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Irony Of The Unheimcanny

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1.1. Das Unheimlich: Introduction In the very first few sentences of The Uncanny (1919), Freud demarcates the uncanny as that which is usually pushed to the periphery of aesthetic investigations. Traditional aesthetic inquiries 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”. But Freud turns his investigation towards the domain of the frightening, to an aesthetics of anxiety. Freud’s essay which explores the uncertainty of an uncanny moment has received a lot of careful attention by several renowned scholars of recent years. However, he was not the first one to undertake the study of this concept. The essay is responding to Ernst Jentsch’s study on the uncanny, called “Über die Psychologie des …show more content…

This led to his derivation of the uncanny as a dichotomy of unheimlich/heimlich. Unheimlich, although translates into the uncanny or eerie in English, etymologically refers to ‘unhomely’. Its seeming antonym, ‘heimlich’ while on the one hand could refer to that which is familiar and comfortable, it also means that which remains hidden. The second meaning of heimlich, along with the meaning of unheimlich, come together to each other in Schelling’s remark, who refers to the ‘uncanny’ or unheimlich as “that which was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open” . The overlap between the heimlich and unheimlich, carries within it the ambivalence of the deeply familiar. The “… unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix 'un' ['un-'] is the token of repression” . Thus, through the lexical investigation, Freud asserts the uncanny (unheimlich) as being located in the canny (heimlich) itself, but in

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