The Unconcept by Masschelein Anneleen

Author:Masschelein, Anneleen [Masschelein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438435558
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2011-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

This substantial quote is one of many junctions where various semantic fields and discursive strategies converge. The passage treats a specific part of “The Uncanny” in which Freud sets out to clarify the link between the uncanny and the return of surmounted primitive fears with a number of examples, leading to the desire to return to the womb.

The example of the animated body parts is highlighted in the enumeration by means of quotation marks and functions as a metaphor for Freud's entire text, “this great gathering in which members form an always dismembered unity.” The classic analogy of text and body parodies the Christian image of the Church as a body with Christ as the head, as well as the “corpus” of examples in scientific research. A corpus is an artificial, dead construct, a closed, finite collection of data isolated from their normal environment, in order to be taken apart, analyzed and reassembled in one conclusion or hypothesis. In the corpus of “The Uncanny,” the various elements resist this unifying, leveling treatment. The fragmented collection of body parts evokes the Lacanian “fragmented body,” i.e., the bodily experience of an infant before the mirror stage and the process of identity formation have set in.

The sources of Freud's strange pleasure in accumulating examples are thus multiple: the forepleasure of aesthetic composition, infantile sexual pleasure, and the dark pleasure of the repetition compulsion. The connotation of the pre-oedipal fragmented body is reinforced by the references to intra-uterine existence and to birth (and death). When the textual “baby” is born, the head is missing. There is no nucleus or keystone to unite the whole under the hegemony of one hierarchical idea expressed by the title.45 Although the title of the essay suggests such a nucleus, this is but an illusion, a trick to keep up scientific appearances: “Just as the still undetermined Unheimliche benefits from the status of concept, so too is the non-scientific clothed with the dignity of the scientific” (Cixous 1976, 529). The image of the head is associated with the intellect, rationality, and control, exactly the things lacking in Freud's essay, as has been made clear in the many words connoting control. Last but not least, the image of the headless figure—the acéphale is an intertextual allusion to Georges Bataille's notorious journal and cult, and to Derrida's “The Double Session,” the main source of inspiration for “Fiction and its Phantoms.”

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