scène], the relationship between Freud's discovery in the domain of scientific truth and the mechanism of fiction may be brought out. Freud's own text, here, functions in the manner of a fiction: the extended consideration of the ego instincts, the dramatic redistribution upon such and such a path, the suspense and surprises and impasses; all of that ressembles the work specific to fiction, as the ‘author’ takes advantage of the narrator's privileges to which the analyst cannot consent. ‘Better than anyone else’, says Freud, it is the writer who conspires to give birth to the Unheimliche.14 The writer is also what Freud wants to be. Freud sees in the writer the one whom the analyst must interrogate, in literature what psychoanalysis must interrogate in order to know itself. He is, in his relationship to the writer, as the Unheimliche in its relationship with the Heimliche: at the limit: his foreignness with respect to creation wants and feels itself to be ‘a case’ of creation. The enigma of the Unheimliche has a literary answer, claims Freud after Jentsch, and this answer is the most reliable.

Scarcely does he appropriate Jentsch's example (in the manner of children: this doll belonged to me) than he declares himself the true master, his predecessor not having made proper use of it! The way in which he misappropriates betrays a stinging boldness and the ploy of a fox! On the one hand, Freud quotes the citation used by Jentsch, who reads The Sandman beginning with the character of the automaton, the doll Olympia. At the same time, he discards Jentsch's interpretation. The latter links the Unheimliche to the ‘psychological manipulation’ of Hoffmann, which consists in producing and preserving uncertainty with respect to the true nature of Olympia. Is she animate or inanimate? Does Freud reject the psychological argument? Yes. He takes advantage of this to displace the Unheimliche (Jentsch had already shown it to be decentred with regard to the reader's attention, and maintained by the subterfuge of this decentring) from the doll to the Sandman. Thus, under the cover of the analytical critique of uncertainty, the doll which had been relegated to the background is already, in effect, down the trap. Its repression will be accomplished, moreover, with the approval or the complicity of the reader: because Freud, henceforth, puts himself in our care. His real and persistent concern with the reader's point of view, his attention to and his demand for communicability, which proceed from his well-known need to share, to guide, to teach and to justify himself – this pedagogical procedure that we find throughout his discourse – on occasion use the strategy of denial. ‘I hope that most readers will agree with me’, says the orator who takes no risk whatsoever without making an alliance or returning to it.15 The dialogue entered upon with the reader is also a theatrical artifice in which the answer precedes and envelops the question. There is hardly a step to be made from this to categorising without delay the the episode involving Olympia in the genre of satire, thus eclipsing it in the discourse on the Unheimliche. We get sand thrown in our eyes, with no further debate.

Next comes Freud's narration of The Sandman, and the account is faithful (or so it would seem); it is not a paraphrase. Freud delights in the structuring necessity to rewrite the tale, beginning with the centre designated as such a priori. The whole story is recounted then through the Sandman and the tearing-out of eyes. Given the fact that Freud's approach is the inverted repetition of his first work, one sees how he demonstratively rewrites the tale starting from the end: a reading that is reclosed as the Unheimliche closes onto the Heimliche. The reader thus gets the impression that this tale (Freud's tale) is not all that Unheimliche: is the something-new, which should have remained hidden, no doubt too exposed here? Or did Freud render the foreign too familiar? Was the letter stolen? The two versions of The Sandman have to be read in order to notice the slippage from one version to the other. As a condensed narrative, Freud's story is singularly displaced towards Nathaniel's linear, logical story, which is strongly articulated as a kind of ‘case history’, going from childhood remembrances to the delirium and the ultimate tragic end. All through the story, Freud intrudes in various ways: on the one hand to bring the fantastic back to the rational (the Unheimliche to the Heimliche); on the other hand to explicitly establish liaisons which are not conveyed as such in the text. These interventions, in effect, constitute a redistribution of the story while they tend to attenuate, to the point of effacement, the characters who represent the Heimliche, like Clara and her brother, to defuse the uncertainty revolving around Olympia, thus pushing Olympia toward the group of the Heimliche, to diminish the texture of the story by trimming, in particular, the discontinuity of the exposition, the sequence, the succession of narrators and points of view. These interventions thus organise a confrontation between the Sandman and Nathaniel which is much more sustained and obsessive but also less surprising than in the original version. If the reader's eye is applied to the satanic eyeglass of the optician (by Hoffmann, suggests Freud – who attributes many intentions to the ‘author’), the function of the eyeglass as it is replayed by Freud constitutes a disturbing complexity: it seems to eradicate the doubt concerning the author's intention. Does it, indeed, lead us toward real life or toward the fantastic? No more doubt (there is repetition and insistence on Freud's part concerning the rejection of doubt): by a series of abrupt thrusts, Freud jumps from one effect to the other (giving the appearance of going from cause to effect) until reaching ‘the point of certitude’, of reality, which he wishes to establish as the cornerstone upon which he may found his analytical argument. We are obliged to accept this ‘conclusion’ with its retroactive effects, or to get out of this venture without loss. Let us play: at believing that there is a real sequence and not only a semblance of sequence in such a peremptory declaration.16 And let's rely on the logic of ‘consequently’: we will not doubt, as Freud does, that Coppola is Coppelius, thus the Sandman in reality; and we will believe Nathaniel not to be delirious but clairvoyant. Let us be taken by these effects (and also this fictional unity of the reader and the analyst), by this ‘art of interpretation’. But not without keeping the secret desire to unmask what should not have remained hidden in such a selective reading.

Freud pruned the story of its bushy narrative structure, of the heterogeneity of its points of view, of all ‘superfluous’ detail (the ‘operatic’ aspect of the story with its choruses of students and villagers and the retinue of mediations which are more or less useful to the plot), pruned it of all the signifiers that did not seem to contribute to the thematic economy. But should not this cutting in the Hoffmannesque wood (Freud, moreover, complains of excessive thickness) be remarked in its very gesture? For it is indeed a question of cutting [une taille] rather than one of summarising, as if the insistence on the elimination of eyes contaminated the very gaze that ‘operates’ the read text. The role of pantomime, so striking in Hoffmann's story,17 is precisely the element that accounts for the charm of this creative work, this sudden emergence of the stage, this springing from the Erinnerung through the epistolary relation up to the carnival scene, from the interiority of subjects to their externment, this reduplication of an ordinary reality by an extraordinary one (which prohibits reading the story exclusively in one or the other worlds, which obliges the reader to move from one to the other side and in fact has no use for the real-imaginary axis), this superb excretion is frankly expelled by Freud. Which accounts for the debatable indictment of intellectual uncertainty which leads him to dance between psychology and psychoanalysis. The rambling demonstrativity turns back attentively to what is at stake, and reflects Freud's discomfort. Who decrees, for example, that the uncertainty regarding such and such a point is not as uncertain as all that: Coppola = Coppelius. But this is done by paronomasia. Rhetoric does not create the real. To perceive identities is reassuring. But what about perceiving ‘incomplete’ identities? In his reduction of ‘intellectual’ ‘uncertainty’ to a rhetorical uncertainty, Freud is playing on lexical velvet: because Jentsch's vocabulary comes from psychology, Freud allows himself the possibility of completely excluding this uncertainty insofar as it would be ‘intellectual’. When the Unheimliche represses the Jentschian motif, is there not, in fact, a repression of the repression? Does not Jentsch say more than what Freud wishes to read?

Eyes in one's pockets

It is up to us to read in its ambiguity Freud's phrase and what it censures: ‘This rapidly related story leaves no doubt.’18 Do we understand this to refer to Hoffmann's story or the rapidly-related-story? But it is precisely the related-story in its rapidness that displaces and assigns doubt. We must think of the ‘story thought’ as a deformation of the text's thought [pensée du texte], just as one speaks of the dream thoughts: Freud ‘relates’, in fact, just as he translates the rebus of the dream by reducing the visible dimension. His elaboration begins, in reality, from a conclusion which returns the analysis to an always intra-analytical circle. This is a conclusion that cuts two ways: (1) the expulsion of ‘intellectual uncertainty’, which allows him to impose an analytical interpretation, and to eclipse Olympia and focus on Nathaniel. (2) Freud takes from the Sandman the fear of becoming blind and what this substitutes for, so that the Sandman is in turn eclipsed by the reductive equation: Sandman = loss of eyes (yet it is not so simple as this). Thus, in one stroke, the two great and extraordinary figures are ousted, and with them, Hoffmann's theatre: one half of the textual body is eliminated. Only the eyes remain: Freud's terrain is now less mobile; we are on territory which is very much reinforced by observations and theoretical knowledge (‘to learn’, ‘learned’): on the one hand, the fear of the loss of sight is a fact of daily experience which clichés underscore; it is a familiar terror. Moreover, examination of three formations of the unconscious (dreams, phantasms, myths) shows that this fear hides another, that of castration. Oedipus, who is summoned briefly here, gives testimony that enucleation is an attenuation of castration. And castration – enucleation – Oedipus assert themselves here within the same theoretical boundaries, without our being sure of their relative position in the whole they constitute. If there is an articulation, the accent is placed on castration more than on Oedipus; analysis of the Unheimliche can thus pass for an analysis of the nuclear Oedipus-castration question. Freud, moreover, has not elaborated anything directly concerning the complex Oedipus-castration articulation. It is the castration complex that leads the boy to liquidate his Oedipus: the castration complex functions as an interdiction; it ‘intervenes’ directly in the Oedipean neucleus, but is it intervention or articulation? Freud starts from the fear the boy experiences of seeing his penis removed: we should thus examine this principle, and the fact that Freud never abandoned (or wanted to abandon) the sexual character of castration; we should likewise examine here the return to the father which the castration myth implies. In point of fact, the entire analysis of the Unheimliche must be (madly un-read [dé-lire]) perceived (we shall see this more and more clearly) as marked by Freud's resistance to castration, its effectuation and its beyond.

For Freud, castration must make of its own enigma a law: ‘enucleation is nothing but an attenuation of castration’:19 how can we reinforce this affirmation which Freud soon recognises as contestable ‘from a rational point of view’? Indeed, one might reverse the terms (castration as an attenuation . . .) or make them equivalent: enucleation or castration. Freud, then, leaves one non-proof for another, by affirming that the secret of castration does not refer to another secret more profound than that which is articulated by the anxiety: the fear of castration refers back to castration and, at the very least or most, to its process of substitution (the relationship of substitution, Ersatzbeziehung, of the penis for the eye and of other organs20). Kein tieferes Geheimnis: ‘no secret anymore profound’, says Freud: the ‘very obscure sentiment’ of resistance to the threat of castration is the same for all of the presentations of the loss of an organ. Freud's theoretical work is concerned with the quality of the fear. Attention is thus focused on this strong and obscure sentiment which is the strangeness of the anxiety [l’étrange de l'inquiétude]: the lure of the enigmatic.

What lies on the other side of castration? ‘No meaning’ other than the fear of (resistance to) castration. It is this no-other-meaning (Keine andere Bedeutung) which presents itself anew (despite our wish to outplay it) in the infinite game of substitutions, through which what constitutes the elusive moment of fear returns and eclipses itself again. This dodging from fear to fear, this ‘mask’ that masks nothing, this merry-go-round of fear that leads to fear ‘is’ the unthinkable secret since it does not open onto any other meaning: its ‘agitation’ (Hoffmann would say ‘Unruhe’) is its affirmation. Even here, isn't everything a repercussion, a discontinuous spreading of the echo, but of the echo as a displacement, and not in any way referring to some transcendent signified? It is from the having-a-place as a place that the strangeness-effect resonates (rather than emerges), the relational signifier that is the Unheimliche. A relational signifier: the Unheimliche is in fact a composite that infiltrates the interstices and affirms the gaps where we would like to join things up. This is what Freud underscores with a kind of relentlessness in the guise of urgent questions which are in fact tantamount to emphatic propositions: yet the ‘question’ why (a mask for because) obligates the theory to account for the ‘arbitrary’ characteristics of the story. What then appears as a shadow of the Freudian argument is the ‘arbitrary’ requirement concerning meaning: a relation of reciprocal guarantee sets up, here, its mirroring effect. The hypothesis aimed at filling the gaps (these ‘become filled with meaning’) derives from a refusal to admit the insignificance of certain characteristics. Without this hypothesis, the narrative would be castrated. The fear of castration comes to the rescue of the fear of castration.

As a result of the statement of propositions (the link with the death of the father; the link with the trammels of love; the assertion of the arbitrary nature of propositions opposed to his own), by way of the adjectivation of infantile that qualifies the castration complex, the doll and its double are reintroduced. Olympia, adult ‘doll’, the object of Nathaniel's desire, and the doll, the little girls’ toy, serve as a guarantee for the adjective infantile. Freud initiates a development here concerning childhood: any symptom, slip, dream has a forked branch which encounters a childhood experience or event. The subject, ‘one’, cites the case of an eight-year-old girl (patient) who thought that her ‘concentrated’ gaze would be able to bring dolls to life. In this example, the three effects of desire intersect: the hysterico-magical attitude (the gaze can produce an effect of direct action); the ‘concentrated’ eye, the eye-penis; and the doll that is secretly alive.21 This example brings up again the Doll motif as well as the debate on the Jentsch-Freud split. Freud underscores the displacement of fear onto the child's desire or belief that the doll is alive. (But Nathaniel is not ‘afraid’ of Olympia.) That is something that appears contradictory. Upon which, the chapter's research ends with a theoretical and novelistic suspension (we shall understand it ‘later on’). From the time the doll makes its appearance, the story moves in an oblique fashion and runs away. The doll is not, however, relegated to some more profound place than that of a note [footnote], a typographical metaphor of repression, always too near but nevertheless negligible.

Note to Olympia; or the other story of the Sandman

In the form of a note, Freud effectively gives us a second narrative which is only ‘reconstituted’, a primitive, originary narrative, closer to the interpretation of a case than to the displacement imposed by the creator's imagination on these elements.22 It is no longer a question here of The Sandman, but rather of its analytical version. Coppelius is designated here as the dreaded father. Freud brings out the structure of a myth, whose functioning is analogous to that at work in the neuroses. This Sand-Man is also a surreptitious rereading of the Wolf-Man (with a few elements borrowed from the Rat-Man): the function of Nathaniel's maid, and of the Wolf-Man's Nanya; the father decomposed into old father and new father, a God-pig and tender father; a re-edition of the father by the Latin professor, Mr Wolf (son of son-filius-daughter) and by Spalanzani. To be sure, the analogy has no scientific value, but it is certainly the citations of this story which colour the rest of this analysis (though Freud does not refer back to Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre23). The filigreed presence of these cases allows Freud to accelerate his argument and justify the apparent ‘imprudence’. It follows that if in the ordering of this new text, a dismembered, tightened-up and reassembled Olympia takes on a new importance, she is, at once, recuperated by the interpretation: ‘she can be nothing else than a personification of Nathaniel's feminine attitude toward his father in his infancy’, says Freud. To be sure! Homosexuality returns in reality under this charming figure. But Olympia is more than just a complex detached from Nathaniel that presents itself to him in the form of a person. If she is no more than that, why are not the dance, the song, the mechanisms and the artificer brought back into the game on this occasion or theorised by Freud? What are we expected to do with these marionettes which have haunted the stages of German romanticism?24

Again, the beautiful Olympia is effaced by what she represents, for Freud has no eyes for her. This woman appears obscene because she emerges there where ‘one’ did not expect her to appear, and she thus causes Freud to take a detour. And what if the doll became a woman? What if she were alive? What if, in looking at her, we animated her?

Put away, removed from the scene, the doll exits . . . between two acts.

Re-birth and story of the double

Make way for another adventure: Freud tells us now a ‘surprising story’, that of the birth and evolution of the Double, the product and mask of castration. This fantastic story takes place on several stages simultaneously, in a spatio-temporal emancipation worthy of fiction. ‘The author who enjoys much freedom also possesses the freedom to select at will the theatre of his fictional action’, says Freud with respect to the envied creator.25 At this moment, Freud has these freedoms at his disposal: he keeps his text in these indistinct and libidinous regions where the light of the law does not yet impose its logic and where description, the plural Hypothesis and all the pre-theoretical mental games are given free reign. This story of the Double resembles the novel of ‘the unequalled master’ of the Unheimliche which presents ‘a mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect . . .’ The whole (novel, story) is ‘too intricate’ and confused for us to attempt to take out an excerpt.26 What does the disconcerted reader do? He ‘selects’ the most salient themes in order to seek out what he hopes to find. And what about the rest? One pulls a thread. The tapestry remains. Freud, then, satisfies his desire always governed by an economy of ‘confusion’, of abundance: the Unheimliche displays its branches, its enigmas and apparitions there against a historical-mythical backdrop. First cluster: the network of the manifestations of the double; ‘telepathy’, identification of the one with the other, replacement of the foreign ego by the proper ego, cleavage, substitution, redoubling of the self and, finally, the recurrent return of what is similar (this last trait is underscored as an end by Freud), repetition of the same traits, characteristics and destinies, etc. Second cluster: researchers of the double: Otto Rank, Hoffmann, Freud, the psychoanalyst, the ‘vulgar’ psychologist, the literary inventor, the poet Heine, a series of questions and enquiries which may be traced back to prehistorical times to a foundation of gods and demons. A mythic anthropology is outlined. Third cluster: a series of anecdotal examples which are literary, biographical, tales or remembrances and mini-stories within the story. These three clusters, which are made up of unusual and scattered elements, are recombined in a great disorder of meanings through points of intersection and attraction which appear frequently to be ordered by chance. Nevertheless, they are crystallised through contact with the fourth cluster, which lends intrigue to the entire story. The fourth cluster: each theme is the double (or the other side) of another theme; the primitive soul refers back to the figuration of dream language, to Egyptian art, to the child's soul by a system of metaphors or representations which psychoanalysis articulates: the ‘algebraic sign’, the Unheimliche is that which masks ‘the unlimited egotism’ and primary narcissism. But as a changing sign, it passes from the affirmation of survival to the announcement of death. As an ‘anticipatory sign’ the uncanny alludes to the death drive (as this entire text is a forerunner of Jenseits des Lustprinzips) within which the reinforcement of life by the Double is replaced by the pulsation of cancellation, of the discharge. So too the text is reinforced, redoubled, discharged; it pivots and becomes a forerunner of itself.

Implicit in this analysis of the silent language of death, the theme of childhood, diversified in a primary narcissism, initiates the historical development of the ego: the history of the ego is inscribed in the history of the theme as if it were facing it. The text pierces through the under-growth: as involved and intertwined as it is, it constantly points to other paths and brings up other questions. A cortege of differed problems accompanies it, such as the allusion to pathological delirium, the reference to Egypt, etc. The historicity of the ego, which tempts Freud, corresponds to its differentiation in two instances; historically the double feeds on the offspring cast off from the ego by the critical instance; an incorporation whose phantasm gives rise, in its turn, to the metaphor of a disquieting consummation: the Double thus also absorbs the unrealised eventualities of our destiny which the imagination refuses to let go [démordre]. While this ego, envisaged from a theoretical point of view and staged by the descriptive point of view, leads back to the Lacanian imaginary by all that is lodged there, it produces above all, in the reading, the ghostly figure of nonfulfilment and repression: not the double, look-alike or reflection, but rather the doll that is neither alive nor dead, and impossible. Expelled, but why?

Admission of failure: there is nothing in all that Freud says which explains the effort to defend the ego and the Double's exile. A hypothesis leads us back to phylogenetic positions, as Freud studys psychoanalytical ‘themes’ through the collective historical trajectory, at the level of race. There is a winding around the Double which seems to be ‘decorated’ with a new kind of provocation: this time, it is the extraordinary degree of the Unheimliche which escapes us, an overbid [surenchérie] Unheimliche. Still another zigzag, another disorder of the ego, and once again it is Hoffmann who is linked, this time, to the ensemble of anxieties. Fiction resists and returns, Hoffmann more and more distinctly becomes Freud's double (through cleavage, through substitution?). Everything occurs, then, as if Hoffmann, in coming back, incited Freud to produce a kind of fiction: two or three short tales punctuate the long development on the repetition of the same, the crowning case of the Unheimliche. Repetition is regulated by what ‘should not have been’ repeated. In the first biographical tale, Freud shows himself in a typical movement of denial: offering himself to view, he covers himself with language, with a modesty, which uncovers him comically: the psychoanalyst psychoanalysed in the psychoanalysis he develops.

The first story

Freud begins: ‘Once . . . on a hot summer afternoon . . .’27 in a style that oscillates between realistic narration and analytic deviation; uncertainty quarrels with certainty. ‘I could not long remain in doubt’ regarding the kind of neighborhood, says Freud. But for the reader, doubt alights here and there, touches the made-up women (dolls?) and Freud's wanderings – in obsessive returns. One more return and instead of the distress which Freud claims to have experienced, it is the irresistible comedy of Mark Twain that breaks out. Question: how many repetitions are necessary before distress turns into comedy? The ‘degree’ of repetition supposes a whole reflection that Freud scrupulously refrains from undertaking: he wants to remain sexually on this side of ridicule . . . It's a missed castration opportunity!

The second story

The return of number 62. ‘You’ is the wretched hero of this story of series. This banal evocation of the little mysteries of everyday experience shows how an inanimate number can become an evil spirit. The number 62, in its returns, functions as an evil master of time. ‘You’ will be tempted to ascribe some meaning to it: here, the function of strangeness becomes complicated by this mediation of the number. The world repeats (and not the ego as in the preceding story). Freud adheres to chance insomuch as chance would be a kind of analytical concretisation. What meaning would you attribute to 62? If you are not ‘steeled’ against superstition, you will understand the temptation of meaning: ‘you’. Especially if you have been born in 1856 and if you are writing in 1919 a text which the death drive haunts, then you will be the reprieved author, who flees the announcement of his end, masked by a you where the I identifies with the reader. Freud is palming off his own death on us, and the reader has become the substitute; and isn't the one who has lived a year beyond the age foreseen for his own disappearance in some way a ghost [revenant]?

After which, you, Freud, you slip back once again under the analyst Freud, and while the threat of 62 moves away again, the primary process which it had replaced on the stage reappears.

An exchange of subterranean journeys. The pleasure principle and its beyond enforce their disquieting reigns: a sudden projection to front stage of the dominant, blind and deaf repetition compulsion, the most intimate of psychological impulses (that is to say, the most archaic and secret doll). The devil, the playing child and the neurotic, sufficiently insufficiently conscious, touch one another, as good transmitters of the Unheimliche. The text becomes knotty, and stops. It is cut. A desire for the indisputable: you need something certain, says Freud. And he cites, again, either out of remorse or compulsion, another even more doubtful, mythological and veiled story: ‘The Ring of Polycrates’ or ‘He who is too happy should fear the envy of the gods’.

This is a beautiful example of the silent ‘dialogue’ with death which claims its due; that is to say, always the exchange with life itself, with the most alive.

At this moment Freud puts up the greatest resistance to his own discovery: he defers, backs up, regresses or stalls for time in the research; takes another detour (recalls the history of the Rat-Man). Thus through intersections derived from mythological and clinical studies running from the most commonplace to the most theoretical, and through a bizarre range of examples, the strange nether empire spreads out.

Let us return to the eye by way of the Evil Eye in a reading caught between superstition and ophthalmology. Once again, the threads become knotted: the thread of superstition, the clinical thread and the thread of analytical explication. I project onto the other my desire to do harm and his eye returns it to me; it is thus that the ‘evil eye’ of the text looks at us furtively from the deepest recesses of our story as we defend our omnipotence, our unlimitedness against the threat of reality. In the time when men were gods, in the time of ‘animism’.

The unconscious psychic activity appears to be derived from primitive animism. Associated with narcissism, animism reintroduces the Double. Freud does not come out of the system of the Unheimliche because no one comes out of it: one sees with a strange eye the journey completed by a return-repetition to the lexicon in an exact representation of the first lexical circuit. The foreigner is the neighbour, the Heimliche passes imperceptibly28 to the Unheimliche, which is the intimate of intimacy, the ‘true’ intimacy. We take up the sequence, again checking on the strength of the knots: resemblance does not inspire fright if it does not proceed from itself in spite of itself. Thus the double becomes exteriorised not only as anguish but as a return of anguish. Narcissus is decked out in anguish. The Unheimliche transforms itself into Unheimliche. The repressed Unheimliche shows up again in the form of the Unheimliche.

Is this repetition? Yes, but displaced by Freud in the same circle grown tighter and tighter toward a decentred and receding target. Insistent: in the same way, it is the insistence of the Heimliche which provokes the Unheimliche. Insistence of the familiar with time gives rise to the strange. Unheimliche: the intensity of a vibration which passes over to (rather than causes) the return of the same. What made this Unheimliche ‘other’, which is not to say new or foreign, is simply the process of repression. The vibration that changes the burden of the signs, the intensification of the real that produces fiction.

Are all men mortal?

‘[. . .] the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation.’29 The direct figure of the uncanny is the Ghost [Revenant]. The Ghost is the fiction of our relationship to death, concretised by the spectre and in literature. The relationship to death produces the highest degree of the Unheimliche. There is nothing more notorious and foreign to our thought than mortality. There is a dazzling chapter on disputed death, on the failure of death to serve as an instrument of moral order and public authority; death veiled by an ideological belief in the hereafter.

Why would death have this power? Because of its alliance with scientific uncertainty and primitive thought. ‘Death’ does not have any form in life. Our unconscious makes no place ‘for the representation of our mortality’. As an impossible representation, death is that which mimes, by this very impossibility, a reality of death. It goes even further. Signifier without signified. Absolute secret, absolutely new, which should remain hidden, because if it shows itself to me, it means that I am dead: only the dead know the secret of death. Death will know us, but we shall not know it.

At this juncture, the text only continues in starts; who is the one who could weave the texture of death? The theory, which is violently thrust aside by the irreducible character of the Unheimliche, turns as it hesitates and gives way in the face of the inexplicable body of the Unheimliche. Nothing is new, everything always returns, except death. Why are we still very much afraid of the dead? Freud asks. It is because, he says, ‘the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor’.30 If he returns, it is to carry you away (you, the credulous reader or the subtle thinker at the end of your life) to his ‘new existence’, into his abode (this Heimliche, this mortal country where no metaphor, meaning or image enters). In order to carry you away: it is always a question of displacement, the insidious movement, through which opposites communicate. It is the between that is tainted with strangeness. Everything remains to be said on the subject of the Revenant and the ambiguity of the Return, for what renders it intolerable is not so much that it is an announcement of death, nor even the proof that death exists, since this Ghost announces and proves nothing more than its return. What is intolerable is that the Ghost erases the limit which exists between two states: neither alive nor dead, passing through, the dead one returns in the manner of the repressed. It is this coming back which makes the revenant what it is, just as it is the return of the repressed that (re)inscribes the repression. In the end, death is never anything more than the blurring [trouble] of the limit. To die is the impossible. To be dead: absolute uncertainty. If all which has been lost returns, as Freud showed it in the Traumdeutung, nothing is ever lost; if everything is replaceable, nothing has ever disappeared; nothing is ever sufficiently dead; the relationship of presence to absence is in itself an immense system of ‘death’, a fabric riddled by the real and a phantomisation of the present. Since a very small quantity of presence can substitute itself for or be the equivalent of an existence, life in concrete reality can recede up to the void.31 Olympia is not inanimate. The strange power of death moves in the realm of life as the Unheimliche in the Heimliche, as the void fills up the lack.

Before death's invasion (which the analyst, ‘the man of science at the end of his own life’, cannot master by theory but which he frustrates by a complex strategy with dodges and thrusts), Freud invokes a screen of traditional defence: men's ‘responses’ to death are all tainted with the order of the Establishment, of ideological institutions (religion, politics). This is the evolution from primitive animism to the moral order.

Still another knot of examples: will the weaving of references never end? Freud proceeds with excuses and additions: one more; this is the last; another instant; that is not enough. A direct anguish emanates from these incessant additions. The text does not want to give up; the argument becomes anxious, reaffirms itself, is doubled up with additional layers. Thus, quickly, another knot: the one who casts the evil eye, plus epilepsy, plus madness, plus the Middle Ages and demonology, plus the diabolicalism of the person (Mephistopheles) and the difficult patient; and I am skipping some; ‘dismembered limbs, a severed head . . . feet which dance by themselves’.32 Still another example, and at the same time the metaphor of this great gathering in which members form a unity which is always disjointed since each preserves an independent activity. A heap. But in the end the figure of a body of examples emerges, but without ‘revealing’ itself, a figure of figures, a body which returns to its dislocation. It is this ‘body’ which Freud ‘crowns’ (by the crown, there is reference to a head that is not there) with the supremely disquieting idea: the phantasm of the person buried alive: his (absent) textual head, shoved back into the maternal body, a horrible voluptuousness. Thus the Unheimliche that enters head first into the Heimliche, an inverse birth.

Liebe ist Heimweh

Love is a yearning for a lost country [mal du pays], according to popular wisdom. Heimweh: a yearning for a lost country, is a formulation which is always interrupted [coupée] by the interpretation which reads ‘regret’ or ‘desire’ for mal. But this mal is also the evil that the country did to you. Which country? The one from which we come, ‘the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning’. The country from which we come is always the one to which we are returning. You are on the return road which passes through the country of children, the maternal body. You have already passed through here: you recognise the landscape. You have always been on the return road. Why is it that the maternal landscape, the heimisch, the familiar becomes so disquieting? The answer is less buried than we might suspect. The obliteration of any separation, the realisation of the desire which in itself obliterates a limit; all that which, in effecting the movement of life in reality, allows us to come closer to a goal, above all at the end of your life, everything that overcomes, abridges, economises and promotes satisfaction, appears to affirm the life forces: all of this has another face turned toward death which is the detour of life. The abbreviating effect which affirms life affirms death.

The fantasy of the person buried alive represents the confusion of death and life: death within life, life in death, non-life in non-death. And what about castration? It is the notch and also the other of the buried-alive person: a bit too much death in life; a bit too much life in death, at the merging intersection. There is no recourse to an inside/outside. You are still there. There is no reversal, of one term into another. Hence the horror: you could be dead while living, you can be in a dubious state.

What is proper to the blurring [trouble] of the limit is this threatening mobility, the arbitrariness of the displacement against which repression reacts. ‘The prefix Un is the token of repression’, says Freud.33 Let us add this: any analysis of the Unheimliche is in itself an Un, a mark of repression and the dangerous vibration of the Heimliche. Unheimliche is only the other side of the repetition of Heimliche and this repetition is two-faced: that which emerges and/is that which is repelled. The same is true for the text which pushes forth and repels itself until it reaches an arbitrary end [terme]. (The Unheimliche has no end, but the text must necessarily stop somewhere.) And this ‘conclusion’ starts up again and offers itself as a recurrence and as a reserve.

Will there be an end to theoretical hesitation?

If the analysis has oscillated, because of its appeal to examples, between ‘life’ and ‘books’, it is because of the difference which exists between the Unheimliche we encounter and the one we imagine. Because a doubling is represented at all times, an ‘important distinction’ which is only clearly perceived in the articulation of literature and life: the doubling of the repressed and of the overcome. The Unheimliche of the Repressed would be linked to the resurgence of infantile urges brought on by threats and danger. These are representations which are repressed, that is to say a psychic reality. Material reality has no hold on representations (the fantasies of the maternal body and the castration complex).

The other type of Unheimliche, the Overcome, has the same primitive root as the Repressed, and then bifurcates: it would seem that in ancient times we had an animistic thought which vanished when confronted by material reality. To overcome does not mean to expel: new convictions are sometimes overwhelmed by a return of the old beliefs which a real fact – such and such extraordinary coincidence – seems to confirm. But when it ‘returns’, we see it reappear without the anguish which the returning urge produces, and the test of reality always defuses it once again.

This distinction redoubles another distinction which manifests it, but while cutting across it: that between life and fiction, not separated, but interchanged.

The Overcome can become frightening in fiction. In return, fiction can cancel out the Repression of the psychic content. The strangeness of the repressed and the strangeness of the overcome exchange their operations and their effects in the exchange which takes place between life and fiction (to such a point that Freud calls to our attention the impossibility of distinguishing them ‘clearly’ in real life). Their limits intermingle. The distinction that is made is itself a product of fiction.

This last development would nevertheless be clear enough, if Freud had not retroactively brought doubt back up again, recalling it to the very points from which he seemed to have dislodged it. The entire body of examples is shaken by it. Doubt, too, is doubtful; we have never sufficiently chased it off. It is never sufficiently certain. If the Unheimliche can't hold it's own, in reality, under the influence of facts, it may reap some disquieting virtue, but it keeps more to itself. In fiction, the Unheimliche, free from the test of reality, has supplementary resources.

Toward a theory of fiction

Fiction is connected to life's economy by a link as undeniable and ambiguous as that which passes from the Unheimliche to the Heimliche: it is not unreal; it is the ‘fictional reality’, the vibration of reality. The Unheimliche in fiction overflows and comprises the Unheimliche of real life. But if fiction is another form of reality, it is understood that the secret of the Unheimliche does not refer to a secret more profound than that of the Unheimliche which envelops the Unheimliche, just as death overflows life.

What is fiction in reality? This is a question which haunts the outskirts of the Freudian text, but without entering it. Freud writes: ‘What is uncanny about fiction, imagination, poetry, deserves a separate examination.’ Further on: ‘Fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny sensations than are possible in real life.’34 The analysis returns to another object, the one which it has come up against unceasingly without ever exhausting it: fiction. It is not merely a question here of examining the enigma of the Unheimliche but also of the enigma of fiction as such, and of fiction in its privileged relationship to the Unheimliche. Fiction (re)presents itself, first of all, as a reserve or suspension of the Unheimliche; for example, in the world of fairy tales the unbelievable is never disquieting because it has been cancelled out by the convention of the genre. Fictional reality, then, is interrupted. The effect can be multiplied by the interruption in the contract between author and reader, a ‘revolting’ procedure on the author's part, which leaves us to wander until the end, without any defence against the Unheimliche. This is only possible provided the Overcome is never completely overcome. The impossible could then represent itself as the possible (let us distinguish here between absence in reality through impossibility and absence through death). The impossible is not death, and death is not impossible. For Freud, the variations of the Overcome only stem, in fact, from mystification. A false death. The true secret of fiction rests somewhere else.

Fiction, through the invention of new forms of Unheimliche, is thevery strange : if one considers the Unheimliche as a fork of which one branch points in the direction of the strange and the other in the direction of frightening, one sees, at the extreme end of the strange, fiction pointing toward the unknown: the newest new, through which it is in league with death.

As a Reserve of the Repressed, fiction is finally that which resists analysis and, thus, attracts it the most. Only the writer (‘knows how’) has the ‘freedom’ to evoke or inhibit the Unheimliche, in other words to give rise to or repress Repression. But this ‘freedom’ remains unanalysable; it is another (unique?) form of the Unheimliche where what should have ‘remained [. . .] hidden’ does not escape the law of representation, mysterious to all but itself.

From our point of view, as unflaggingly disquieted readers, we cannot help but think that Freud has hardly anything to envy in Hoffmann for his ‘art or craftiness’ in provoking the Unheimliche effect. This is of course not always the case. If we experience uneasiness in reading Freud's essay, it is because the author is his double in a game that cannot be dissociated from the edge of his own text: he is there, he gets away, at every turn of phrase. It is also and especially because the Unheimliche refers [renvoie] to no more profound secret than itself: every pursuit produces its own cancellation, every text dealing with death is a dead text which returns. The repression of death or of castration writes death (or castration) everywhere. To speak death is to die. To speak castration is either to overcome it (thus to cancel it, to castrate it) or to effect it. ‘Basically’ Freud's adventure in this text is dedicated to the very paradox of the writing which stretches its signs in order to ‘manifest’ the secret that it ‘contains’ [contenu-détenu], and that always overflows it(self) mortally. As for ‘solitude, silence, and darkness’, which have always been there since childhood, ‘we can say nothing’, says Freud, except their permanence. Similarly, of the Unheimliche, and of its double, fiction, we can say nothing. Only this: that it never completely disappears . . . that it ‘re-presents’ that which in solitude, silence and darkness will (never) be presented to us. Neither real nor fictitious, ‘fiction’ is a secretion of death, an anticipation of non-representation, a hybrid body composed of language and silence that, in the movement which turns it and which it turns, as a doll, invents doubles, and death.35

Translated by Robert Denommé (revised by Eric Prenowitz)

Notes

1.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ [1919], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 219–56; ‘Das Unheimliche’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1999), pp. 229–68.

2.

The standard French translation of das Unheimliche is l'inquiétante étrangeté, which itself might be translated into English as ‘disquieting strangeness’. The standard English translation of das Unheimliche is ‘the uncanny’.

3.

E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Sandman [Der Sandmann].

4.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 230.

5.

Cf. ibid., p. 251.

6.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Der Dichter und das Phantasieren’ [1908 (1907)], Gesammelte Werke, vol.7 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1999), pp. 213–23; ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, S.E., vol. IX (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 141–53.

7.

‘Das Unheimliche’ first appeared in Imago, 5 (1919). Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in May 1920, but was written, according to Freud, in 1919. Note the relationship of composition-publication of these two texts. Together, they form a chiasma: they refer to each other. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ [1920], S.E., vol. XVIII (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 1–64. [HC]

8.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Der Dichter und das Phantasieren’, p. 223.

9.

Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘La Double Séance’, La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 249; and ‘Hors livre’, ibid., p. 66. [HC]

10.

Cited by Freud in ‘The Uncanny’, p. 219; the study appeared in 1906. Freud's singular relation to his fascinating predecessor: it would seem, despite appearances, that the Unheimliche has something to do with intellectualness. [HC]

11.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 220.

12.

Ibid., p. 220.

13.

Ibid., p. 224. Freud is here citing Schelling [ed.]. Freud's text is riddled with linguistic patterns, which are sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden. Cf. note 35, pp. 39–40, ‘Translating the Unheimliche’ [in this volume] [HC]

14.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 227.

15.

Ibid., p. 227.

16.

Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 230: ‘For the conclusion of the story makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really is the lawyer Coppelius and also, therefore, the Sandman. – There is no question therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty here . . .’ [HC]

17.

And in all of Hoffmann's stories, always constructed around a double scene (see The Princess Brambilla,An Evening with Don Juan, Kreisleriana, etc.). [HC]

18.

Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 230.

19.

Ibid., p. 231: there is a ‘substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ’.

20.

Cf. Sandor Ferenczi, Sex in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1950), Chapter 10: ‘Symbolism’. [HC]

21.

Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 233. [HC]

22.

Ibid., pp. 232–3. [HC]

23.

Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1950).

24.

A heritage transmitted by Goethe (Faust I and II) from the medieval Puppenspiel, and replayed, up to the very obliteration of the notion of the imaginary, by Kleist, by Hoffmann, between philosophy and delirium to the point of a meeting of several languages: that of the eyes, that of memory, that of body, that of enigma, that of silence (en voir the echo engraved by Hans Bellmer). [HC]

25.

Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 249.

26.

Cf. ibid., pp. 233–4.

27.

Cf. ibid., p. 237.

28.

It is this imperceptible passage, too slow and too rapid, that Poe inscribes everywhere, and whose impossible history he attempts to note down. [HC]

29.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 242.

30.

Ibid., p. 242.

31.

This is the problem of sublimation and substitution: is there such a thing as the unsubstitutable? This question arises in many ways in the following pages. [HC]

32.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 244.

33.

Ibid., p. 245.

34.

Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 249.

35.

In the French edition, the following note is appended to the essay:

Translating the Unheimliche

Concerning this semantic analysis, a remark must be made about the impossibility of ‘translating’ the word Unheimliche into French. An impossibility that is not, in my opinion, the simple and customary obstacle to all translation, which always divides a displaced text into translated + non-translated. To translate is to bring over as best one can from one code to another a certain ideality of meaning; to transfer an intact kernel into another signifying web. But in this case I wonder if the transplantation has worked: in the place of the Unheimlichkeit, we have a ‘inquiétante étrangeté’ [‘frightening strangeness’, ‘disturbing foreignness’ . . .], which does not fail to disturb me. The French therefore operates the Unheimlichkeit through syntax [in French the adjective generally follows the noun]. This articulation is – in fact – already a kind of defence: we are not ‘receptive’ (neither is Freud, he reminds us) to this type of dread. It is not familiar to us. In other words, we repress it, because it is more foreign than familiar, too foreign, too threatening, perhaps. What I am saying can only be supported by a vast analysis, which would be out of place here, but which would make us reflect on the relations between French thought and the cogito, and the truth, etc., of the history of the cogito and of its influence in France. The fact that the critique of truth – by philosophy and psychoanalysis – was first produced elsewhere than in France is not surprising for whoever perceives the repressive power of logocentrism on our soil. This power is much more significant [prégnante] and durable than for our German or Anglo-Saxon neighbours. It is no coincidence that there is no fantastic literature in France (the traces one can find are infiltrations of the German fantastic). Very generally, we do not like worry, fright, confusion, decentring: this is also why it is so difficult to imagine a ‘French humour’. Ours is the ‘old irony’ that monarchises and does not make things slip. The Germans have wandering, failure, doubt that we have subjugated, with Descartes, to the majesty of our thought. For French thought, there is nothing exterior to reason that reason cannot reappropriate. This is why – famously – the French reader is resistant to the works of the German Romantics, who were only appreciated by their kin, Nerval or Artaud. A sociological analysis of reading and intellectual production (in France and elsewhere) would lead us very far. In particular, the whole history of psychoanalysis would be curiously illuminated.

Note that, with the survey of translations he undertakes in diverse languages, Freud stresses that ‘in many languages a word designating this particular nuance of the frightful is lacking’. He cites examples from Latin, Greek, English, French and Spanish. And he adds that Italian and Portuguese seem to be content with words that we would call periphrases. In Arabic and Hebrew, unheimliche is confused with the demonic, the horrible. ‘Let us return, therefore, to the German language’. ‘Therefore’? It is a bizarre effect of scientific scrupulousness that makes interest fall back on the German language. Which makes us question: (1) Freud's decision to circumscribe the analysis to the German field, and nothing more; (2) the relation to be established between the manifestation of the Unheimlichkeit and language.

How can we avoid suspecting Freud of undertaking little strategic operations where Jentsch, and the dictionaries, bother him a bit. The Unheimlichkeit having to do – after all – with symbolicity. [HC]