“Embrace of the Serpent” (2015): 3/5

            In “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” Lacan declares that “the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier,” (126). He clarifies that he is talking about the Cartesian subject here, “who appears at the moment when doubt is recognized as certainty” — so this ‘subject,’ is synonymous with the pronoun “I” as commonly understood in, for example, the clauses “I think,” or, “I am.” (This is the very first stage of subjecthood, which process is defined in more detail on p. 141.) Therefore, if ‘the sum of the effects of speech’ is to be understood as the all-encompassing division of the world into differences as the mind learns language — as it learns to differentiate the phenomena of experience according to the lines of language — then the “I” is thereby a sign within that structure; a remainder of what is left over after all the non-self of the world has been demarcated. It is a word defined by association and by what it has not been defined as not. And, therefore, a word that has as much malleability — and vulnerability — as any other in the web of a living language. (This is not the image of the objet a, as Lacan clarifies emphatically on p. 142 — this is just the “sign in relation to which, at first, [the subject] has been able to constitute himself as subject.” The paradox is there from the start.)

            Freud’s essay on the Uncanny touches on a similar aspect of selfhood, albeit from a different direction, and not nearly so directly. The essay lists a number of different horror tropes that inspire that “unheimlich” feeling in readers and then declares that the connecting thread through all of them is the threatened return of the repressed, such as, for example, the return of the “repressed savage” that lurks within all “civilized” men. The descriptive passages, however, have always seemed to me to be suggestive of an alternative thesis: when Freud tries to connect the thread between the uncanniness of injuries to the eyes, twins, automata, and the return of severed limbs, what strikes me is not so much “the return of the repressed” as experiences that undermine the sense of self. The eyes are the windows to the self, as well as symbolic of the Lacanian gaze; twins threaten our own naive equation of uniqueness as identity; automata similarly undermine our understanding of animation as qualifications for selfhood; and the return of severed limbs calls into question the arbitrary boundaries of what parts of our bodies constitute “us.” Even his specific point about fears of ‘savagery,’ for him represented by the return of animism and thereby the supposition that all objects have selves, clearly relate this concept primarily as a threat to the Western idea of selfhood. While not in contradiction to his idea that uncanniness is about ‘the return of the repressed,’ his essay moreover advances the thesis that the feeling of “uncanniness” is precisely related to repressed anxiety about selfhood, and especially about that particular aspect of selfhood expressed in the word “I”.

            Finally, when we bring in my above reading of Lacan’s “I”, we can posit that the uncanny is precisely the feeling of one’s own definition slipping. Freud already put forward the idea of psychological phenomena as made up of signs, but by putting psychological experience within language, Lacan allows us to take the analysis a step further still. The idea that trees have selfhood is threatening because it suggests, within the relational structure of language, that we have as much selfhood as a tree does. And even worse, then — because it overlaps with far more our definition of self — is the automaton. It is precisely the threat to the definition of “I” that invoke uncanniness.

            When we look at our own modern conventions of horror, then, we can, arguably, reverse-engineer our own discomfort to posit upon what exactly our modern definitions of self depend.

            For example, take a look at the modern American zombie movie. While there is the more (one might say) universal uncanniness of a desiring body without a self, I would argue that the true uncanniness of the contemporary Hollywood zombie flick is the dissolution of individuality into the group death of the conformist hoard of consumers. The American self presupposes individuality, where to lose one’s individuality is tantamount to the death of self, and nowhere is this clearer than in zombie movies. The walking dead are almost universally presented as stereotypes, as the football-player zombie, as the cheerleader zombie, as the math teacher zombie, as the hillbilly zombie. At the same time, among the humans, the characters who survive or die without being infected are those who (generally speaking) prove themselves as more than their types — those who surprise the viewer with compassion, or generosity, or strength, or what have you. Those who fulfill the viewers’ expectations of weakness or jockness or stonerness are those who are consumed; they prove themselves zombies, as humans without individuality beyond stereotype, without self. They are worse than human; they are ordinary. They do not qualify for an American “I”.

            Lacan’s text goes far beyond the incoherence of selfhood, of course. But more broadly, his use of linguistic structures as part of psychological experience opens the door to a whole host of similar analyses; uncanniness is by no means the only emotion that we can unpack as a sign of a certain psychological concept. While there is no essay by Freud on it to cite, I’m personally very interested in the feeling of truth, and upon what it might depend. Or any other feeling, really — if we follow Lacan and posit that a given psychological phenomena is not just a signifier but operates as the consequence of its role as a signifier, there’s no limit to how deep we can go.