Original scientific paper

Writing the Uncanny: Freud, Cixous, Derrida

Mirela Dakić ; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Abstract

The essay reconstructs the discussion about Sigmund Freud’s famous text The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche, 1919), highlighting different conceptualizations of the relation between the literary and the psychoanalytic text. Starting from the privileged connection of literature and the uncanny, related with Freud’s critical turn from the esthetics based on the pleasure principle, divergent interpretative positions emerge in the following discussion. After considering the established critique of Freud’s reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman”, which revalues the uncanny and the castration from the perspective of the literary text, elaborated in Samuel Weber’s and Sarah Kofman’s approaches, we discuss Hélène Cixous’s former insights into the uncanniness of Freud’s text, compatible with Jacques Derrida’s analysis of his diabolical scene of writing. In the midst of its crisis of phenomenality, the uncanny literary uncertainty upsets what used to be the familiar psychoanalytic text.

Keywords

the uncanny; repetition compulsion; pleasure principle; castration; esthetics; literature

Hrčak ID:

247740

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/247740

Publication date:

13.12.2020.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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