The concept as ghost: Conceptualization of the uncanny in late-twentieth-century theory.

Ongoing conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny (das Unheimliche) in the late twentieth century is marked by the ambiguity that prevails in current theoretical and critical movements. The complexity of the conceptualization is briefly demonstrated in this essay with reference to deconstructive architecture.

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In one of her most recent texts, "Crossroad Theory and Travelling Concepts," leading theorist Mieke Bal makes a passionate plea for the study of concepts as one of the main tasks for cultural analysis. In her view, concepts are more than mere tools for analysis. As a basis for scientific dialogue, they guarantee intersubjectivity, provided that they are used with care and consideration:

Concepts are the tools for intersubjectivity but only on the condition that they are explicit, clear, defined in such a way that everyone can take them up and use them. Every concept is part of a framework, a systematic set of distinctions--not of oppositions--that can sometimes be bracketed or even ignored, but never transgressed or contradicted without serious damage to the analysis at hand. Concepts, or those words that outsiders consider jargon, can be tremendously productive. They help articulate an understanding, convey an interpretation, check an imagination run wild, enable discussion on the basis of common terms; they help perceive absences or exclusions. Hence, a concept is not just a label that can easily be replaced by a more common word. (5, emph. Bal's)

Bal is aware of the historicity of concepts: they develop, every new user adds his or her specific connotation and intention. In other words, concepts are never purely descriptive; they are always also normative and programmatic. However, she warns against the "misuse" of concepts that causes them to degenerate into labels. When the framework to which a concept belongs is no longer visible, concepts lose their working force: they are subject to fashion and ultimately become meaningless. For her, examples of this tendency are trauma, cultural memory and--the concept that concerns me in this essay--the uncanny.

The concept of the uncanny, or das Unheimliche (in French, l'inquirtante etrangete), is particularly interesting for several reasons. First of all, theoretical use of the word proliferates in the twentieth century, especially in the latter part. Although the term was relatively common in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic and fantastic literature, there are (as distinct from the semantically and grammatically related notion the sublime) no theoretical texts on the uncanny dating from that period. Martin Jay notes in a 1995 text, "The Uncanny Nineties" (included in Cultural Semantics), "By common consent, the theoretical inspiration for the current fascination with the concept is Freud's 1919 essay" (157). Indeed, the one thing that nearly all critics agree on is that Freud's text "The 'Uncanny"' ("Das Unheimliche") provides the starting point for the twentieth-century conceptualization of the uncanny--even if Freud himself does point out some earlier sources on the uncanny (Jentsch and Schelling).

Freud introduces the uncanny as a special shade of anxiety, which can be experienced in real life or in literature, caused by the return of the repressed or by the apparent confirmation of surmounted, primitive beliefs. Extensive bibliographical and textual research reveals that, after 1919, Freud rarely refers to the word in the conceptual sense outlined in the essay, nor do his immediate followers, except for Theodor Reik, Edmund Bergler, and Martin Grohtjahn (see Nobus). It takes until the late 1960s and early 1970s for the essay to re-emerge and for the uncanny to really enter the Freudian and cultural vocabulary (Jay, "Uncanny" 158). In 1968, Ludwig Eidelberg includes the term in his Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis, justifying his rather idiosyncratic selection of terms with a general prophecy: "A term which is not presently in wide usage may become so in the near future" (xii). In France, Jacques Lacan discusses the essay in his unpublished seminar on anxiety as early as 1962-63, and Jacques Derrida devo tes some influential footnotes to it in "La Double Seance." In 1972, Bernard Merigot characterizes the shift as follows:

Psychoanalytic concepts circulate on the theoretical scene. They wear out, become tired, lose their freshness. Other theoretical formulations succeed the concepts of the first hour; concepts of a second level appear. So it goes with the unheimliche, which, although it does not occupy a central position in the Freudian development, is nevertheless, for those who pay attention to it, an important and complex concept. Complex by its mode of functioning, which is often allusive and subterranean in texts inspired by psychoanalysis, important because it is situated at one of the knots of the theoretical articulation of analysis. (100, trans. mine)

Although the growing interest in the uncanny indicates that the term is gradually more and more accepted as a concept in psychoanalytic circles, the bulk of the critical and theoretical reception of "The 'Uncanny"' is located in a broader field: literary theory and criticism, aesthetics, philosophy, art history, architecture, film studies, and cultural studies. The rise of the uncanny in literary studies coincides with the heydays of structuralism and post-structuralism. On the one hand, Tzvetan Todorov briefly discusses Freud's essay in his influential structuralist study of the genre of the fantastic, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. It is by an odd twist of fate that a lasting interest in the uncanny within the genre study of the fantastic, the gothic, and other related genres depends to a large extent on the English translation of Todorov's work. Todorov defines the fantastic against two neighbouring genres, le merveilleux and l'etrange, translated by Richard Howard as "the marvel ous" and "the uncanny." This has caused considerable confusion with the Freudian uncanny, which, to complicate matters further, several scholars feel is quite similar to Todorov's category of the fantastic (see: Jackson; Armitt). On the other hand, Freud's essay is simultaneously unearthed in the wake of the so-called retour & Freud, inspired by Lacan's and the deconstructionists' fascination with more marginal, forgotten texts, rather than with the grand classics. A number of important readings of "The 'Uncanny"' from this perspective in the late 1970s and early 1980s (most notably Cixous, Kofman, Weber, and Hertz) have determined …