Returning to The Uncanny

Having begun this blog with the discovery of The Uncanny on my doorstep (still no explanation btw), it’s time to return to it here….

 

The Uncanny – or ‘unheimlich’ / ‘unhomely’ – is associated with the repression of something which was once familiar. It manifests itself in strange returns, reappearances, doublings and hauntings. (Freud also connects it with the fear of castration and losing one’s eyes and with severed limbs but I’ve not processed the implications of that yet!)

 

It seems to me that there might be something uncanny about our interest in the past.

Progressive Nostalgia

A friend just sent an email raising the idea of ‘progressive nostalgia’. I thought I’d comment on it here.

The Historical Shiver

It seems to be fairly standard to draw a dividing line between memory and history on the grounds that the former is affective and sensory and the latter critical and dispassionate. Even theorists who propose a ‘reconciliation’ between the two continue to see them as sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum on this matter.[1]

 

I accept that history and memory represent different ways of approaching the past. However, I am struggling with the idea of history as fundamentally non-affective and non-sensory. Conversations with colleagues suggest that I am not the only one to experience a shiver at opening an untouched box of archives.

 

Collective Memory: Two Films

Comments on Waltz with Bashir and Hunger (some spoilers)….

Big Question

In a 1972 article Eric Hobsbawm noted that ‘Clearly the sense of belonging to an age-old tradition of rebellion provides emotional satisfaction, but how and why?’ That is the big question I am struggling with at the moment.

[I haven't worked out how to do footnotes yet, but the article was 'The Social Functions of the Past: Some Questions', Past and Present 55 (1972), pp. 3-17]

Uncanny

I’ve recently been reading Freud’s The Uncanny, and wondering whether it is relevant to my work. I keep meaning to buy myself a copy but so far have been using one in the library. I arrived home last night, and found a copy on my doorstep in an unmarked envelope, no note. No emails to explain it either. I’ve been struggling to think who I’ve talked to about this who also knows where I live. A blank. Of all the books for this to happen with…!