MLN 1111 It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny ❦ Susan Bernstein “Das Unheimliche”—the uncanny—has been with us for some time. Freud’s famous essay began to attract critical attention in the early seventies as psychoanalysis became important in literary studies. Samuel Weber’s essay, “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment,” first published in MLN in 1973 and reprinted in the expanded edition of The Legend of Freud in 2000, is now a classic in the literature of the uncanny. Reading Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” along with Hoffmann’s “Sandman” and Villier de l’Isle-Adam’s novel l’Eve future, Weber makes an important intervention in arguing against the many prior approaches to this topic which had tended to understand it solely as an “emotive phenomenon” identified with feelings of fear, anxiety, weirdness, etc. “Such a position,” he writes, “misconstrues the peculiar structure of the uncanny, or more pre- cisely, ignores the fact that the uncanny has a particular structure, which, however intimately bound up with subjective feelings—above all anxiety—is nonetheless determined by a series of ‘objective’ factors that in turn stand in a certain relation to literary discourse” (208).1 He thus joins in the discussion that begins to understand Freud’s text as itself a case of the uncanny,2 and indeed of the literary uncanny. Weber points to Freud’s failure to define the uncanny in a final or complete way, suggesting that this is not an error on Freud’s part, but rather tells us something about the uncanny itself. At the same time, Weber steers clear of defining the uncanny as an “object.” Rather, what characterizes the uncanny is precisely the impossibility of looking it “straight in the eyes, as it were . peeling and paring MLN 118 (2004): 1111–1139 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1112 SUSAN BERNSTEIN away its external layers to get at the ‘conceptual kernel’ within and yet unable to ever eliminate the (growing) shadow of doubt—all this indicates that even if the uncanny is not conceived as an irreducibly subjective sentiment, its objective structure cannot be determined solely in thematic terms” (1115). The uncanny calls not for a definition, a collection of thematic terms, but rather, as a “‘formal,’ textual structure,” demands reading. This insistence on reading, foregrounding the textuality of the uncanny, points to the ways in which the uncanny functions as a critique of identity. “The reading that I now propose to undertake,” Weber writes, “seeks . to avoid the impasse of interpretations which—like Freud’s Musterung— conceive and organize their own activity, consciously or uncon- sciously, in terms derived from a notion of perception (‘vision’) which in turn is based upon ontological presuppositions that the problematic of castration precisely and decisively dislocates: namely, upon the presence and identity of the ‘object’ in question” (1115). Since Weber’s article was published, as well as several other lively texts on the topic,3 “the Uncanny” has tended to become a fixed psychoanlaytic concept whose descriptive potential overshadows the fact that the uncanny puts in question the possibility of definition itself.4 Weber’s work on the uncanny, in contrast, focuses on reading and textuality, rather than on conceptual results. His reading of the uncanny continues in the essay “Uncanny Thinking” (1999), also added to the new edition of Legend of Freud.5 Interestingly, the two essays on the uncanny are both supplements to the original book and thus destabilize the identity boundaries of The Legend of Freud. In this essay, I would like to follow Weber’s lead in continuing to read the uncanny and outline some of its peculiar textual features. Weber’s discussion in the earlier essay, while giving due importance to the problem of castration in the uncanny, reads this in the Lacanian tradition as a problem of the unreliability of vision, the strange crossing from sense perception to the symbolic order, and the emergence of anxiety around the creeping conviction of the subject’s incompletion, lack of wholeness and fallibility. That is, he does not reduce it to the castration scenario, as Freud does in his (mis)reading of the “The Sandman”: For what the child “discovers”—that is, interprets—as “castration” is neither nothing nor simply something, at least in the sense in which the child expects and desires it to be: what is “discovered” is the absence of the maternal phallus, a kind of negative perception, whose object or refer- ent—perceptum—is ultimately nothing but a difference, although no MLN 1113 simple one, since it does not refer to anything, least of all to itself, but instead refers itself indefinitely . Castration thus structures the future identity and experience of the subject, by confronting it with its uncon- scious desire as a violent and yet constitutive difference, preventing the subject from ever being fully present to itself, or fully self-conscious. (215– 16) This castration anxiety, then, is not literally about the boy’s fear of losing his penis, but surrounds what Weber describes as a “restructur- ing of experience, including the relation of perception, desire and consciousness, in which the narcissistic categories of identity and presence are riven by a difference they can no longer subdue or command” (216–17). The differences between presence and ab- sence, sameness and difference, self and other, are of course particu- larly at stake here. All of these pairs are troubled by the destabiliza- tion of binary opposition that Freud formulates as one of the fundamental features of the uncanny, that is, between the “heimlich” and the “unheimlich,” the “homey” and the “foreign,” the familiar and the strange. While the uncanny is often discussed in terms of these pairs, most importantly, the opposition itself is untenable. Freud points out: “Aus diesem langen Zitat ist fur uns am interes- santesten, dass das Wörtchen heimlich unter den mehrfachen Nuancen seiner Bedeutung auch eine zeigt, in der es mit seinem Gegensatz unheimlich zusammenfallt” [“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’”].6 One might even read “unheimlich” here as an adverb, for the coincidence of a term with its opposite is itself uncanny. Uncanny is the word always falling away from itself into its opposite, yet affirming itself in doing so. The uncanny comes into being as a violation of the law of non-contradiction. Like a ghost, it “is” and “is not.” The opposition between subject and object also falls away with the erosion of the structure of identity; subject and predicate can no longer keep their boundaries intact. The uncanny is not a stable concept (subject) to which the predicate of a clear definition can be attached. Likewise, there can be no reliable identification of a text or event as uncanny, no stable thing to which the qualities of the uncanny can be predicated. The propositional structure of adequation collapses in uncanny writing, for the model of adequation requires that each member stay on its own side of the copula. However, this does not mean that the uncanny is some ineffable quality about which nothing can be said. In fact, the naming 1114 SUSAN BERNSTEIN of the uncanny is constitutive of it, helps to bring it about, and partakes in it; this relationship is one that can be further examined. Speaking of the uncanny thus calls for some caution, or perhaps, it makes explicit the caution required when trying to define anything at all. Martin Heidegger discusses the pitfalls of definition in his essay “Zur Seinsfrage,” “On the Question of Being,” which will incidentally entail some mention of the uncanny. In this essay, Heidegger takes issue with Ernst Jünger’s efforts to find a “good definition” of nihilism. Heidegger clearly criticizes the definitional procedure that takes the object of inquiry to be a stable and separate entity waiting to be defined by propositions. Instead, he allows questions to “turn towards” what they ask about, hoping thus to dislodge the opposi- tional relationship separating and dessicating both the subject and object poles. This is how he asks about the essence, the Wesen, of a thing: Woher kommt dieses Wesen? Wo haben wir es zu suchen? Welches ist der Ort des Nichts? Wir fragen nicht unbedacht zuviel, wenn wir nach dem Ort sauchen und das Wesen der Linie erörtern. Doch ist dies etwas anderes als der Versuch, das zu leisten, was Sie [Jünger] verlangen: ‘eine gute Definition des Nihilismus’? Es sieht so aus, als werde das Denken wie in einem magischen Kreis fortgesetzt um das Selbe herumgefördert oder gar herumgenarrt, ohne sich doch je diesem Selben nähern zu können. Aber vielleicht ist der Kreis eine verborgene Spirale. Vielleicht hat sich diese inszwischen verengt. Dies bedeutet: die Art und die Weise, nach denen wir und dem Wesen des Nihilismus nähern, wandlen sich. Die Güte der rechtmäßig verlangten ‘guten Definition’ findet ihre Bewahrung darin, dass wir das Definierenwollen aufgeben, insofern diese sich auf Aus- sagessätze festlegen muß, in denen das Denken abstirbt.7 [From where does this essence come? Where must we seek it? What is the locale of the nothing? We shall not be asking too much in an unthinking manner if we search for the locale and in our discussion locate the essence of the line. Yet is this something other than the attempt to provide what you demand: ‘a good definition of nihilism’? It looks as though thinking is continually led around or even chased around the Same as though in a magical circle, yet without ever being able to approach this Same.