#the sublime

In its ability to destabilize a sense of coherent self-identity, to disorient the self-positing subject, even if only momentarily, the uncanny does stand in conceptual proximity to the sublime. However, rather than mimicking or re-representing sublime awe, uncanny encounters with frightening others (or with the otherness, the strangeness, of oneself) bring back something past, yet in altered form. Like the sublime, the uncanny involves an encounter with otherness; a sublation between subject and object takes place. But while the sublime entails the awareness of one’s own lack of understanding, the uncanny is a moment of understanding all too well, a mistake or malfunction of memory that simultaneously reveals something real. In the broadest sense, it demonstrates that no matter how alienated or dissociated we may feel from the past, from others, and from our own selves, these entities all belong to us and we to them.