Freud's ‘The “Uncanny”’ and Deconstructive Criticism: Intellectual Uncertainty and Delicacy of Perception

In the course of the last 40 years, Freud's article entitled ‘Das Unheimliche’ and printed in Imago, Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis on the Humanities [Geisteswissenschaften] (Freud, 1919), has gone through a process of radical re-evaluation. On the one hand, the re-evaluation concerns the status of this apparently rather narrow and relatively unambitious text as a part of Freud's oeuvre. Today, the article has definitively emerged from the marginal position it had during the first 50 years of its existence. In the Humanities departments of Western universities, ‘The “Uncanny”’ can be referred to with nearly the same implicit demand for immediate recognition as The Interpretation of Dreams; in literary and cultural studies, the notion of the ‘Uncanny’ experiences a degree of popularity which can be compared to the one enjoyed by traditional, psychoanalytical concepts a few decades ago. Indicative of this popularity is not only the number of hits produced by searching for the term in humanities databases like the Modern Language Association's Bibliography,1 but also the inclusion of the concept as a headword in recent dictionaries of aesthetics, cultural studies and literary criticism. Book-length studies dealing with the subject include Nicholas Royle's (2003) successful, 340-page ‘introduction’, and a volume by Anneleen Masschelein (2010, forthcoming), especially dedicated to the conceptualization process which has formed (and forms) today's ways of using the term.