The uncanny

Abstract

One of the central questions that Lacan poses in his Seminar concerns the status of uncanny phenomena. In everyday speech, the term uncanny is commonly used to designate the strange or the suspect, that is, something both unfamiliar and, at the same time, disturbingly familiar.¹ An encounter with the uncanny is never without an experience of anxiety, however slight or ephemeral. All of a sudden, an object in your immediate environment—or your environment as a whole—changes its aspect, almost as if it began to stare right back at you with a bewitching, silent gaze. On the one hand, the experience feels deeply unsettling and leaves you with a disorienting sense of confusion and uncertainty (‘Am I really seeing this, or am I just imagining it?’), and yet, on the other hand, this sudden change of aspect also has a way of leaving you with the same sense of “dreadful,” paranoid “certainty” that we saw in the introduction (‘This is not and simply cannot be my mind playing tricks on me!’).