Nicholas Royle
This collection of essays took shape out of a one-day conference at the University of Sussex on midsummer’s day 2019. The call for papers ran as follows:
- What does it mean to suppose that ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’? A hundred years after the original German publication of Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ (‘DasUnheimliche’), how do we read and engage with the question of the uncanny today?
- Freud observes: ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign [wirselbstFremdsprachigesind]’. Or more literally, ‘we ourselves are foreign-language-speakers’, ‘we ourselves are foreign-language-ers’. What are we to make of this foreignness of language and of ourselves? What is the relationship between this foreignness and art (especially literature)? What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and translation, psychoanalysis and the uncanny, philosophy and the uncanny? How have such questions been illuminated by writers and thinkers since 1919?
- What are we to do with the uncomfortable strangeness, the strange familiarity, the weirdness or waywardness of ‘uncanniness’ today? How might we write or talk about it, in relation to, for example, the human, the non-human and inhuman; language, translation and the untranslatable; politics and justice; the natural and unnatural; mourning and spectrality; climate change and mass extinctions; science and technology; time and history; memory; trauma; poetry and literature; theatre and performance; painting, film and other visual culture; music; magical thinking; biography and autobiography; sport and play; home and family; nation and migration; sex and gender; race and ethnicity; religion and non- religion; animate and inanimate; comedy and humour; secrecy;health and well-being; illness and death?
The Oxford Literary Review, in collaboration with the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought at the University of Sussex, is planning a one-day conference on Friday 21 June 2019, to mark the centenary of the publication of Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ (‘DasUnheimliche’). Freud’s essay is fascinatingly disjointed, suggestive and abrupt in its movements – developments taken up but not concluded, things left unspoken, embedded micro-narratives, aphoristic formulations such as ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’. In an attempt to respond to this, and in the hope that this midsummer’s day might be as full as possible, we envisage a somewhat unusual structure for the conference: there will be no keynote speakers, but rather a good number of short presentations (no more than ten minutes in length, i.e. 1,400 words maximum).
In preparing their texts for publication here, contributors were asked to keep to the original, compressed length, with an additional 100 words to allow for references and endnotes. It is hoped that the outcome—a considerable number of short, sharply focused essays— will please, provoke, disturb and stimulate. Most of the essays were written by those who came to Sussex in June 2019; a few others were submitted shortly afterwards by scholars, friends and strangers unable to make it on the day. There was, nonetheless, something about that day—the intensity and conviviality, the speed and simplicity (speakers delivering their brief presentations in alphabetical order of surname), the unflagging richness of the thinking, and a new and unexpected cumulative apprehension of how much Freud’s essay still has to give.
As all of these essays differently attest, what is uncanny is surprising. Uncanniness is not to be mastered. It is a matter of what eludes us, leaves us (betimes) strangers to ourselves, as well as to the world or others. No one foresaw the uncanniness of the Covid-19 pandemithat has engulfed 2020. When beginning to edit these essays for publication, I feared that they might seem merely ‘out of date’, ‘behind the times’, anachronistic. They are all these things, indeed; but they are also documents that resonate with what is now happening— in part through reminding us of massive continuities (the forms of disturbance, trouble, injustice and so forth that run on and on), and in part through their explorations and analyses of the uncanny asuntimely, disrupting our sense and experience of time.
31 August 2020