Mladen Dolar - "I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the Uncanny

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"I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the UncannyAuthor(s): Mladen DolarSource: October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991), pp. 5-23Published by: MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778795

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"I Shall Be with You onYour Wedding-Night":

Lacan and the Uncanny

MLADEN DOLAR

The dimension of the uncanny, ntroduced by Freud in his famous paper,is located at the very core of psychoanalysis.' t is the dimension where all theconcepts of psychoanalysis ome together, where its diverse lines of argumentform knot. The uncanny provides clue to the basic project of psychoanalysis.And yet Freud appears to be somewhat t a loss about how to make use of thisclue. Although he enumerates a number of instances f the uncanny, giving narray of examples embellished with theoretical eflections, e leaves us in theend with only a sketch or a prolegomenon to a theory f the uncanny. Exactlyhow the different ieces fit ogether remains unclear.

The Extimate

Freud starts off with a lengthy inguistic iscussion of the German termdas Unheimliche.t was fortunate or Freud that uch a paradoxical word existedin the German language, and perhaps it gave him the idea for the paper in thefirst lace. The word is the standard German negation of heimlich nd is thussupposed to be its opposite. But it turns out that t is actually directly mplied

byheimlich, hich means familiar, omely, ozy, ntimate, arousing a sense of

agreeable restfulness nd security s in one within he four walls of his house";by extension, what s familiar nd securely ucked away salso hidden, concealedfrom the outside, secret, kept from ight. . . withheld from others"; and by afurther xtension, what s hidden and secret s also threatening, earful, ccult,"uncomfortable, neasy, gloomy, dismal . . . ghastly"-that is, unheimlich, n-canny.2 There is a point where the two meanings directly oincide and becomeundistinguishable, nd the negation does not count-as indeed it does not count

1. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny' " (1919), The Standard dition of the Complete sychologicalWorks, d. James Strachey, ol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).2. Ibid., pp. 221, 222, 225.


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in the unconscious.3The English translation, theuncanny," argely

retains heessential ambiguity f the German term, but French doesn't possess an equiv-alent, 'inquiltante trangeti eing the standard ranslation. o Lacan had to nventone, extimit".

This term aims directly t the essential dimension of psychoanalysis. ut-ting this imply, ne could say that raditional hought onsisted f the constanteffort o draw a clear line between the interior nd the exterior. All the greatphilosophical conceptual pairs-essence/appearance, mind/body, ubject/object,spirit/matter, tc.-can be seen as just so many transcriptions f the divisionbetween nteriority nd exteriority. ow the dimension f extimiti lurs this ine.

It points neither to the interior nor to the exterior, ut is located there wherethe most intimate nteriority oincides with the exterior and becomes threat-ening, provoking horror and anxiety. The extimate s simultaneously he inti-mate kernel and the foreign body; in a word, t s unheimlich. reud writes, theuncanny s that class of the frightening hich eads back to what s known ofold and long familiar."4 nd it is this very dimension beyond the division nto"psychic" nd "real" that deserves to be called the real in the Lacanian sense.

Freud then proceeds in an "inductive" way, omewhat haphazardly enu-merating different nstances f this strange dimension-the paradoxical realmbetween the living and the dead (what Lacan will ater call the area "between

two deaths"); the anxiety provoked by the double, the point where narcissismbecomes unbearable; "the evil eye" and the dimension of the gaze; the series ofcoincidences that suddenly bear a fateful meaning where the real, so to speak,begins to speak); cut off imbs; etc. It is obvious that the different ases have asimple Lacanian common denominator which s the irruption f the real into"homely," ommonly ccepted reality. We can speak of the emergence of some-thing that shatters well-known ivisions and which cannot be situated withinthem. (This holds not only for the classicaldivisions subject/object, nterior/exterior, tc., but also for the "early" Lacanian division symbolic/imaginary.)The status both of the subject nd of "objective eality" s thus put into question.

In dealing with the different nstances, Freud is gradually forced to usethe entire panoply of psychoanalytic oncepts: castration omplex, Oedipus,(primary) narcissism, ompulsion to repeat, death drive, repression, nxiety,psychosis, tc. They all seem to converge on "the uncanny." One could simplysay that it is the pivotal point around which psychoanalytic oncepts revolve,the point that Lacan calls object small a and which he himself onsidered hismost mportant ontribution o psychoanalysis.

3. "The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries nd contradictories s highlyremarkable. t is simply disregarded. No' seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. Theyshow a particular preference for combining ontraries nto a unity r for representing hem as oneand the same thing." The nterpretation f Dreams 1900), in The Standard dition, ol. IV, p. 318.4. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,' p. 220.




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"I ShallBe with ou on Your Wedding-Night" 7

It seems that Freud speaks about a "universal" f human experience whenhe speaks of the uncanny, yet his own examples tacitly oint to its ocation n aspecifichistorical onjuncture, o the particular historical upture brought boutby the Enlightenment. here is a specific imension f he ncanny hat merges ithmodernity. hat I am interested n is not the uncanny as such, but the uncannythat s closely inked with he advent of modernity nd which constantly auntsit from the inside. To put it simply, n premodern societies the dimension ofthe uncanny was largely covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred anduntouchable. It was assigned to a religiously nd socially anctioned place in thesymbolic from which the structure f power, sovereignty, nd a hierarchy ofvalues emanated. With the

triumphof the

Enlightenment,his

privilegedand

excluded place (the exclusion that founded society)was no more. That is to saythat the uncanny became unplaceable; it became uncanny in the strict ense.Popular culture, lways extremely ensitive o the historical hifts, ook success-ful hold of it-witness the mmense popularity f Gothic fiction nd its romanticaftermath.5 t has often been pointed out that heGothic novel wasbeing writtenat the same time as the French Revolution. There was an irruption of theuncanny strictly arallel with bourgeois and industrial) evolutions nd the riseof scientific ationality-and, one might dd, with he Kantian establishment ftranscendental ubjectivity, f which the uncanny presents he surprising oun-

terpart.6 Ghosts, vampires, monsters, he undead dead, etc., flourish n an erawhen you might xpect them to be dead and buried, without place. They aresomething brought about by modernity tself.

Freud, in his paper, gives a somewhat misleading mpression when he saysthat the uncanny s the return of something ong surmounted, discarded, andsuperseded in the past. Just as Lacan has argued that the subject of psycho-analysis s the subject of modernity ased in the Cartesian cogito and unthink-able without he Kantian turn, o one has to extend the argument to the realmof the object, the object a. It, too, is most ntimately inked with and producedby the rise of modernity. What seems to be a leftover s actually a product ofmodernity, ts counterpart.

The QuadrupleLet us see how the Lacanian "simplification"-the ntroduction f a com-

mon pivotal point-affects Freud's formulations n the uncanny. Freud takesas the paradigmatic case the well-known hort story The Sand-Man" by E. T.A. Hoffmann, an example suggested by Jentsch and which serves Freud's

5. See James Donald's excellent ccount, The Fantastic, he Sublime and the Popular; or What'sat Stake in Vampire Films?" in Fantasy nd the Cinema, d. James Donald (London: British FilmInstitute, 1989).6. See Slavoj Ziiek's article n this ssue.




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purpose very well. Freud's account of the story hinges upon two relations: theone between the student Nathaniel, the hero of the story, nd Olympia, theyoung girl of angelic beauty who turns ut to be a doll, an automaton; the otherbetween the Sand-Man figure, n his various guises as the awyerCoppelius, theoptician Coppola, and the Father later partly ubstituted y Professor palan-zani).7 One is tempted to place the four characters on the two intersectingdiagonals of the sort of L-scheme proposed by Lacan:

The Sand-Man Olympia

Nathaniel Father

Of course this diagram doesn't correspond t all to Lacan's original nten-tion and illustrates different oint. The L-scheme was introduced n order tosituate the imaginary ego produced by the mirror phase in relation to thesymbolic, o the Other of the symbolic rder, nd to a subject that s not an ego.So the entire tension of Lacan's diagram, the drama it represents, s betweenthe imaginary nd the symbolicdiagonals. In our case, both the "imaginary"line (Nathaniel-Olympia) nd the "symbolic" ne are haunted by the intrusionof the real, the dimension that was not yet elaborated in early Lacan and hadno assigned place in the L-scheme, r which waspresent here only n an implicitway. With its introduction, both diagonals become troubled and presage adisaster.

Nathaniel falls madly n love with his beautiful girl who seemsremarkablysilent and reticent. t is true that she dances and she sings as one can hear inOffenbach's

Hoffmann'sales),but in a very mechanical way, keeping her beat

too accurately. Her vocabulary s rather imited; she only exclaims "Oh oh "from ime to time and says"Good night, ove " at the end of long conversationsin which he is the only speaker. Her eyes gaze into emptiness or hours on end.Nathaniel never tires f watching er through his spy glass, nd this s sufficientfor bringing bout the folly f love: "She says but a few words, that s true,"

7. H61kneCixous points out in "La Fiction et ses Fant6mes: Une lecture de l'Unheimliche deFreud," Poitique 1972), vol. 10, pp. 199-216, that Freud makes some arbitrary uts n Hoffmann'sstory nd doesn't take into account the subtlety f his narrative trategy. lthough this s true tosome extent, one could show that those elements do not contradict reud's reading. It seems that

Cixous tries to prove too much; for the very ct of interpreting perates by arbitrary uts and thealleged wealth of the object nterpreted s a retroactive ffect f the very nterpretation hat eemedto reduce it. Here, rather than claiming any fidelity o an original textual wealth, proceed bytaking up only one essential point that nterests me.




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remarks Nathaniel, "but these few words appear as genuine hieroglyphs f aninner world full of love and a higher knowledge of the spiritual ife n contem-plation of the eternal Beyond." "Oh you glorious, profound nature, only you,you alone understand me completely "8 A blank screen, empty eyes, and an"Oh ": it s enough to drive anybody razy with ove. There is a strange reversalin this situation: the problem is not simply that Olympia turns out to be anautomaton (contrived by the Sand-Man figure Coppola, who contributed theeyes, and Spalanzani, who took care of the mechanism) and is thus in theuncanny area between the living and the dead; it is that Nathaniel strangelyreacts in a mechanical way. His love for an automaton is itself utomatic; his

fiery feelingsare

mechanically produced ("hissenseless obsessive

[zwanghafte,compulsory] ove for Olympia," says Freud).9 It takes so little to set up thatblank screen from which he only receives his own message. The question arisesas to who is the real automaton in the situation, for the appearance of theautomaton calls for n automatic response, t entails n automatic ubjectivation.

Hoffmann's ronical twist, he social parody implied in the episode, high-lights the role sociallyassigned to the woman: it is enough to be there, at theappropriate place, at the most to utter an "Oh " at the appropriate time, toproduce that specter of The Woman, that figure of the Other. The mechanicaldoll only highlights he mechanical character of "intersubjective" elations. t is

the character exploited by the position of the analyst: the analyst, oo, utters tthe most an "Oh " here and there (and perhaps a "Good night, ove "); hemakes himself n automaton n order to give rise to the dimension of the Other,the real interlocutor f the patient's monologue," and also in order to producethat strange kind of love, perhaps love in its strictest nd purest sense, which stransference ove. Nathaniel's engthy onversations with Olympia prefigure heanalytic ession.

But Olympia is both the Other to whom Nathaniel addresses his love andhis amatory discourse like the Lady of courtly ove)and his narcissistic upple-ment (love can after all be seen as the attempt o make the Other the same, toreconcile it with narcissism). Like him, she is in the position of a child towardthe father figures: Her fathers, palanzani and Coppola, are ... nothing butnew editions, reincarnations f Nathaniel's pair of fathers."'1 he is his sister-image, the realization of his essential ambivalence in relation to the fatherfigure-the attempt to identify with the father on one hand, and to makeoneself an object for him, to offer neself as the object of his love on the other(what Freud calls the "feminine ttitude"): "Olympia s, as it were, a dissociatedcomplex of Nathaniel's which confronts him as a person."" She is his "better

8. E. T. A. Hoffmann, TalesofHoffmann Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982),pp. 117 and118.9. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,' p. 232.10. Ibid.11. Ibid.




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half," the missing half that could make him whole, but which turns out to bethe materialized, mancipated death drive. She presents the point where thenarcissistic omplement urns ethal, where the imaginary tumbles n the real.

Olympia's position s conditioned by the tension of the second diagonalthat connects the two father figures, he father nd the Sand-Man. The threatof a loss of sight, he menace to one's eyes, which s the red thread of the storyand for Freud the main source of its uncanny character, s immediately on-nected with the castration complex, the threat of the loss of what is mostvaluable. Hoffmann's tory reats his omplex n the simplest nd most classicalway, with the duplication of father figures. The father s split nto the good

father,he

protectornd the bearer of the universal

Law,and the bad

father,the castrater, he menacing and jealous figure that evokes the father of theprimal horde, the father inked with errible ouissance. he good father rotectsNathaniel's eyes; the bad one threatens with blinding. The good father s killedby the bad one, who takes the blame for t, thus resolving n a simple way theessential mbivalence oward he father, hesubject's ovefor him and his death-wish against him. But the tension between he two fathers s irresolvable: ehindthe father who is the bearer of the Law, and as such reduced to the "Name-of-the-Father" i.e., the dead father), here is the horrible castrating igure thatLacan has called the "father-jouissance," he father who wouldn't die and who

comes to haunt the Law (and actually endows it with ts effectiveness). heSand-Man is the bearer of this terrible nd lethal ouissance.For Freud, the uncanny effect depends on castration, which also links

together he two diagonals and centers hem on the relation o the object. TheSand-Man as the castrating igure nd the figure of jouissance always appearsas the disturber f ove [St~irererLiebe]."He is the ntruder who always mergesat the moment when the subject comes close to fulfilling "sexual relation," ofind his imaginary upplement and become a "whole."'2 It is because of theappearance of the father-jouissance n the symbolic iagonal that hecompletionfails n the maginary ne. One could saythat n this first pproach, the uncannyis precisely what bars the sexual relation; t is the dimension that prevents usfrom finding ur Platonian missing halves and hence imaginary ompletion; tis the dimension that blocks the fulfillment f our subjectivity. he objectaldimension at one and the same time opens the threat of castration nd comesto fill the gap of castration. The uncanny emerges as a reality, ut one whichhas its only substance in a positivization f negativity, negative existence,castration. The positive presence of the objectal dimension is the "positiveexpression" of what Lacan, in one of his most famous dictums, has called theabsence of sexual relation "Ii n'y pas de rapport exuel").

12. "He separates Nathaniel from his betrothed nd from her brother, is best friend; he destroysthe second object of his ove,Olympia, he ovelydoll; and he drives him nto suicide at the momentwhen he has won back his Clara and is about to be happily united to her" (Ibid., p. 231).




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The Double

The dimension of the double, another source of the uncanny, implifiesthe quadruple scheme of the Sand-Man into a dual relation where the tensionappears between the subject and his double. Freud dwells on the omnipresence,the obsession with the theme of the double in Hoffmann's work, nd mentionsthe then-recent xample of Stellan Rye's film Der Student on Prag. The ex-haustive studies by Otto Rank and more recently y Karl Miller have shown thevery extensive use of this motive n literature and elsewhere), particularly tsincredible proliferation n the romantic era.'3 The authors range (apart fromHoffmann) from Chamisso (Peter Schlemihl), the Gothic novel, Andersen,Lenau, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hogg, Heine, Musset, Maupassant, Wilde, etc., toPoe (William Wilson) and Dostoyevsky Golyadkin).

There are some simple structural eatures of these stories that can them-selves have a number of complex ramifications with different utcomes. Thesubject is confronted with his double, the very mage of himself that can goalong with he disappearance, or trading ff, f his mirror mage or his shadow),and this crumbling of the subject's accustomed reality, his shattering f thebases of his world, produces a terrible nxiety.'4 Usually only the subject cansee his own double, who takes care to appear only n private, r for the subjectalone. The double

producestwo

seemingly ontradictoryffects: he

arrangesthings so that they turn out badly for the subject, he turns up at the mostinappropriate moments, he dooms him to failure; and he realizes the subject'shidden or repressed desires so that he does things he would never dare to door that his conscience wouldn't let him do. In the end, the relation gets sounbearable that the subject, n a final howdown, killshis double, unaware thathis only substance and his very being were concentrated n his double. So inkilling him he kills himself. You have conquered, and I yield," says Wilson'sdouble in Poe's story. Yet henceforward rt thou also dead-dead to the World,to Heaven, and to Hope In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this

image, which s thine own, how utterly hou hast murdered thyself.""5 s a rule,all these stories finish badly: the moment one encounters one's double, one isheaded for disaster; there seems to be no way out. (In clinical cases ofautoscopia--meeting or seeing one's double-the prognosis s also rather badand the outcome is likely o be tragic.)'6

Otto Rank gives an extensive account of the theme of the double indifferent mythologies nd superstitions.17 For all of them the shadow and the

13. Otto Rank, TheDouble:A Psychoanalytictudy London: Karnac-Maresfield ibrary, 989) andKarl Miller, Doubles Oxford: Oxford University ress, 1985).14. The heroes of these stories re alwaysmale. As will appear later, he double is also a deviceto avoid a relationship o femininity nd sexualilty n general.15. Edgar Allen Poe, SelectedWritings, d. David Galloway Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).16. See Eric Blumel, "L'hallucination du double," Analytica 2 (1980), pp. 35-53.17. Rank, The Double.




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"I Shall Be with ou on Your Wedding-Night" 13

by a doubling or a multiplication f a genital symbol."2' The multiplicity fsnakes on Medusa's head, to take another example from Freud, is there todissimulate the lack; the One, the Unique is missing. So the doubling, in thesimplest way, entails the loss of that uniqueness that one could enjoy in one'sself-being, but only at the price of being neither an ego nor a subject. Thedoubling cuts one off from a part, the most valuable part, of one's being, theimmediate self-being f ouissance.This is what Lacan will ater add to his earlytheory of the mirror phase: the object a is precisely hat part of the loss thatone cannot see in the mirror, he part of the subject hathas no mirror eflection,the nonspecular. The mirror n the most elementary way already implies the

split between the imaginary nd the real: one can only have access to imaginaryreality, o the world one can recognize oneself in and familiarize neself with,on the condition of the loss, the "falling out," of the object a. It is this oss ofthe object a that opens "objective" reality, he possibility f subject-object ela-tions, but since its oss is the condition of any knowledge of "objective" reality,it cannot itself become an object of knowledge.

We can now see the trouble with the double: the double is that mirrorimage in which the object a is included. So the imaginary tarts ocoincide withthe real, provoking shattering nxiety. The double is the same as me plus theobject a, that nvisible part of being added to my mage. In order for the mirror

image to contain the object a, a wink or a nod is enough. Lacan uses the gazeas the best presentation f that missing bject; in the mirror, ne can see one'seyes, but not the gaze which s the part that s lost. But imagine that one couldsee one's mirror mage close its eyes: that would make the object as gaze appearin the mirror. This is what happens with the double, and the anxiety that thedouble produces is the surest sign of the appearance of the object. (It can alsobe brought about in the opposite way, by the disappearance of one's mirrorimage, technically ubbed "the negative autoscopia," an example of which s tobe found in Maupassant's Le Horla.) Here the Lacanian account of anxietydiffers harply from other theories: t is not produced by a lack or a loss or anincertitude; t is not the anxiety of losing something the firm support, one'sbearings, tc.). On the contrary, t s the anxiety f gaining omething oomuch,of a too-close presence of the object. What one loses with anxiety s preciselythe loss-the loss that made it possible to deal with coherent reality. Anxietyis the lack of the support of the lack," saysLacan; the lack acks, and this bringsabout the uncanny.22

The inclusion of the object also entails the emergence of that ost part ofjouissance.The double is always the figure of jouissance:on one hand, he issomebody who enjoys t the subject's xpense; he commits cts that one wouldn't

21. Ibid., pp. 356-57.22. See Blumel, "L'hallucination," p. 49.




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dare to commit, he indulges n one's repressed desires and makes sure that theblame falls on the subject. On the other hand, though, he is not simply omeonewho enjoys, but essentially figure hat commands ouissance.The double is a"disturber f love": he typically prings up at the moment when one is about totouch, or to kiss, he girl of one's dreams; he springs up when the subject comesclose to the realization of his wishes, when he is on the brink of attaining fullenjoyment, he completion of the sexual relation. But while the double appearsto be the one who spoils and obstructs, what s significant s the choice of theobject. It is myself who prefers he double, the one who retains the object andwho can provide ouissance nd being, to the beautiful girl who can give me

pleasure. Onlythe alter

egocan offer he true

jouissancehat am not

willingto give up in favor f pleasure. The magnificent oung girl s rather he obstacleto my privileged relation to myself; he is the real spoiler in this game, thespoiler of narcissism, o one has to get rid of her (and the double takes care ofthis) n order to oin my real partner, my double. He retains hat ost primordialobject for which no woman can be a substitute. But of course joining one'sjouissance, egaining ne's primordial eing, s lethal. The subject an only ttainit by his death.

The appearance of the object n reality oesn't make t an object of possible"objective"knowledge. As a rule, t appears only to the subject; the others don't

see it and therefore on't understand the subject's peculiar behavior. t cannotbecome a part of accepted intersubjective pace. It is the privileged privateobject accessibleonly to the subject, his incorporated elf-being.

The double, retaining he object, also immediately ntroduces the deathdrive. The original function f the double (as the shadow and the mirror mage)was "an insurance against the destruction f the ego, an 'energetic enial of thepower of death' . . . and probably the immortal oul' was the first double' ofthe body.'"23 Yet what was designed as a defense against death, as a protectionof narcissism--one's mortality s that nanke whichmost mmediately ontradictsand limits he narcissistic holeness-turns into ts harbinger: when the double

appears, the time s up. One could saythat hedouble inaugurates hedimensionof the real precisely s the protection gainst "real" death. It introduces thedeath drive, that is, the drive in its fundamental ense, as a defense againstbiological death. The double is the initial repetition, he first epetition f thesame, but also that which keeps repeating tself, merging n the same place(one of the Lacanian definitions f the real), springing p at the most awkwardtimes, both as an irruption of the unexpected and with clockwork precision,totally npredictable nd predictable n one.

But the intrusion of the real in stories about the double is drastic anddramatic, and is not part of everyday experience. It can spring up for a

23. Graves, TheGreekMyths, . 356.




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moment-as in that highly unpleasant experience of Freud's when he met hismirror double in the very cozy and homely setting f a wagon-lit ompartmentwhile alone in his dressing gown and traveling ap.24 The world was out ofjoint, for that nstant, with the apparition of the intruder, n elderly gentlemandressed ust like him, until he recognized his own mirror reflection. ut "nor-mally" the lack implied in narcissism s the pivotal point between the mirrorphase and the Oedipus-that which can give it a "normal" outcome. Whathappens with the Oedipus, which s the entry nto the symbolic, s the shift nwhich the loss entailed by the mirror reflection s inscribed nto the register fthe Name-of-the-Father. he father's Law is what now denies the subject his

self-being,he

mmediacyf his

ouissance,s wellas the access to that

primordialobject of completion which is the mother. The father takes responsibility orthe loss, which makes him an ambiguous figure, ubject to a lack and split ntoa "good" and a "bad" father, producing the object that cannot fit nto thepaternal law. The Law offers words instead of things instead of the Thing); itguarantees the objective world instead of the object. This is the only way it ispossible for the subject to deal with he loss, although this operation necessarilyproduces a remainder which will come to haunt reality s it is instituted. heimmediate appeal of the theme of the double lies in the fact that t points tothat remainder. In fact, we are never rid of the predicament of the mirror

reflection.The theme of animism s closelyconnected to narcissism; t is its prolon-gation. The reality that is opposed to narcissistic sufficiency s conceived assubject to the same "psychological" aws as interiority-it s animated, nhabitedby spirits, tc. One gives up part of one's omnipotence to those spirits, ut sincethey are of the same nature as the ego, one can influence hem, seduce them,trade with them. The underlying ssumption s the omnipotence of thought;"the distinction etween imagination nd reality s effaced .. a symbol takesover the full functions f the thing t symbolizes."25 here is the class of phe-nomena where a series of coincidences and contingent vents suddenly startsto signify nd take on a fateful meaning, or conversely, chance event seemsto realize one's thought, hus confirming he belief n its omnipotence. "I knowthat thoughts an't kill, but nevertheless .. I believe they do." Here too, thesource of the uncanny is the reappearance of a part that was necessarily ostwith the emergence of the subject-the intersection etween the "psychic" ndthe "real," the interior nd the exterior, he "word" and the "object," the symboland the symbolized-the point where the real immediately oincides with thesymbolic o be put into the serviceof the maginary. o what s uncanny s againthe recuperation of the loss: the lost part destroys eality nstead of completingit.

24. Ibid., p. 371.25. Ibid., p. 367.




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The UniqueSo far I have considered the uncanny on a rather general evel, following

Freud's examples, which are, although he never explicitlymentions t, histori-callysituated. Hoffmann, he sudden emergence of the doubles in the romanticera, the extraordinary bsessionwith ghosts, ampires, undead dead, monsters,etc., in Gothic fiction nd all through the nineteenth entury, he realm of thefantastic-they all point to the emergence of the uncanny at a very precisehistorical moment. t is Frankenstein, owever, hat s perhaps the best exampleof this.

I started with a quadruple scheme in Hoffmann's tale, which was thenreduced to a dual relationship with he double. Now we can undertake furthersimplification r condensation of the problem by reducing t to a single elementbest presented by the theme of the monster.

It appears at first ight that Frankenstein s the direct opposite of thetheme of the double: the creature reated by Frankenstein s a monster withouta name, and his basic problem n the novel is precisely hat he cannot find hisdouble.26 t is a creature without iliation r a genealogy, without nybody whowould recognize or accept him (not even his creator). His narcissism s thusthwarted from the outset, nd the main part of the plot actually prings fromhis demand for a partner, omebody ike him, a wife, o that he could startline, a new filiation. He is One and Unique, and as such he cannot even have aname-he cannot be represented ya signifier which absence is often "sponta-neously" filled n by his "father's" name), he cannot be a part of the symbolic.The story tself had the strange fate of becoming "modern myth," very rareoccurrence ndeed. The huge number of different ersions n which heoriginalis virtually ost testifies o this fact. All these versions turn around the samefantasmatic ernel, etranscribing t to nfinity. t is a myth n the L6vi-Straussiansense of the word: the myth s "a logical model to resolve a contradiction aninsoluble task if the contradiction s real)"27-ultimately he contradiction e-

tween nature and culture.The myth has its starting oint n scientific iscourse. Shelley's Introduc-tion" takes up Erasmus Darwin as the witness, long with the background ofresearch into electromagnetic ccurrences, galvanism, etc. The possibility fcreating a human being seems to be just a small extension of the seeminglylimitless possibilities f the new science. But the connection with the Enlight-enment goes much further.

26. I am greatly ndebted to two recent nalyses: Chris Baldick, n Frankenstein's hadow Oxford:Oxford University ress, 1987) and Jean-Jacques ecercle, Frankenstein: ythe t PhilosophieParis:P.U.F., 1988). But I concentrate n only one line of argument, eglecting ther possibilities fferedby the material.27. Claude Levi-Strauss, tructural nthropology,rans. Monique Layton Chicago: University fChicago Press, 1983).




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"I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night" 17

The subtitle, The Modern Prometheus," wasprobably directly

orrowedfrom La Mettrie's 'Homme-Machine.28a Mettrie praises the craft f Vaucanson,the famous French constructor f automatons a highly uccessful flute player,to say nothing of the digesting duck). It seems that he was not far from beingable to produce a speaking being-"the machine which should not be consid-ered as impossible any more, especially n the hands of a new Prometheus"'29-with which La Mettrie only gives voice to a fantasy hat was then very muchalive: if Descartes could think of animals as machines, omewhat more compli-cated than human products, f he could see the human body as essentiallymechanism, a machine like a watch, it was only to highlight he difference

between the res xtensa nd the spirit. The Galilean revolution n physics penedthe perspective of the cosmos as a mechanism hence the ubiquitous presenceof billiard balls and clockwork n the seventeenth nd eighteenth enturies) ndput in question the autonomy f the spiritual. A hundred years ater La Mettrie'spoint was precisely o do away with that difference, o see the automaton notonly in the body, but also in the spirit. It was the age of fascination withautomata, still at work in Hoffmann, Poe, etc. What was at stake was the linkbetween matter nd spirit, nature and culture. The notion of the subject of theEnlightenment was all along an attempt o provide this ink. This is what oinstogether ts different acets: Locke's tabula rasa, le bon sauvage, 'homme-nature,Condillac's statue gradually acceding to the senses, the blind man-a majorfigure of the Enlightenment cf. Molyneux's famous problem for which all thephilosophers of the time proposed a solution, Diderot's Letter n the Blind, etc.;one could go so far as to say that the subject of the Enlightenment was blind),then Rousseau's Emile (whowas an orphan), etc. What they ll have in commonis the quest for a "zero degree" of subjectivity, he missing ink between natureand culture, the point where the spiritual would directly pring from the ma-terial. They all seem to aim at a subject beyond the imaginary, ingularlydeprived of a mirror phase, a nonimaginary ubject from which the imaginarysupport in the world has to be taken away (this is particularly lear with theblind) in order to reconstruct t, n its true significance, rom this "zero" point.

Frankenstein's reature demonstrates his n a particularly oignant way:it is the realization of the subject of the Enlightenment, he missing ink pro-duced by its scientific roject. He is created, so to speak, ex nihilo, nd he hasto recreate the whole complexity f the spiritual world ex nihilo.And we have,in the most extraordinary entral part of the book, a first-hand ccount of his

28. La Mettrie, 'Homme-MachineParis: Denoil Gonthier, 1981).29. Ibid., p. 143. It seems that the parallel was first stablished by Voltaire n 1738, some tenyears before La Mettrie:

Le hardi Vaucanson, rival de PromethdeSemblait, de la nature imitant es ressorts,Prendre le feu des cieux pour aimer les corps.




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subjectivation, first-person arration f the passage from nature nto culture.He is the zero point of natural subjectivity, nd herein ies his paradox: as theembodiment of the natural zero state, he is counter to nature, a monster,excluded from nature and culture like. Through his tragedy, ulture only getsback its own message: his monstrosity s the monstrosity f culture. The noblesavage, the self-educated man, turns bad only because the culture turns himdown. By not accepting him society hows ts corruption, ts nability ointegratehim, to include its own missing ink. Culture udges by nature (that s, by hislooks), not by culture that s, by his good heart and sensitivity). he creatureas the Unique only wants a social contract, ut being refused one he wants to

destroythe contract that excludes him and so to vindicate himself. Since he

cannot found a family-a minimal ontract with his like-he exterminates hefamily f his creator, who wouldn't recognize his offspring, is only link withculture. In the end all the figures f the novel are dead (except for Walton,who lives to tell the story).

The paradox of the creature ies in the fact that this embodiment f thesubject of the Enlightenment irectly disrupts ts universe and produces itslimit. The creature, that small extension of scientific ndeavor, would fill themissing ink and make it exist; it would bridge the gap. With ts addition, "thegreat chain of being" would be complete; one could pass without break from

matter ospirit, rom nature to culture. There was an empty pace between thetwo that the monster comes to fill, but what we get with this continuous, fulluniverse s the opposite of the traditional orror acui;it is a horror lenitudinis,the horror of an unsplit world. Frankenstein rings to humanity, ike Prome-theus, the spark of life, but also much more: there s a promise to provide itwith ts origin, to heal the wound of castration, o make it whole again. Butfilling he lack is catastrophic-the Enlightenment eaches its imit by realizingit, ust as the appearance of the double, in another context, produced the lackof lack.

The emergence of this imit f the Enlightenment s then open to a varietyof interpretations. he religious one is closest to hand: Frankenstein, whointerferes with God's business, has to be punished for his presumption nd hisrebellion against the divine order, the presumption nd the rebellion of theEnlightenment tself,which has gone too far. But there s an opposite, romanticinterpretation, positive view of the monster, which not only exhibits com-passion for the inherent goodness of his nature betrayed by society, ut alsoadmires the sublimity f his horrible utlook-he appears against backgroundof spectacular natural scenery Mont Blanc, the Arctics), long with ts unfath-omable wildness, being thus the embodiment f this other nature. Not the onewritten n mathematical anguage and that functions ike clockwork, mecha-nism, but the one that was lost with this mechanical scientific iew of nature,the one that became the lost object of scientific ndeavor and that can only bepresent as that effort o represent he unrepresentable, he Kantian definition




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"I ShallBe withYou on Your Wedding-Night" 19

of the sublime. One can also see a politicaldimension n it: the story akesplaceat the time of the French Revolution, which was already abeled as "monstrous"by Burke (another theorist of the sublime) and which produced, in a wholegeneration of young English intellectuals nd poets, a mixture of enthusiasmand horror. Mary Shelley was best placed to draw the consequences of thissituation: both her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft s the "founder" of feminismand William Godwin as the "founder" of anarchism, placed themselves n aradical line of revolutionary demands-"Englishmen, one more effort"-torealize the revolutionary hrust, he effort aradoxically ccomplished by theirdaughter. One could see in it the birth of the proletariat nd the horror that

provokes-andconservative iscourse

veryoon took hold of the monster s a

metaphor of workers' upheavals and demands, a personification f the mass,"the rule of the mob."30

It is not that these interpretations re not correct; they are all plausible,and evidence can be found to support them. The point where the monsteremerges is always mmediately eized by an overwhelming mount of meaning-and that is valid for the whole subsequent gallery of monsters, vampires,aliens, etc. It has immediate social and ideological connotations. The monstercan stand for everything hat our culture has to repress-the proletariat, ex-uality, other cultures, alternative ways of living, heterogeneity, he Other.3'

There is a certain arbitrariness n the content that can be projected onto thispoint, and there are many attempts o reduce the uncanny to ust this content.The important hing from Lacanian point of view, however, s that while thiscontent s indeed always present n the uncanny to a greater or a lesser degree,it doesn't constitute t. The uncanny is always at stake in ideology-ideologyperhaps basically onsists of a social attempt o integrate he uncanny, o makeit bearable, to assign it a place, and the criticism f ideology is caught in thesame framework f it tries to reduce it to another kind of content or to makethe content conscious and explicit. This criticism s always on the brink of anaive effort o fix things with their proper names, to make the unconsciousconscious, to restore the sense of what is repressed and thus be rid of theuncanny. The constant resurgence of "right-wing" deologies that find supportin the uncanny always comes as a surprise-the fascination won't vanish, thehistoricization ails, he "hidden contents" do not exhaust it. Thus the criticismof ideology helplessly repeats the modernist gesture-the reduction of theuncanny to its "secular basis" through the very ogic that actually produced theuncanny in the first place as the objectal remainder. Psychoanalysis doesn'tprovide a new and better nterpretation f the uncanny; t maintains t as a limitto interpretation. ts interpretation ries to circumscribe he point where inter-

30. See Franco Moretti, igns Taken or Wonders London: Verso, 1983).31. Ibid., p. 236.




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pretation fails, where no "more faithful" ranslation an be made. It tries topinpoint he dimension of the object n that iny rack before different meaningsget hold of it and saturate t with ense, the point that can never be successfullyrecuperated by the signifying hain. In other words, psychoanalysis iffers romother nterpretations y ts nsistence n the formal evelof the uncanny ratherthan on its content.

Lacan's specification hat the best presentification f the object s the gazedoesn't contradict hisformal evelof analysis. t seems that t names the objectand thus assigns t a place, but the gaze in its formal tructure s rather deviceto open a "non-place," he pure oscillation etween n emptiness nd a fullness.Frankenstein's

tory againreveals this

simplyand

efficiently.he

principalsource of the uncanniness of the monster, for Frankenstein, s precisely thegaze. It is the being of the gaze. The point that Frankenstein annot endure,during the creation of the monster, s the moment when the creature opens itseyes, when the Thing renders the gaze-it is this opening that makes it theThing. When seeing those "watery yes, that seemed almost of the same coloras the dun-white ockets n which they were set," Frankenstein uns away inhorror.32 ut the gaze comes to pursue him n his bedroom; the monster omesto his bedside-"his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were set on me."33Theemergence of this mpossible ubject s the emergence of the gaze-the openingof a hole in reality which s immediately lso that which comes to fill t with nunbearable presence, with being more being than being, vacuum nd plenitudoall in one, the plenitude as the direct onsequence of the emptiness. One couldsay that the monster's errible ppearance is only a mask, an imaginary overto provide a frame for his gaze. The same traumatic resence of the gaze canalso be pinpointed n the second "primal scene," the attempted reation of themonster's bride in a Scottish cottage, the scene that is interrupted preciselybecause of the appearance of the gaze. It finishes with the announcement ofthe reappearance of the gaze in the third primal scene": "I shall be with youon your wedding-night."34 nd he will.The bearer of the gaze will turn froma creature-that is, something reated, an offspring, son-into the figure fthe father-jouissance.

The gaze that occurs with uch precision n all the "primal scenes" of thenovel is an impossible gaze.Jean-Jacques ecercle has already pointed out thatit is situated as the presence of the gaze at the subject's own conception.35 temerges together with the emergence of the subject, in the moment of itsconception, as an hors-corps nd an hors-sexe.t is this object that would make

32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, n Three GothicNovels, d. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1979), p. 318.33. Ibid., p. 319.34. Ibid., p. 438.35. Lecercle, Frankenstein, . 99.




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the subject a causasui f t could be integrated-the missing ause of subjectivity,the missing ink of its emergence.

The Fantastic

Before concluding, et us consider briefly zvetan Todorov's "theory ofthe uncanny" n his classical analysis The Fantastic.36 is account seems to comevery close to the Lacanian one, yet it differs from t in the most importantrespect.

For Todorov, the main source of "the fantastic" roughly he realm of the

uncanny,o

simplifymatters) ies in an "intellectual

ncertainty.""37n Lacanian

terms t is the eruption of the real in the midst of familiar reality; t provokesa hesitation nd an uncertainty nd the familiar breaks down. Of course thishesitation s structural-it affects he internal, mplicit eader who is inscribedin the text, not the empirical or psychological ne. For Todorov, in the lastinstance, he fantastic as to be explained and dissolved. The hesitation annotbe maintained ndefinitely: ither the unexplainable turns out to be ust odd-the hero was deluded, mad, victim f a conspiracy, tc.-or the supernaturalreally exists, n which case we exchange our reality or another one with differ-ent rules a mythical world, the world of fairy ales,etc.). In both cases, the real

obtains a sense, it is allotted a meaning, and it thus evaporates. The uncannycould only ubsist n the narrow middle ground that xistsbefore the uncertaintyas to its nature is dissipated. And it was only n that no-man's-land hat t couldproduce anxiety nd doom the subject to utter nsecurity, o floating withoutpoint of anchor. Todorov then admirably draws the implications f this simplestarting point, shows a number of supplementary onditions that spring fromit, and demonstrates t on a number of convincing xamples.

The strength f this theory ies in its simplicity nd especially n its purelyformal character. t also offers n immediate ink with the Lacanian view thatthe real can never be dealt with directly, hat it emerges only in an obliqueperspective, nd that the attempt o grasp it directly makes it vanish. Neverthe-less, one could say that this theory overs both too much and too little. Toomuch because its formal description pplies also to a much broader area whichone could call the ogicof uspense. n its simplest form, t consists n the mech-anism whereby n essential piece of information e.g., the identity f the mur-derer) is withheld from the (implicit) reader and is disclosed only at the end.That delay makes the hero and the reader uncertain s to what s actually goingon without necessarily roducing the effect f the uncanny. Most detective nd

36. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic:A StructuralApproach oa Literary enre, rans. R. Howard(Ithaca: Cornell University ress, 1973).37. Ibid., p. 29.




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crime fiction s based on this, but with the advance certainty hat events willhave a plausible natural explanation (the certainty mbodied in that subjectsupposed to know, who is the detective).38 oo little, ince not only does it eaveout a great number of instances of the fantastic, ut also because, ultimately,the main source of the uncanny s not at all a hesitation r an uncertainty.

The instances not accounted for by this theory re easily found. A largepart of "fantastic iterature" has no intention f making the reader hesitate sto the true nature of events but is built on the assumption from he outset of a"supernatural" postulate. In Frankenstein e have to assume, for the durationof the narrative, he possibility f a "synthetic" roduction of "human" beings;in

Stephen King'sPet

Sematary,o take a

contemporary xample,we find the

possibility f the "resurrection f the dead" under certain onditions. Once wehave accepted this hypothesis, o hesitation ccurs, and yet those stories aredefinitely ncanny. The firm nowledge hat such things on't normally ccur"doesn't diminish the uncanny effect. The question may then arise of why weare so easily nclined to swallow n improbable hypothesis hat runs counter toall usual experience and be so easilyduped into anxiety by horror.

In his book on jokes, Freud quotes Lichtenberg's entence: "Not only didhe disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened f them."39 Clearly, theuncertainty elonging to knowledge has to be distinguished rom the area of

unconscious belief. "I know very well, but all the same . . . I believe," theformula so admirably pinpointed by Octave Mannoni in his classic paper, is atthe basis of this fabrication f the uncanny.40 he knowledge doesn't contradictthe belief, nor does the belief simply ose its force through knowledge, ince itis fundamentally ituated n relation to the object-which is not the object ofknowledge.

We have a second, more basic distinction o make. The knowledge, ndits un)certainties, s to be distinguished rom he terrible ertainty n the levelof the object. It is a certainty hat goes beyond any certainty which science canprovide, or better, t is only here that we reach the level of certainty, hereas

science can only yield exactitude nd remains ubject odoubt, questioning, ndproof. Only he bject an givecertainty, s it s only the object that provides one'sbeing. One can easily ee this n good fantastic iterature or its modern version,"horror fiction"): he logic of its uncanniness s even directly pposed to thelogic of suspense-what is horrible s that one knows n advance preciselywhatis bound to happen, and it happens. One could saythat n this evel the certainty

38. See Slavoj Zifek, Looking wry: n Introduction oJacques acan through opular Culture Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 1991).39. Sigmund Freud, Jokes nd Their Relation o the Unconscious1905), The Standard dition, ol.VIII, p. 92.40. "Je sais bien ... mais quand meme," n Clefs our L'Imaginaire u L'Autre scone Paris: Seuil,1969).




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is opposed to the unconscious belief s well. The fateful vents eem unavoidablefrom the very outset, yet unconsciously ne doesn't believe that the unavoidablewill happen.4' So there is a passage from "I know very well ... yet believe"to "I don't really believe . . yet am certain." The mechanism of uncanninessdoesn't leave you any space for uncertainty nd hesitation. f there s a structuralhesitation, r floating, ttached to it, t comes from heimpossibility f espousingthe terrible certainty-it would ultimately ntail psychosis, n annihilation ofsubjectivity. he apparent oscillationbetween knowledge and belief s rather astrategy of postponement to defer the encounter with the Thing (a strategysimilar to obsessional neurosis). So for Todorov the fantastic omes from lack

of certainty nd is dissipated when certainty s restored. From a Lacanianperspective he uncanny comes from oo much certainty, hen escape throughhesitation s no longer possible, when the object comes too close.

Todorov deals with well-circumscribed orpus of texts, clearly ut realmof the fantastic. ts beginning coincides roughly with the advent of modernityand its scientific ackground; its closure, somewhat surprisingly, oincides withthe advent of psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis as replaced (and thereby madesuperfluous) the fantastic iterature."42What appeared indirectly hrough thefantastic an be dealt with directly y psychoanalysis. o psychoanalysis ppearsto be the most fantastic f all fantastic ales-the ultimate horror story.

Such a conclusion seems rather abrupt, but there s a sense in which onemight gree. Psychoanalysis was the first o point out systematically he uncannydimension pertaining o the very project of modernity, ot in order to make itdisappear, but in order to maintain t, to hold it open. It is true that modernliterature had to develop other strategies o deal with it, as Todorov pointsout.43 But what is currently alled postmodernism-and this is one way todisentangle the growing confusion around this term-is a new consciousnessabout the uncanny as a fundamental dimension of modernity.44 t doesn't implya going beyond the modern, but rather an awareness of its internal imit, tssplit, which was there from the outset. Lacan's object a may be seen as itssimplest nd most radical expression.

41. See Ziz'ek, ookingAwry, p. 70-71.42. Todorov, TheFantastic, p. 168-69.43. Todorov gives the paradigmatic xample of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," where the source ofthe uncanny is actually the very absence of uncanny effects following ny uncanny event: thesupernatural s treated as natural, thus becoming "doubly" uncanny p. 183). One could add thatJoyce uses the inverse strategy n Ulysses: he very commonplace everyday events of an entirely"uneventful" ay in Dublin are endowed with the dignity f the Thing by their complex treatmentthrough anguage: the natural becomes "supernatural."44. Again, it s contemporary opular culture that displays the greatest ensitivity o this hift byits nsistence n and "working hrough" he "fundamental fantasies." The "return of the uncanny"currently ppears to be its prevailing feature.

Mladen Dolar - "I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the Uncanny

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