At Home in the Uncanny
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
21-9-2017 1:00 PM
Description
Generally and essentially we do not know ourselves, but, the existentialist Martin Heidegger writes, moments of the uncanny come to our aid—those eerie feelings of the familiar made strange—and invite us to recognize that “human being consists in dwelling.” The uncanny is the dissolution of our world’s everydayness and a threshold to dwelling as authentic being-at-home-in-the-world. Psychoanalysis, too, identifies the uncanny as the return of repressed memories, its strangeness is the self-revelation of self-concealment and its passing as an awakening to self-understanding. But what if this threshold was one’s home?
Recommended Citation
Walton, Melanie, "At Home in the Uncanny" (2017). Humanities Symposium. 14.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2017/2017/14
At Home in the Uncanny
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Generally and essentially we do not know ourselves, but, the existentialist Martin Heidegger writes, moments of the uncanny come to our aid—those eerie feelings of the familiar made strange—and invite us to recognize that “human being consists in dwelling.” The uncanny is the dissolution of our world’s everydayness and a threshold to dwelling as authentic being-at-home-in-the-world. Psychoanalysis, too, identifies the uncanny as the return of repressed memories, its strangeness is the self-revelation of self-concealment and its passing as an awakening to self-understanding. But what if this threshold was one’s home?
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences