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"I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the Uncanny
Author(s): Mladen Dolar
Source: October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991), pp. 5-23
Published by: MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778795
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MLADEN
DOLAR
1.
Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny' " (1919), The StandardEditionof theCompletePsychological
Works,ed. James Strachey,vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
2.
Ibid., pp. 221, 222, 225.
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Nathaniel
Olympia
Father
Of course thisdiagram doesn't correspondat all to Lacan's originalintenillustratesa differentpoint. The L-schemewas introducedin order to
and
tion
situate the imaginaryego produced by the mirror phase in relation to the
symbolic,to the Other of the symbolicorder,and to a subjectthatis not an ego.
So the entire tension of Lacan's diagram, the drama it represents,is between
the imaginaryand the symbolicdiagonals. In our case, both the "imaginary"
line (Nathaniel-Olympia)and the "symbolic"one are haunted by the intrusion
of the real, the dimension that was not yet elaborated in early Lacan and had
no assigned place in the L-scheme,or whichwas presentthereonlyin an implicit
way. With its introduction,both diagonals become troubled and presage a
disaster.
Nathaniel fallsmadlyin love withthisbeautifulgirlwho seems remarkably
silentand reticent.It is true thatshe dances and she sings (as one can hear in
Offenbach'sHoffmann's
Tales), but in a verymechanicalway,keeping her beat
too accurately.Her vocabularyis ratherlimited; she only exclaims "Oh! oh!"
fromtimeto timeand says "Good night,love!" at the end of long conversations
in whichhe is the only speaker. Her eyes gaze into emptinessforhours on end.
Nathaniel never tiresof watchingher throughhis spyglass,and thisis sufficient
for bringingabout the follyof love: "She says but a few words, that is true,"
de
7.
H61kneCixous points out in "La Fictionet ses Fant6mes: Une lecturede l'Unheimliche
Freud," Poitique(1972), vol. 10, pp. 199-216, thatFreud makes some arbitrarycuts in Hoffmann's
storyand doesn't take into account the subtletyof his narrativestrategy.Although this is true to
some extent,one could show that those elementsdo not contradictFreud's reading. It seems that
Cixous triesto prove too much; for the veryact of interpretingoperates by arbitrarycuts and the
thatseemed
alleged wealthof the object interpretedis a retroactiveeffectof the veryinterpretation
to reduce it. Here, rather than claiming any fidelityto an original textual wealth, I proceed by
takingup only one essentialpoint thatinterestsme.
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10
OCTOBER
half," the missinghalf that could make him whole, but which turns out to be
the materialized,emancipated death drive. She presentsthe point where the
narcissisticcomplementturnslethal,where the imaginarystumbleson the real.
Olympia's position is conditioned by the tension of the second diagonal
that connects the two fatherfigures,the fatherand the Sand-Man. The threat
of a loss of sight,the menace to one's eyes,whichis the red thread of the story
and for Freud the main source of its uncanny character,is immediatelyconnected with the castration complex, the threat of the loss of what is most
valuable. Hoffmann'sstorytreatsthiscomplex in the simplestand mostclassical
way, with the duplication of fatherfigures.The fatheris split into the good
father,the protectorand the bearer of the universalLaw, and the bad father,
the castrater,the menacing and jealous figurethat evokes the fatherof the
primalhorde, the fatherlinkedwithterriblejouissance.The good fatherprotects
Nathaniel's eyes; the bad one threatenswithblinding.The good fatheris killed
by the bad one, who takes the blame for it, thus resolvingin a simple way the
essentialambivalencetowardthe father,the subject'slove forhim and his deathwishagainsthim. But the tensionbetweenthe twofathersis irresolvable:behind
the fatherwho is the bearer of the Law, and as such reduced to the "Name-ofthe-Father"(i.e., the dead father),there is the horriblecastratingfigurethat
the fatherwho wouldn't die and who
Lacan has called the "father-jouissance,"
comes to haunt the Law (and actually endows it with its effectiveness).The
Sand-Man is the bearer of thisterribleand lethaljouissance.
For Freud, the uncanny effectdepends on castration,which also links
togetherthe two diagonals and centersthemon the relationto the object. The
Sand-Man as the castratingfigureand the figureofjouissance"alwaysappears
derLiebe]."He is the intruderwho alwaysemerges
as the disturberof love [St~irer
a "sexual relation,"to
at the momentwhen the subjectcomes close to fulfilling
find his imaginarysupplement and become a "whole."'2 It is because of the
on the symbolicdiagonal thatthe completion
appearance of the father-jouissance
failson the imaginaryone. One could say thatin thisfirstapproach, the uncanny
is preciselywhat bars the sexual relation; it is the dimension that preventsus
fromfindingour Platonian missinghalves and hence imaginarycompletion;it
is the dimension that blocks the fulfillmentof our subjectivity.The objectal
dimension at one and the same time opens the threatof castrationand comes
to fillthe gap of castration.The uncannyemerges as a reality,but one which
has its only substance in a positivizationof negativity,a negative existence,
castration. The positive presence of the objectal dimension is the "positive
expression" of what Lacan, in one of his most famous dictums,has called the
absence of sexual relation("Ii n'ya pas de rapport
sexuel").
"He separates Nathanielfromhis betrothedand fromher brother,his bestfriend;he destroys
12.
the second object of his love, Olympia,the lovelydoll; and he driveshim intosuicide at the moment
when he has won back his Clara and is about to be happilyunited to her" (Ibid., p. 231).
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11
The Double
The dimension of the double, another source of the uncanny,simplifies
the quadruple scheme of the Sand-Man into a dual relation where the tension
appears between the subjectand his double. Freud dwellson the omnipresence,
the obsession withthe theme of the double in Hoffmann'swork,and mentions
the then-recentexample of Stellan Rye's filmDer Studentvon Prag. The exhaustive studies by Otto Rank and more recentlyby Karl Miller have shown the
very extensive use of this motive in literature(and elsewhere), particularlyits
incredible proliferationin the romanticera.'3 The authors range (apart from
Hoffmann) from Chamisso (Peter Schlemihl), the Gothic novel, Andersen,
Lenau, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hogg, Heine, Musset, Maupassant, Wilde, etc., to
Poe (William Wilson) and Dostoyevsky(Golyadkin).
There are some simple structuralfeaturesof these storiesthat can themselves have a number of complex ramificationswith differentoutcomes. The
subject is confrontedwith his double, the very image of himself(that can go
along withthe disappearance, or tradingoff,of his mirrorimage or his shadow),
and this crumbling of the subject's accustomed reality,this shatteringof the
bases of his world, produces a terribleanxiety.'4Usually only the subject can
see his own double, who takes care to appear only in private,or for the subject
alone. The double produces two seeminglycontradictoryeffects:he arranges
things so that they turn out badly for the subject, he turns up at the most
inappropriate moments,he dooms him to failure; and he realizes the subject's
hidden or repressed desires so that he does thingshe would never dare to do
or that his conscience wouldn't let him do. In the end, the relation gets so
unbearable that the subject,in a finalshowdown,killshis double, unaware that
his only substance and his very being were concentratedin his double. So in
killinghim he kills himself."You have conquered, and I yield," says Wilson's
double in Poe's story."Yet henceforwardartthou also dead-dead to the World,
to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this
As a rule,
image, whichis thineown, how utterlythou hast murdered thyself.""5
all these stories finishbadly: the moment one encounters one's double, one is
headed for disaster; there seems to be no way out. (In clinical cases of
autoscopia--meeting or seeing one's double-the prognosis is also ratherbad
and the outcome is likelyto be tragic.)'6
Otto Rank gives an extensive account of the theme of the double in
differentmythologiesand superstitions.17 For all of them the shadow and the
13.
Otto Rank, TheDouble:A Psychoanalytic
Study(London: Karnac-MaresfieldLibrary,1989) and
Karl Miller,Doubles(Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1985).
14.
The heroes of these storiesare always male. As will appear later,the double is also a device
to avoid a relationshipto femininityand sexualiltyin general.
15.
ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1979).
Edgar Allen Poe, SelectedWritings,
16.
See Eric Blumel, "L'hallucinationdu double," Analytica22 (1980), pp. 35-53.
17.
Rank, The Double.
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15
24.
25.
Ibid., p. 371.
Ibid., p. 367.
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The Unique
So far I have considered the uncannyon a rathergeneral level, following
Freud's examples, which are, although he never explicitlymentionsit, historicallysituated.Hoffmann,the sudden emergenceof the doubles in the romantic
era, the extraordinaryobsessionwithghosts,vampires,undead dead, monsters,
etc., in Gothic fictionand all throughthe nineteenthcentury,the realm of the
fantastic-they all point to the emergence of the uncanny at a very precise
historicalmoment.It is Frankenstein,however,thatis perhaps the best example
of this.
I started with a quadruple scheme in Hoffmann'stale, which was then
reduced to a dual relationshipwiththe double. Now we can undertakea further
or condensationof the problemby reducingit to a singleelement
simplification
best presented by the theme of the monster.
It appears at firstsight that Frankensteinis the direct opposite of the
theme of the double: the creaturecreated by Frankensteinis a monsterwithout
a name, and his basic problem in the novel is preciselythathe cannot find his
double.26It is a creaturewithoutfiliationor a genealogy,withoutanybodywho
would recognize or accept him (not even his creator). His narcissismis thus
thwartedfrom the outset,and the main part of the plot actuallyspringsfrom
his demand for a partner,somebody like him, a wife,so that he could starta
line, a new filiation.He is One and Unique, and as such he cannot even have a
name-he cannotbe represented
(which absence is often "spontabya signifier
in
his
cannot be a part of the symbolic.
filled
"father's"
he
name),
neously"
by
The storyitselfhad the strangefateof becominga "modern myth,"a veryrare
occurrenceindeed. The huge numberof differentversionsin whichthe original
is virtuallylost testifiesto this fact. All these versions turn around the same
It is a mythin the L6vi-Straussian
itto infinity.
fantasmatickernel,retranscribing
sense of the word: the mythas "a logical model to resolve a contradiction(an
insoluble task if the contradictionis real)"27-ultimatelythe contradictionbetween nature and culture.
The mythhas its startingpoint in scientificdiscourse. Shelley's"Introduction" takes up Erasmus Darwin as the witness,along with the background of
research into electromagneticoccurrences,galvanism,etc. The possibilityof
creating a human being seems to be just a small extension of the seemingly
limitlesspossibilitiesof the new science. But the connectionwith the Enlightenment goes much further.
Shadow(Oxford:
26.
I am greatlyindebted to two recentanalyses:Chris Baldick,In Frankenstein's
Oxford UniversityPress, 1987) and Jean-JacquesLecercle, Frankenstein:
(Paris:
Mytheet Philosophie
P.U.F., 1988). But I concentrateon onlyone line of argument,neglectingotherpossibilitiesoffered
by the material.
Claude Levi-Strauss,Structural
trans. Monique Layton (Chicago: Universityof
27.
Anthropology,
Chicago Press, 1983).
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17
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19
of the sublime. One can also see a politicaldimensionin it: the storytakes place
at the time of the French Revolution,whichwas already labeled as "monstrous"
by Burke (another theoristof the sublime) and which produced, in a whole
generation of young English intellectualsand poets, a mixtureof enthusiasm
and horror. Mary Shelley was best placed to draw the consequences of this
situation: both her parents,Mary Wollstonecraftas the "founder" of feminism
and William Godwin as the "founder" of anarchism, placed themselves in a
radical line of revolutionarydemands-"Englishmen, one more effort"-to
realize the revolutionarythrust,the effortparadoxicallyaccomplished by their
daughter. One could see in it the birthof the proletariatand the horror that
provokes-and conservativediscourse verysoon took hold of the monsteras a
metaphor of workers' upheavals and demands, a personificationof the mass,
"the rule of the mob."30
It is not that these interpretationsare not correct; they are all plausible,
and evidence can be found to support them. The point where the monster
emerges is always immediatelyseized by an overwhelmingamount of meaning
-and that is valid for the whole subsequent gallery of monsters,vampires,
aliens, etc. It has immediate social and ideological connotations.The monster
can stand for everythingthat our culture has to repress-the proletariat,sexuality, other cultures, alternativeways of living, heterogeneity,the Other.3'
There is a certain arbitrarinessin the content that can be projected onto this
point, and there are many attemptsto reduce the uncanny to just thiscontent.
The importantthingfroma Lacanian point of view,however,is thatwhile this
contentis indeed always presentin the uncannyto a greateror a lesser degree,
it doesn't constituteit. The uncanny is always at stake in ideology-ideology
perhaps basicallyconsistsof a social attemptto integratethe uncanny,to make
it bearable, to assign it a place, and the criticismof ideology is caught in the
same frameworkif it tries to reduce it to another kind of contentor to make
the content conscious and explicit. This criticismis always on the brink of a
naive effortto fix things with their proper names, to make the unconscious
conscious, to restore the sense of what is repressed and thus be rid of the
uncanny.The constantresurgenceof "right-wing"ideologies that find support
in the uncanny always comes as a surprise-the fascinationwon't vanish, the
historicizationfails,the "hidden contents"do not exhaust it. Thus the criticism
of ideology helplessly repeats the modernist gesture-the reduction of the
uncanny to its "secular basis" throughthe verylogic thatactuallyproduced the
uncanny in the firstplace as the objectal remainder. Psychoanalysisdoesn't
provide a new and betterinterpretationof the uncanny; it maintainsit as a limit
to interpretation.
Its interpretationtries to circumscribethe point where inter-
30.
31.
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36.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic:A Structural
Approachto a LiteraryGenre,trans. R. Howard
(Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1973).
37.
Ibid., p. 29.
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crime fictionis based on this,but with the advance certaintythat events will
have a plausible natural explanation (the certaintyembodied in that subject
Too little,since not onlydoes it leave
supposed to know,who is the detective).38
out a great number of instancesof the fantastic,but also because, ultimately,
the main source of the uncannyis not at all a hesitationor an uncertainty.
The instances not accounted for by this theoryare easily found. A large
of
part "fantasticliterature"has no intentionof makingthe reader hesitateas
to the true nature of eventsbut is builton the assumptionfromthe outsetof a
we have to assume, for the duration
"supernatural" postulate. In Frankenstein
of the narrative,the possibilityof a "synthetic"productionof "human" beings;
in Stephen King's Pet Sematary,
to take a contemporaryexample, we find the
of
the
of
the dead" under certainconditions.Once we
"resurrection
possibility
have accepted this hypothesis,no hesitationoccurs, and yet those stories are
definitelyuncanny.The firmknowledgethat"such thingsdon't normallyoccur"
doesn't diminishthe uncanny effect.The question may then arise of why we
are so easily inclined to swallowan improbablehypothesisthatruns counterto
all usual experience and be so easilyduped into anxietyby horror.
In his book on jokes, Freud quotes Lichtenberg'ssentence: "Not only did
he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightenedof them."39 Clearly,the
uncertaintybelonging to knowledge has to be distinguishedfrom the area of
unconscious belief. "I know very well, but all the same . . . I believe," the
formulaso admirablypinpointedby Octave Mannoni in his classic paper, is at
the basis of thisfabricationof the uncanny.40The knowledgedoesn't contradict
the belief,nor does the beliefsimplylose its forcethroughknowledge,since it
is fundamentallysituated in relationto the object-which is not the object of
knowledge.
We have a second, more basic distinctionto make. The knowledge,and
its (un)certainties,is to be distinguishedfromthe terriblecertaintyon the level
of the object. It is a certaintythat goes beyond any certaintywhichscience can
provide, or better,it is only here that we reach the level of certainty,whereas
science can onlyyieldexactitudeand remainssubjectto doubt,questioning,and
as it is only the object thatprovidesone's
proof. Onlytheobjectcan givecertainty,
being. One can easilysee thisin good fantasticliterature(or itsmodernversion,
"horror fiction"):the logic of its uncanniness is even directlyopposed to the
logic of suspense-what is horribleis thatone knowsin advance preciselywhat
is bound to happen, and it happens. One could saythaton thislevelthecertainty
toJacquesLacan through
38.
See Slavoj Zifek,LookingAwry:An Introduction
PopularCulture(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
39.
(1905), The StandardEdition,vol.
Sigmund Freud, Jokesand TheirRelationto theUnconscious
VIII, p. 92.
40.
"Je sais bien ... mais quand meme," in ClefspourL'Imaginaireou L'Autrescone(Paris: Seuil,
1969).
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23
41.
See Ziz'ek,LookingAwry,pp. 70-71.
42.
Todorov, The Fantastic,pp. 168-69.
43.
Todorov gives the paradigmaticexample of Kafka's "Metamorphosis,"where the source of
the uncanny is actually the very absence of uncanny effectsfollowingany uncanny event: the
supernatural is treated as natural, thus becoming "doubly" uncanny (p. 183). One could add that
Joyce uses the inverse strategyin Ulysses:the verycommonplace everydayevents of an entirely
"uneventful"day in Dublin are endowed withthe dignityof the Thing by theircomplex treatment
through language: the natural becomes "supernatural."
44.
to thisshiftby
Again, it is contemporarypopular culture thatdisplaysthe greatestsensitivity
its insistenceon and "workingthrough"the "fundamentalfantasies."The "returnof the uncanny"
currentlyappears to be its prevailingfeature.
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