Michel Foucault on Biopower; note especially pp. 139-145

Right of Death and Power Over Life, from Michel Foucault, An Introduction to the History of Sexuality


For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of
sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a
formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria
potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the
right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves;
just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. By
the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi­
cal theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form.
It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign
over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and un­
conditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign's very
existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he
were threatened by external enemies who s0ught to over­
throw him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately
wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense
of the state; without "directly proposing their death," he was
empowered to "expose their life": in this sense, he wielded
an "indirect" power over them of life and death. 1 But if
someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws,
then he could exercise a direct power over the offender's life:
as punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in
this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute
privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign,
and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as
the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by
every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death
of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was
manifested with the formation of that new juridical being,
I Samuel von Pufendorf. Le Droit de la nature (French trans .• 1734). p. 445.

1 35 1 36 The History of Sexuality

the sovereign?2 In any case, in its modern form-relative and
limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life
and death is a dis symmetrical one. The sovereign exercised
his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by
refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only
through the death he was capable of requiring. The right
which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was
in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after
all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be re­
ferred to a historical type of society in which power was
exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a
subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of
the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and
blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was
essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and
ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize
hold of life in order to suppress it.
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very
profound transformation of these mechanisms of power.
"Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of
power but merely one element among others, working to
incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize
the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, mak­
ing them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated
to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least
a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-adminis­
tering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that
was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure,
maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody
as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things
2 "Just as a composite body can have propt'rties not found in any of the simple bodies
of which the mixture consists, so a moral body, by virtue of the very union of
persons of which it is composed, can have certain rights which none of the individu­
als could expressly claim and whose exercise is the proper function of leaders
alone." Pufendorf, Le Droit de la nature, p. 452.

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 37

being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts
on their own populations. But this formidable power of death
-and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and
the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits
-now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to adminis­
ter, optimize, and mUltiply it, subjecting it to precise controls
and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in
the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire popula­
tions are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is
as managers of life and survival, of bodies_and the race, that
so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that
closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them
to tend increasingly toward aU-out destruction, the decision
that initiates thetn and the one that terminates them are in
fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival.
The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process:
the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual's con­
tinued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of bat­
tle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on
living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of
states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical
existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence
of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at
the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.
On another level, I might have taken up the example of the
death penalty. Together with war, it was for a long time the
other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply
of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or

138 The History of Sexuality

his person. Those who died on the scaffold became fewer and
fewer, in contrast to those who died in wars. But it was for
the same reasons that the latter became more numerous and
the former more and more rare. As soon as power gave itself
the function of administering life, its reason for being and the
logic of its exercise-and not the awakening of humanitarian
feelings-made it more and more difficult to apply the death
penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives
by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure,
sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such
a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal,
and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be
maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime
itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility,
and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those
who represented a kind of biological danger to others.
One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live
was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the
point of death. This is perhaps what explains that disqualifi­
cation of death which marks the recent wane of the rituals
that accompanied it. That death is so carefully evaded is
linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable
for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power
have not ceased to turn away from death. In the passage from
this world to the other, death was the manner in which a
terrestrial sovereignty was relieved by another, singularly
more powerful sovereignty; the pageantry that surrounded it
was in the category of political ceremony. Now it is over life,
throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domin­
ion; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death
becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most "pri­
vate." It is not surprising that suicide-once a crime, since
it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign
alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the
right to exercise-became, in the course of the nineteenth
century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of

Right of Death and Power over LIfe 1 39

sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private
right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that
was exercised over life. This determination to die, strange
and yet so persistent and constant in its manifestations, and
consequently so difficult to explain as being due to particular
circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first
astonishments of a society in which political power had as­
signed itself the task of administering life.

In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this
power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were
not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles
of development linked together by a whole intermediary
cluster of relations. One of these poles-the first to be
formed, it seems--centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its
docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic
controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the
human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused
on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propa­
gation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expect­
ancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause
these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an
entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio­
politics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the
regulations of the population constituted the two poles
around which the organization of power over life was de­
ployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of
this great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, in­
dividualizing and specifying, directed toward the perfor­
mances of the body, with attention to the processes of life­
characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps
no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power

140 The History of Sexuality

was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies
and the calculated management of life. During the classical ..
period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines
-universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops;
there was also the emergence, in the field of political prac­
tices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate,
longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence
there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the SUbjugation of bodies and the control of
populations, marking the beginning of an era of "bio­
power." The two directions taken by its development still
appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth century.
With regard to discipline, this development was embodied in
institutions such as the army and the schools, and in reflec­
tions on tactics, apprenticeship, education, and the nature of
societies, ranging from the strictly military analyses of Mar­
shal de Saxe to the political reveries of Guibert or Servan. As
for population controls, one notes the emergence of demog­
raphy, the evaluation of the relationship between resources
and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth
and its circulation: the work of Quesnay, Moheau, and Sliss­
milch. The philosophy of the "Ideologists," as a theory of
ideas, signs, and the individual genesis of sensations, but also
a theory of the social composition of interests-Ideology
being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of
contracts and the regulated formation of the social body­
no doubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one
sought to coordinate these two techniques of power in order
to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however,
they were not to be joined at the level of a speCUlative
discourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements (agence­
ments concrets) that would go to make up the great technol­
ogy of power in the nineteenth century: the deployment of
sexuality would be one of them, and one of the most impor­
tant.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable ele-

Right of Death and Power over Life 141

ment in the development of capitalism; the latter would not
, have been p0ssible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. But this
was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these
factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and
docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimiz­
ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same
time making them more difficult to govern. If the develop­
ment of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of
power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the
rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eigh­
teenth century as techniques of power present at every level
of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions
(the family and the army, schools and the police, individual
medicine and the administration of collectiv� bodies), ope­
rated in the sphere of economic processes, their development,
and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as
factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting
their influence on the respective forces of both these move­
ments, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of
hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to
that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to
the expansion of productive forces and the differential alloca­
tion of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The
investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive
management of its forces were at the time indispensable.
One knows how many times the question has been raised
concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma"
tion of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth cen­
tury in some Western countries, an event bound up with the
development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon hav­
ing perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was
nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the
entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species

142 The History of Sexuality

into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of ,
political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this
was the moment when the first contact between life and
history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure
exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very
strong for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the
two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always
dominated by the menace of death. But through a circular
process, the economic-and primarily agricultural--devel­
opment of the eighteenth century, and an increase in produc­
tivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic
growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these
profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the pe­
riod of great ravages from starvation and plague had come
to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing
to torment life so directly. But at the same time, the develop­
ment of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life
in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and
the observations and measures relative to man's life and
survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over
life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space
for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organiz­
ing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed
responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control
and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what
it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a
body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individ­
ual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and
a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal
manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological
existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living
was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged
from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be
dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate

Right of Death and Power over Life 143

dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery
it would be able to exercise over them would have to be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of
life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access
even to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the
pressures through which the movements of life and the proc­
esses of history interfere with one another, one would have
to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques
that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.
Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale
than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are
perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the
birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's
"threshold of modernity" has been reached when the life of
the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence;
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence
as a living being in question.

This transformation had considerable consequences. It
would serve no purpose here to dwell on the rupture that
occurred then in the pattern of scientific discourse and on the
manner in which the twofold problematic of life and man
disrupted and redistributed the order of the classical epis­
teme. If the question of man was raised-insofar as he was
a specific living being, and specifically related to other living
beings-the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode
of relation between history and life: in this dual position of
life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its
biological environment, and inside human historicity, pene­
trated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power.
There is no need either to lay further stress on the prolifera­
tion of political technologies that ensued, investing the body,

144 The History of Sexuality

health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living condi­
tions, the whole space of existence.

Another consequence of this development of bio-power
was the growing importance assumed by the action of the
norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law
cannot help but but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to
the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life
needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of
value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient
subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not
mean to say that the law fades into the background or that
the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a con­
tinuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)
whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normal­
izing society is the historical outcome of a technology of
power centered on life. We have entered a phase of juridical
regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century
societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived
by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since
the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a
whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these
were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power
acceptable.

Moreover, against this power that was still new in the
nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support
on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a
living being. Since the last century, the great struggles that

Right of Death and Power .over Life 1 45

have challenged the general system of power were not guided
by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old
dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. One no longer
aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the poor, or the
kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of our
imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what
served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that
was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has
been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object
was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against
the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more
than the law that becam,e the issue of political struggles, even
if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The "right" to life, to one's body, to health, to happi­
ness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppres­
sions or "alienations," the "right" to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this "right" -which the classical
juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending­
was the political response to all these new procedures of
power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right
of sovereignty..

MLA style for text

Link for using MLA style formats in text

Writing and reading assignment for Monday and Tuesday, 2/10 (07) and 2/11 (06): Horror-theory applied to King's "The Return of Timmy Baterman"

Reading for Mon/Tues: Stephen King, "The Return of Timmy Baterman" (Zombies anthology). (I am deleting the Ray Bradbury story; let's concentrate on the King.)

Assignment  due by class meeting time next week (Monday, Tuesday, depending on your section).  This assignment earns grade points and is designed to review analytic organizational/ writing skills and to prepare you for successful work on the midterm essay (in some cases, the material you produce for these blog comments will be incorporated into your midterm).

(Re mechanics: If you have any doubts about how to cite page numbers or film scenes/clips, review these via the posts/links on this blog.)

For Monday, please post in Comments for this Post three paragraphs of your own writing analyzing the Stephen King story "The Return of Timmy Baterman" (Zombies anthology) as follows:

1. One longer paragraph (100+ words) applying 1 or more relevant categories from Carroll's horror theory to the King story.

2. One shorter paragraph (50+ words) considering social attitudes in King's story in light of historical-cultural contexts (for starters: is social-class a factor?  Attitudes in the 1940s--or the 1970s when King wrote the story--toward American experiences in World War Two?)

3.  One shorter paragraph (50+ words) considering possible social critique or commentary in King's story.

REQUIRED TO PASS:

1. A clear statement of the category or categories (if more than one, take them in turn, not all at once) from Carroll you are using and examples using QUOTATIONS with page numbers in parentheses from the King story (89).  

EXAMPLE PARAGRAPH

Noel Carroll defines "incompletion" as a horror-effect involving a missing piece of a body, usually human.   Incompletion works by disturbing the reader's or viewer's expectations: the human body should appear intact and whole with all its parts; instead, something is missing.  It might be an arm, an eye, even a head.  Stephen King's short story "The Return of Timmy Baterman" employs the incompletion effect to heighten the unsettling apparition of the zombie figure.  Baterman is described as "a shambling figure, like an ambulatory trunk or torso, lacking as he did both of his arms, a considerable chunk of his left thigh, and most of the left side of his face" (98).

Note that the page # cites are to be done exactly as shown above.
Note also that quotes in running text may not exceed 4 typed lines.
Note that I don't want you to use quotes exceeding 4 lines placed in block form; keep them within the 4 line limit.

2. Clearly stated points regarding social attitudes and social critique/commentary (this must be the case even if, for example, you don't believe King is proposing any social commentary: say that clearly.  You may need less or sometimes no quotation in this phase, since you will be mostly talking about ideas and about story action in summary form.

requirements for citing from films/video, plus link on how to cite film and other media material, MLA style.

Citing Film and other Media MLA Style


IN ADDITION, NOTE BELOW:

Along with these standard formats, I want you also to include the exact minute/second of the scene/clip you are referring to as your example.  That is, if you are talking about the image of the experimental subject exploding blood from its head in Reanimator, I want it to look like this:

In another example, Gordon's fashioning of the zombie-figure combines a magnification effect and a formlessness effect.  In the second hospital scene, West's attempt to reanimate a cadaver is unexpectedly successful.  In this sequence, the zombie's face is brought into a close-up shot.  Blood spurts from all of the head's openings: eyes, mouth, nose, and ears.  The features of the face are almost invisible under the sanguinary flood.  The magnified face nearly fills the screen as the blood flows like water leaking from a broken vessel.  The normal features of a human face give way to an undifferentiated haze of plasma and mucus.  The scream the zombie delivers, a gurgling, raucous sound far removed from normal human speech, seconds the sense of being overwhelmed by a liquescent formlessness (Reanimator 55:33).

Julia Kristeva on the Abject, from Chapter 1, Powers of Horror

From Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Chapter One: APPROACHING ABJECTION 

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity, 

No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not 

Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce. 

Victor Hugo, La Legende des siecles 

NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT 

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark re- 

volts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate 

from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope 

of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite 

close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and 

fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be se- 

duced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A 

certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which 

it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, 

that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere 

as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescap- 

able boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the 

one haunted by it literally beside himself. 

When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects 

and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly 

speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing 

me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness 

ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject 

is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or 

something else as support, would allow me to be more or less 

detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of 

the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, 

through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of 

2 APPROACHING ABJECTION 

a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me 

ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on 

the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and 

draws me toward the place_where meaning collapses. A certain 

"ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven 

it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to 

agree to the latter's rules of the game. 

And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. 

Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, 

a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. 

It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not 

the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bod- 

ies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that, 

"I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it 

to the father's account [verse au pere—pere-uersion]: I endure 

it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. 

A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it 

might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries 

me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not 

nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a 

thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is noth- 

ing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non- 

existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge 

it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safe- 

guards. The primers of my culture. 

THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN 

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The 

spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the 

retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from 

defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of 

being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads 

me toward and separates me from them. 

Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most ar- 

chaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch 

that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of 

cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging 

APPROACHING ABJECTION 3 

sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the 

belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and 

bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. 

Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at 

that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who 

proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; 

"I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel 

it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only 

in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself 

within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish 

myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that 

they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside 

out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in the 

process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, 

During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself 

amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symp- 

tom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is 

inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either 

wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer 

to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects. 

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irre- 

mediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even 

more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious 

chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell 

of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of 

signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would 

understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without 

makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I perma- 

nently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this 

defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with 

difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of 

my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as 

being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might 

live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my 

entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung 

signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not 

and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of 

wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is 

4 APPROACHING ABJECTION 

no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become 

an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that 

I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I 

might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is 

now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of 

world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, in- 

solent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no 

longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I 

behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: 

fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of 

science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. 

Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, 

 from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. 

Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and 

ends up engulfing us. 

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection 

but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect 

borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the 

composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good con- 

science, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a 

savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the frag- 

ility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning mur- 

der, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they 

heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality 

is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in 

crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liber- 

ating, and suicidal crime. 

Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: 

a terror that dissembles,* a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter 

 instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who 

stabs you.*. . . In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains 

of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children's shoes, or something 

like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a 

Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of 

Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, 

kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is sup- 

posed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other 

things. A

APPROACHING ABJECTION 5 

THE ABJECTION OF SELF 

If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pul- 

verizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced 

at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless 

attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the 

impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes 

its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection 

of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the 

subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely 

on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. 

There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all ab- 

jection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, 

meaning, language, or desire is founded. One always passes too 

quickly over this word, "want," and today psychoanalysts are 

finally taking into account only its more or less fetishized prod- 

uct, the "object of want." But if one imagines (and imagine 

one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foun- 

dations are being laid here) the experience of want itself_as log- 

ically preliminary to being and object—to the being of the 

object—then one understands that abjection, and even more so 

abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none 

but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of 

self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness 

Elizabeth of Hungary who "though a great princess, delighted 

in nothing so much as in abasing herself."1

 

The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time, 

that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what is 

termed knowledge of castration, turning away from perverse 

dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the 

most precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own 

right but forfeited, abject. The termination of analysis can lead 

us there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights of 

masochism. 

Essentially different from "uncanniness," more violent, too, 

abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; 

nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine 

a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who fright- 

ens himself on that account, "all by himself," and, to save 

6 APPROACHING ABJECTION 

himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him— 

all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject. 

Even before things for him are—hence before they are signi- 

fiable—he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and 

constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacred 

configuration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to an- 

other world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has 

swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather 

a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; 

that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace 

does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, 

existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an appar- 

ition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat 

would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, 

he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects that 

are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by 

abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he 

through whom the abject exists. Out of the daze that has pet- 

rified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of 

the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their 

objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze he 

causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The 

phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, 

"fear"—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it 

cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all 

words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, 

ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse 

will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, 

a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory 

that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject

Freud on The Uncanny

Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217-256
The ‘Uncanny’
I
IT is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics. The subject of the ‘uncanny’1 is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in comprehensive treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime—that is, with feelings of a positive nature—and with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress. I know of only one attempt in medico-psychological literature, a fertile but not exhaustive paper by Jentsch (1906). But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the literature, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may —————————————
1 [The German word, translated throughout this paper by the English ‘uncanny’, is ‘unheimlich’, literally ‘unhomely’. The English term is not, of course, an exact equivalent of the German one.]
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easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live;1 so that my paper is presented to the reader without any claim to priority. In his study of the ‘uncanny’ Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling. The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility of experiencing it. Still, such difficulties make themselves powerfully felt in many other branches of aesthetics; we need not on that account despair of finding instances in which the quality in question will be unhesitatingly recognized by most people. Two courses are open to us at the outset. Either we can find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense- impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common. I will say at once that both courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and was only later confirmed by an examination of linguistic usage. In this discussion, however, I shall follow the reverse course. The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. —————————————
1 [An allusion to the first World War only just concluded.]
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We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny. On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it. It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ = ‘unfamiliar’. We will first turn to other languages. But the dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new, perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign. Indeed, we get an impression that many languages are without a word for this particular shade of what is frightening. I should like to express my indebtedness to Dr. Theodor Reik for the following excerpts:— LATIN: (K. E. Georges, Deutschlateinisches Wörterbuch, 1898). An uncanny place: locus suspectus; at an uncanny time of night: intempesta nocte. GREEK: (Rost's and Schenkl's Lexikons).  
(i.e. strange, foreign).  ENGLISH: (from the dictionaries of Lucas, Bellows, Flügel and Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow. FRENCH: (Sachs-Villatte). Inquiétant, sinistre, lugubre, mal à son aise. SPANISH: (Tollhausen, 1889). Sospechoso, de mal aguëro, lúgubre, siniestro. The Italian and Portuguese languages seem to content themselves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions. In Arabic and Hebrew ‘uncanny’ means the same as ‘daemonic’, ‘gruesome’. Let us therefore return to the German language. In Daniel Sanders's Worterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860, 1, 729), the following entry, which I here reproduce in full, is to be found
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under the word ‘;heimlich’. I have laid stress on one or two passages by italicizing them.1 Heimlich, adj., subst. Heimlichkeit (pi. Heimlichkeiten): I. Also heimelich, heimelig, belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc. (a) (Obsolete) belonging to the house or the family, or regarded as so belonging (cf. Latin familiaris, familiar): Die Heimlichen, the members of the household; Der heimliche Rat (Gen. xli, 45; 2 Sam. xxiii. 23; 1 Chron. xii. 25; Wisd. viii. 4), now more usually Geheimer Rat [Privy Councillor]. (b) Of animals: tame, companionable to man. As opposed to wild, e.g. ‘Animals which are neither wild nor heimlich’, etc. ‘Wild animals …that are trained to be heimlich and accustomed to men.’ ‘If these young creatures are brought up from early days among men they become quite heimlich, friendly’ etc.—So also: ‘It (the lamb) is so heimlich and eats out of my hand.’ ‘Nevertheless, the stork is a beautiful, heimelich bird.’ (c) Intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house.2 ‘Is it still heimlich to you in your country where strangers are felling your woods?’ ‘She did not feel too heimlich with him.’ ‘Along a high, heimlich, shady path …, beside a purling, gushing and babbling woodland brook.’ ‘To destroy the Heimlichkeit of the home.’ ‘I could not readily find another spot so intimate and heimlich as this.’ ‘We pictured it so comfortable, so nice, so cosy and heimlich.’ ‘In quiet Heimlichkeit, surrounded by close walls.’ ‘A careful housewife, who knows how to make a pleasing Heimlichkeit (Häuslichkeit [domesticity]) out of the smallest means.’ ‘The man who till recently had been so strange to him now seemed to him all the more heimlich.’ ‘The protestant land-owners do not feel … heimlich among their catholic inferiors.’ ‘When it grows heimlich and still, and the evening quiet alone watches
—————————————
1 [In the translation which follows in the text above, a few details, mainly giving the sources of the quotations, have been omitted. For purposes of reference, we reprint in an Appendix the entire extract from Sanders's Dictionary exactly as it is given in German in Freud's original paper except that a few minor misprints have been put right. (Cf. p. 253.)] 2 [It may be remarked that the English ‘canny’, in addition to its more usual meaning of ‘shrewd’;, can mean ‘pleasant’, ‘cosy’.]
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over your cell.’ ‘Quiet, lovely and heimlich, no place more fitted for their rest.’ ‘He did not feel at all heimlich about it.’—Also, [in compounds] ‘The place was so peaceful, so lonely, so shadily- heimlich.’ ‘The in- and outflowing waves of the current, dreamy and lullaby- heimlich.’ Cf. in especial Unheimlich [see below]. Among Swabian Swiss authors in especial, often as a trisyllable: ‘How heimelich it seemed to Ivo again of an evening, when he was at home.’ ‘It was so heimelig in the house.’ ‘The warm room and the heimelig afternoon.’ ‘When a man feels in his heart that he is so small and the Lord so great—that is what is truly heimelig.’ ‘Little by little they grew at ease and heimelig among themselves.’ ‘Friendly Heimeligkeit.’ ‘I shall be nowhere more heimelich than I am here.’ ‘That which comes from afar …assuredly does not live quite heimelig (heimatlich [at home], freundnachbarlich [in a neighbourly way]) among the people.’ ‘The cottage where he had once sat so often among his own people, so heimelig, so happy.’ ‘The sentinel's horn sounds so heimelig from the tower, and his voice invites so hospitably.’ ‘You go to sleep there so soft and warm, so wonderfully heim'lig.’—This form of the word deserves to become general in order to protect this perfectly good sense of the word from becoming obsolete through an easy confusion with II [see below]. Cf: ‘“The Zecks [a family name] are all ‘heimlich’.” (in sense II) “‘Heimlich’? …What do you understand by ‘heimlich’?” “Well, …they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again.” “Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’ you call it ‘heimlich’. Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?”’ (Gutzkow). (d) Especially in Silesia: gay, cheerful; also of the weather. II. Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others. To do something heimlich, i.e. behind someone's back; to steal away heimlich; heimlich meetings and appointments; to look on with heimlich pleasure at someone's discomfiture; to sigh or weep heimlich; to behave heimlich, as though there was something to conceal; heimlich love-affair, love, sin; heimlich places (which good manners oblige us to conceal) (1 Sam. v. 6). ‘The heimlich chamber’ (privy) (2 Kings x. 27.). Also, ‘the heimlich chair’. ‘To throw into pits or Heimlichkeiten’.—‘Led the steeds heimlich before Laomedon.’—‘As secretive, heimlich, deceitful and malicious towards cruel masters …as frank, open, sympathetic and
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helpful towards a friend in misfortune.’ ‘You have still to learn what is heimlich holiest to me.’ ‘The heimlich art’ (magic). ‘Where public ventilation has to stop, there heimlich machinations begin.’ ‘Freedom is the whispered watchword of heimlich conspirators and the loud battle-cry of professed revolutionaries.’ ‘A holy, heimlich effect.’ ‘I have roots that are most heimlich, I am grown in the deep earth.’ ‘My heimlich pranks.’ ‘If he is not given it openly and scrupulously he may seize it heimlich and unscrupulously.’ ‘He had achromatic telescopes constructed heimlich and secretly.’ ‘Henceforth I desire that there should be nothing heimlich any longer between us.’—To discover, disclose, betray someone's Heimlichkeiten; ‘to concoct Heimlichkeiten behind my back’. ‘In my time we studied Heimlichkeit.’ ‘The hand of understanding can alone undo the powerless spell of the Heimlichkeit (of hidden gold).’ ‘Say, where is the place of concealment … in what place of hidden Heimlichkeit?’ ‘Bees, who make the lock of Heimlichkeiten’ (i.e. sealing-wax). ‘Learned in strange Heimlichkeiten’ (magic arts). For compounds see above, Ic. Note especially the negative ‘un-’: eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear: ‘Seeming quite unheimlich and ghostly to him.’ ‘The unheimlich, fearful hours of night.’ ‘I had already long since felt an unheimlich, even gruesome feeling.’ ‘Now I am beginning to have an unheimlich feeling.’ … ‘Feels an unheimlich horror.’ ‘Unheimlich and motionless like a stone image.’ ‘The unheimlich mist called hill-fog.’ ‘These pale youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mischief.’ ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Schelling).—‘To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit.’—Unheimlich is not often used as opposite to meaning II (above).
What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Cf. the quotation from Gutzkow: ‘We call it “unheimlich”; you call it “heimlich”.’) In general we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed
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and kept out of sight.1 ‘Unheimlich’ is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of ‘heimlich’, and not of the second. Sanders tells us nothing concerning a possible genetic connection between these two meanings of heimlich. On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. Some of the doubts that have thus arisen are removed if we consult Grimm's dictionary. (1877, 4, Part 2, 873 ff.) We read: Heimlich; adj. and adv. vernaculus, occultus; MHG. heimelîch, heimlîch. (p. 874.) In a slightly different sense: ‘I feel heimlich, well, free from fear.’ … [3] (b) Heimlich is also used of a place free from ghostly influences …familiar, friendly, intimate. (p. 875: β) Familiar, amicable, unreserved. 4. From the idea of homelike', ‘belonging to the house’, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways … (p. 876.) ‘On the left bank of the lake there lies a meadow heimlich in the wood.’ (Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, I. 4.)…Poetic licence, rarely so used in modern speech … Heimlich is used in conjunction with a verb expressing the act of concealing: ‘In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich.’ (Ps. xxvii. 5.) … Heimlich parts of the human body, pudenda …‘the men that died not were smitten on their heimlich parts.’ (1 Samuel v. 12.) … (c) Officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret in matters of state are called heimlich councillors; the adjective, according to modern usage, has been replaced by geheim [secret] …‘Pharaoh called Joseph's name “him to whom secrets are revealed”’ (heimlich councillor). (Gen. xli. 45.) —————————————
1 [According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a similar ambiguity attaches to the English ‘canny’, which may mean not only ‘cosy’ but also ‘endowed with occult or magical powers’.]
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(p. 878.) 6. Heimlich, as used of knowledge—mystic, allegorical: a heimlich meaning, mysticus, divinus, occultus, figuratus. (p. 878.) Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious … Heimlich also has the meaning of that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge …‘Do you not see? They do not trust us; they fear the heimlich face of the Duke of Friedland.’ (Schiller, Wallensteins Lager, Scene 2.) 9. The notion of something hidden and dangerous, which is expressed in the last paragraph, is still further developed, so that ‘heimlich’ comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to ‘unheimlich’. Thus: ‘At times I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him’. (Klinger, Theater, 3. 298.) Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it, alongside of Schelling's1 definition of the Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.


(omitted: Freud's long section with an account of Hoffmann's "The Sandman," although last reference included below, for relevance to animation/reanimation horror-effects)


We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood. But having reached the idea that we can make an infantile factor such as this responsible for feelings of uncanniness, we are encouraged to see whether we can apply it to other instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular, extremely concentrated, way. So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from childhood. But, curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on. Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature. His novel, Die Elixire des Teufels [The Devil's Elixir], contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative;1 but it is too obscure and —————————————

1 [Under the rubric ‘Varia’ in one of the issues of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse for 1919 (5, 308), the year in which the present paper was first published, there appears over the initials ‘S.F.’ a short note which it is not unreasonable to attribute to Freud. Its insertion here, though strictly speaking irrelevant, may perhaps be excused. The note is headed: ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Function of Consciousness’ and it proceeds: ‘In Die Elixire des Teufels (Part II, p. 210, in Hesse's edition)—a novel rich in masterly descriptions of pathological mental states—Schönfeld comforts the hero, whose consciousness is temporarily disturbed, with the following words: “And what do you get out of it? I mean out of the particular mental function which we call consciousness, and which is nothing but the confounded activity of a damned toll-collector—excise-man—deputy- chief customs officer, who has set up his infamous bureau in our top storey and who exclaims, whenever any goods try to get out: ‘Hi! hi! exports are prohibited …they must stay here …here, in this country.…’”’]
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intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed from him, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too much material of the same kind. In consequence one's grasp of the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes. We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double’,

which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another—by what we should call telepathy—, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing1 —the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations. The theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which —————————————

1 [This phrase seems to be an echo from Nietzsche (e.g. from the last part of Also Sprach Zarathustra). In Chapter III of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), Standard Ed., 18, 22, Freud puts a similar phrase ‘the perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ into inverted commas.]

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the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol.1 The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self- love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. The idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego's development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’. In the pathological case of delusions of observation, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician's eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object—the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation—renders it possible to invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it—above all, those things which seem to self- criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.2 —————————————
1 [Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Ed., 5, 357.] 2 I believe that when poets complain that two souls dwell in the human breast, and when popular psychologists talk of the splitting of people's egos, what they are thinking of is this division (in the sphere of ego-psychology) between the critical agency and the rest of the ego, and not the antithesis discovered by psycho-analysis between the ego and what is unconscious and repressed. It is true that the distinction between these two antitheses is to some extent effaced by the circumstance that foremost among the things that are rejected by the criticism of the ego are derivatives of the repressed.—[Freud had already discussed this critical agency at length in Section III of his paper on narcissism (1914c), and is was soon to be further expanded into the ‘ego- ideal’ and ‘super-ego’ in Chapter XI of his Group Psychology (1921c) and Chapter III of The Ego and the Id (1923b) respectively.]
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But it is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will.1 [Cf. Freud, 1901b, Chapter XII (B).]
But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a ‘double’, we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted—a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.2 The other forms of ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffmann can easily be estimated along the same lines as the theme of the ‘double’. They are a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people. I believe that these factors are partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness, although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their share of it. The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From —————————————

1 In Ewers's Der Student von Prag, which serves as the starting-point of Rank's study on the ‘double’, the hero has promised his beloved not to kill his antagonist in a duel. But on his way to the duelling-ground he meets his ‘double’, who has already killed his rival. 2 Heine, Die Götter im Exil.

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what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. Other situations which have in common with my adventure an unintended recurrence of the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness. So, for instance, when, caught in a mist perhaps, one has lost one's way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot, which one can identify by some particular landmark. Or one may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture— though it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration in turning this latter situation into something irresistibly comic.1 If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen —————————————

1 [Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, London, 1880, 1, 107.]

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close together—if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—invariably has the same
one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.1 Or suppose one is engaged in reading the works of the famous physiologist, Hering, and within the space of a few days receives two letters from two different countries, each from a person called Hering, though one has never before had any dealings with anyone of that name. Not long ago an ingenious scientist (Kammerer, 1919) attempted to reduce coincidences of this kind to certain laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect. I will not venture to decide whether he has succeeded or not. How exactly we can trace back to infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such similar recurrences is a question I can only lightly touch on in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another work,2 already completed, in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a different connection. For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny. Now, however, it is time to turn from these aspects of the matter, which are in any case difficult to judge, and look for some undeniable instances of the uncanny, in the hope that —————————————

1 [Freud had himself reached the age of 62 a year earlier, in 1918.] 2 [This was published a year later as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g). The various manifestations of the ‘compulsion to repeat’ enumerated here are enlarged upon in Chapters II and III of that work. The ‘compulsion to repeat’ had already been described by Freud as a clinical phenomenon, in a technical paper published five years earlier (1914g).]

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an analysis of them will decide whether our hypothesis is a valid one. In the story of ‘The Ring of Polycrates’,1 the King of Egypt turns away in horror from his host, Polycrates, because he sees that his friend's every wish is at once fulfilled, his every care promptly removed by kindly fate. His host has become ‘uncanny’ to him. His own explanation, that the too fortunate man has to fear the envy of the gods, seems obscure to us; its meaning is veiled in mythological language. We will therefore turn to another example in a less grandiose setting. In the case history of an obsessional neurotic,2 I have described how the patient once stayed in a hydropathic establishment and benefited greatly by it. He had the good sense, however, to attribute his improvement not to the therapeutic properties of the water, but to the situation of his room, which immediately adjoined that of a very accommodating nurse. So on his second visit to the establishment he asked for the same room, but was told that it was already occupied by an old gentleman, whereupon he gave vent to his annoyance in the words: ‘I wish he may be struck dead for it.’ A fortnight later the old gentleman really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an ‘uncanny’ experience. The impression of uncanniness would have been stronger still if less time had elapsed between his words and the untoward event, or if he had been able to report innumerable similar coincidences. As a matter of fact, he had no difficulty in producing coincidences of this sort; but then not only he but every obsessional neurotic I have observed has been able to relate analogous experiences. They are never surprised at their invariably running up against someone they have just been thinking of, perhaps for the first time for a long while. If they say one day ‘I haven't had any news of so-and-so for a long time’, they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morning, and an accident or a death will rarely take place without having passed through their mind a little while before. They are in the habit of referring to this state of affairs in the most —————————————
1 [Schiller's poem based on Herodotus.] 2 ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909d) [Standard Ed., 10, 234].

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modest manner, saying that they have ‘presentiments’ which ‘usually’ come true. One of the most uncanny and wide-spread forms of superstition is the dread of the evil eye, which has been exhaustively studied by the Hamburg oculist Seligmann (1910-11). There never seems to have been any doubt about the source of this dread. Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people's envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look1 even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its command. These last examples of the uncanny are to be referred to the principle which I have called ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, taking the name from an expression used by one of my patients.2 And now we find ourselves on familiar ground. Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings; by the subject's narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or ‘mana’ as well as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching —————————————
1 [‘The evil eye’ in German is ‘der böse Blick’, literally ‘the evil look’.] 2 [The obsessional patient referred to just above—the ‘Rat Man’ (1909d), Standard Ed., 10, 233 f.]

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those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression.1 At this point I will put forward two considerations which, I think, contain the gist of this short study. [In the first place, if psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das Unheimliche (p. 226); for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition [p. 224] of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.] It only remains for us to test our new hypothesis on one or two more examples of the uncanny. Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen [p. 221] some languages in use to-day can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’. We might indeed have begun our investigation with this example, perhaps the most striking of all, of something uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it. There is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our —————————————
1 Cf. my book Totem and Taboo (1912-13), Essay III, ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’, where the following footnote will be found: ‘We appear to attribute an “uncanny” quality to impressions that seek to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and the animistic mode of thinking in general, after we have reached a stage at which, in our judgement, we have abandoned such beliefs.’ [Standard Ed., 13, 86.]

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thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life.1 It is true that the statement ‘All men are mortal’ is paraded in text-books of logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality.2 Religions continue to dispute the importance of the undeniable fact of individual death and to postulate a life after death; civil governments still believe that they cannot maintain moral order among the living if they do not uphold the prospect of a better life hereafter as a recompense for mundane existence. In our great cities, placards announce lectures that undertake to tell us how to get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of science have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible. Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him. Considering our unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather enquire what has become of the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny. But repression is there, too. All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances —————————————

1 [This problem figures prominently in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), on which Freud was engaged while writing the present paper. See Standard Ed., 18, 44 ff.] 2 [Freud had discussed the individual's attitude to death at greater length in the second part of his paper ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915b).]

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dependent on improbable and remote conditions; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety.1 We have now only a few remarks to add—for animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man's attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny. We can also speak of a living person as uncanny, and we do so when we ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not all; in addition to this we must feel that his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help of special powers. A good instance of this is the ‘Gettatore’,2 that uncanny figure of Romanic superstition which Schaeffer, with intuitive poetic feeling and profound psycho-analytic understanding, has transformed into a sympathetic character in his Josef Montfort. But the question of these secret powers brings us back again to the realm of animism. It was the pious Gretchen's intuition that Mephistopheles possessed secret powers of this kind that made him so uncanny to her. Sie fühlt class ich ganz sicher cin Genie, Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin.3 The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being. The Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to the influence of demons, and in this their psychology was almost correct. Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason. In one case, after I had succeeded—though none too rapidly—in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid —————————————

1 Cf. Totem and Taboo [Standard Ed., 13, 66]. 2 [Literally ‘thrower’ (of bad luck), or ‘one who casts’ (the evil eye). —Schaeffer's novel was published in 1918.]
3 [She feels that surely I'm a genius now,— Perhaps the very Devil indeed! Goethe, Faust, Part I (Scene 16), (Bayard Taylor's translation).]

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for many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the patient's mother long after her recovery. Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff's,1 feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by Schaeffer which I mentioned above—all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex. To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness—the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.2 There is one more point of general application which I should like to add, though, strictly speaking, it has been included in what has already been said about animism and modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been surmounted; for I think it deserves special emphasis. This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices. The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality—a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. In the middle of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands; and, among other somewhat redundant matter, I read a story about a young married couple who move into a furnished house in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening an intolerable and very specific smell begins to pervade the house; they —————————————

1 [Die Geschichte von der abgehauenen Hand (‘The Story of the Severed Hand’).] 2 [See Section VIII of Freud's analysis of the ‘Wolf Man’ (1918b), above p. 101 ff.]

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stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague form gliding over the stairs—in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the sort. It was a naïve enough story, but the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable. To conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly not complete, I will relate an instance taken from psychoanalytic experience; if it does not rest upon mere coincidence, it furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’ and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I've been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body.1 In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un- ’] is the token of repression.2

III

In the course of this discussion the reader will have felt certain doubts arising in his mind; and he must now have an opportunity of collecting them and bringing them forward. It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition—not everything that recalls repressed desires and
surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race—is on that account uncanny. Nor shall we conceal the fact that for almost every example —————————————
1 [Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Standard Ed., 5, 399.] 2 [See Freud's paper on ‘Negation’ (1925h).]

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adduced in support of our hypothesis one may be found which rebuts it. The story of the severed hand in Hauff's fairy tale [p. 244] certainly has an uncanny effect, and we have traced that effect back to the castration complex; but most readers will probably agree with me in judging that no trace of uncanniness is provoked by Herodotus's story of the treasure of Rhampsinitus, in which the master-thief, whom the princess tries to hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother's severed hand behind with her instead. Again, the prompt fulfilment of the wishes of Polycrates [p. 239] undoubtedly affects us in the same uncanny way as it did the king of Egypt; yet our own fairy stories are crammed with instantaneous wish-fulfilments which produce no uncanny effect whatever. In the story of ‘The Three Wishes’, the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of a sausage to wish that she might have one too, and in an instant it lies on a plate before her. In his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes it may hang on her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose. All this is very striking but not in the least uncanny. Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when an inanimate object—a picture or a doll—comes to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen's stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive, yet nothing could well be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion's beautiful statue comes to life. Apparent death and the re-animation of the dead have been represented as most uncanny themes. But things of this sort too are very common in fairy stories. Who would be so bold as to call it uncanny, for instance, when Snow- White opens her eyes once more? And the resuscitation of the dead in accounts of miracles, as in the New Testament, elicits feelings quite unrelated to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme that achieves such an indubitably uncanny effect, the unintended recurrence of the same thing, serves other and quite different purposes in another class of cases. We have already come across one example [p. 237] in which it is employed to call up a feeling of the comic; and we could multiply instances of this kind. Or again, it works as a means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?

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Do not these factors point to the part played by danger in the genesis of what is uncanny, notwithstanding that in children these same factors are the most frequent determinants of the expression of fear [rather than of the uncanny]? And are we after all justified in entirely ignoring intellectual uncertainty as a factor, seeing that we have admitted its importance in relation to death [p. 242]? It is evident therefore, that we must be prepared to admit that there are other elements besides those which we have so far laid down as determining the production of uncanny feelings. We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed. We have noticed one point which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly all the instances that contradict our hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction, of imaginative writing. This suggests that we should differentiate between the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about. What is experienced as uncanny is much more simply conditioned but comprises far fewer instances. We shall find, I think, that it fits in perfectly with our attempt at a solution, and can be traced back without exception to something familiar that has been repressed. But here, too, we must make a certain important and psychologically significant differentiation in our material, which is best illustrated by turning to suitable examples. Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition under which the feeling of uncanniness
arises here is unmistakable. We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old,

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discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!’ and so on. Conversely, anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny. The most remarkable coincidences of wish and fulfilment, the most mysterious repetition of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises—none of these things will disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which can be described as ‘a fear of something uncanny’. The whole thing is purely an affair of ‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.1 The state of affairs is different when the uncanny proceeds from repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb-phantasies, etc.; but experiences which arouse this kind of uncanny feeling are not of very frequent occurrence in real life. The uncanny which proceeds from actual experience belongs for the most part to the first group [the group dealt with in the previous paragraph]. Nevertheless the distinction between the two is theoretically very important. Where the —————————————

1 Since the uncanny effect of a ‘double’ also belongs to this same group it is interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting one's own image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst Mach has related two such observations in his Analyse der Empfindungen (1900, 3). On the first occasion he was not a little startled when he realized that the face before him was his own. The second time he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and thought ‘What a shabby- looking school-master that man is who is getting in!’—I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead, therefore, of being frightened by our ‘doubles’, both Mach and I simply failed to recognize them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to be something uncanny?

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uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is involved is an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in the reality of such a content. We might say that in the one case what had been repressed is a particular ideational content, and in the other the belief in its (material) reality. But this last phrase no doubt extends the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed]. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we must not let our predilection for smooth solutions and lucid exposition blind us to the fact that these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable. When we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is often a hazy one. The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for the realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted to reality- testing. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be
so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life. The imaginative writer has this licence among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in

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every case. In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfilments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in fairy stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgement as to whether things which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated from the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales. Thus we see that fairy stories, which have furnished us with most of the contradictions to our hypothesis of the uncanny, confirm the first part of our proposition—that in the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life. In the case of these stories there are other contributory factors, which we shall briefly touch upon later. The creative writer can also choose a setting which though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual beings such as daemonic spirits or ghosts of the dead. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality, such figures lose any uncanniness which they might possess. The souls in Dante's Inferno, or the supernatural apparitions in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than Homer's jovial world of gods. We adapt our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and ghosts as though their existence had the same validity as our own has in material reality. In this case too we avoid all trace of the uncanny. The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this he is in a sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted; he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would

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have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object. But it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit. I have noticed this particularly after reading Schnitzler's Die Weissagung [The Prophecy] and similar stories which flirt with the supernatural. However, the writer has one more means which he can use in order to avoid our recalcitrance and at the same time to improve his chances of success. He can keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he writes about is based, or he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point to the last. Speaking generally, however, we find a confirmation of the second part of our proposition—that fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life. Strictly speaking, all these complications relate only to that class of the uncanny which proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted. The class which proceeds from repressed complexes is more resistant and remains as powerful in fiction as in real experience, subject to one exception [see p. 252]. The uncanny belonging to the first class—that proceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted— retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as well, so long as the setting is one of material reality; but where it is given an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction, it is apt to lose that character. We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the privileges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny feeling. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the storyteller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material. All this is nothing new, and has doubtless long since been fully taken into account by students of
aesthetics. We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily, through the temptation to explain certain instances which

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contradicted our theory of the causes of the uncanny. Accordingly we will now return to the examination of a few of those instances. We have already asked [p. 246] why it is that the severed hand in the story of the treasure of Rhampsinitus has no uncanny effect in the way that the severed hand has in Hauff's story. The question seems to have gained in importance now that we have recognized that the class of the uncanny which proceeds from repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. The answer is easy. In the Herodotus story our thoughts are concentrated much more on the superior cunning of the master-thief than on the feelings of the princess. The princess may very well have had an uncanny feeling, indeed she very probably fell into a swoon; but we have no such sensations, for we put ourselves in the thief's place, not in hers. In Nestroy's farce, Der Zerrissene [The Torn Man], another means is used to avoid any impression of the uncanny in the scene in which the fleeing man, convinced that he is a murderer, lifts up one trapdoor after another and each time sees what he takes to be the ghost of his victim rising up out of it. He calls out in despair, ‘But I've only killed one man. Why this ghastly multiplication?’ We know what went before this scene and do not share his error, so what must be uncanny to him has an irresistibly comic effect on us. Even a ‘real’ ghost, as in Oscar Wilde's Canterville Ghost, loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about it and allows liberties to be taken with it. Thus we see how independent emotional effects can be of the actual subject-matter in the world of fiction. In fairy stories feelings of fear—including therefore uncanny feelings—are ruled out altogether. We understand this, and that is why we ignore any opportunities we find in them for developing such feelings. Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness [pp. 246-7], we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. This problem has been discussed from a psycho-analytic point of view elsewhere.1 —————————————
1 [See the discussion of children's fear of the dark in Section V of the third of Freud's Three Essays (1905d), Standard Ed., 7, 224 n.]

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Strachey, J. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217-256
Editor's Note to "The ‘Uncanny’"

 (a) GERMAN EDITIONS: 1919 Das Unheimiliche Imago, 5(5-6), 297-324. 1922 Das Unheimiliche S.K.S.N., 5, 229-73. 1924 Das Unheimiliche G.S., 10, 369-408. 1924 Das Unheimiliche Dichtung und Kunst, 99-138. 1947 Das Unheimiliche G.W., 12, 229-68. (b) ENGLISH TRANSLATION: ‘The “Uncanny”’ 1925 C.P., 4, 368-407. (Tr. Alix Strachey.) The present translation is a considerably modified version of the one published in 1925. This paper, published in the autumn of 1919, is mentioned by Freud in a letter to Ferenczi of May 12 of the same year, in which he says he has dug an old paper out of a drawer and is re-writing it. Nothing is known as to when it was originally written or how much it was changed, though the footnote quoted from Totem and Taboo on p. 241 below shows that the subject was present in his mind as early as 1913. The passages dealing with the ‘compulsion to repeat’ (p. 234 ff.) must in any case have formed part of the revision. They include a summary of much of the contents of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and speak of it as ‘already completed’. The same letter to Ferenczi of May 12, 1919, announced that a draft of this latter work was finished, though it was not in fact published for another year. Further details will be found in the Editor's Note to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Ed., 18, 3. The first section of the present paper, with its lengthy quotation from a German dictionary, raises special difficulties for the translator. It is to be hoped that readers will not allow themselves to be discouraged by this preliminary obstacle, for the paper is full of interesting and important material, and travels far beyond merely linguistic topics.
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Midterm Assignment

Spring 2014 English 281 Midterm Essay

Due 3/20/14, 11:59 P.M; send in Word file attachment to gmajer@stevenson.edu.

Drafts read up to 3/17/14.

1500 words minimum; 1800 words maximum.

Times New Roman 12 font, double spaced.

All quotes and citations use MLA or APA format.

This essay uses a 3-part structure to develop analysis of the zombie-figure and zombie-narrative from course readings and viewings (and additional cases if you would like to incorporate these).  The best structure is to move through the essay case by case, covering the 3 parts for one case, then moving on to the next, and so on through your cases.   Note that you are allowed to uses cases/texts/films from outside the course readings/films as long as they are clearly on topic.

Simply:

For each example/case, use the 3 parts as follows:

1. Horror-engineering, employing Carroll's 9 horror-effects as relevant (if you like, you also can include refs to Freud, Kristeva, Lacan, or Zizek).

2.  Social attitudes--ideas, fears, stereotypes, phobias, fantasies of various kinds registering social attitudes.  Be sure to have a sense of the historical-cultural context of your example (research online can help you, say, with things like 1930s America).

toward nation/empire
toward race or ethnicity
toward social-class
toward feminine, masculine, and gay/queer gender roles/identities
toward capitalism, labor, and economics
toward modern"biopower" and the human/"posthuman"
and toward other specific aspects of the text/film historical-social context (1890s Egypt/Suez Canal;, 1930s Haiti/American invasion; 1980s gay issues, Reaganomics; 2000s 9/11 terrorism, war, bioterror, economic crisis, globaliszation, etc.)

3.  Possible social critique, commentary, satire--highlighting of social inequities, failures, hypocrisies, double-standards, rigid roles, "normative" categorizations.


Your intro paragraph should not be a long account of what you will be doing.  Just announce that you are going to explore your given texts/films in light of the 3 parts and that will be enough.