Incorporating the Uncanny: Das Unheimliche as a Cultural Experience

The main subject I am going to focus on in this chapter is a short cultural history of the category of the uncanny: the history of its cultural operationalization. Concentration on the very process of framing of the uncanny, and the functions of the uncanniness in various cultural contexts is to be connected above all with the question of the heuristic potential of ‘the uncanny’. The argumentation presented here relies on a on the idea of the uncanny introduced by Freud, and the theoretical context of contemporary post-Heideggerian radical hermeneutics. Yet, the category of das Unheimliche as conceptualized by Freud and revisited by Heidegger functions here not only as a tool for characterizing contemporary cultural experience with respect to its complexity and specify, but first and foremost as a meta-category: the term that aims at problematizing the very discourses in which it appears.