The being of the social in the structures of the uncanny: hermeneutical aspect

The concept "uncanny" is traditionally connected with human affects, emotions and examined by psychology, sometimes by aesthetics and ethics. This article attempts to formulate a philosophical approach to the concept "uncanny" in the social ontology discourse which deals with the problem of social evil. The semantic analysis of the German word "unheimlich" (uncanny, sinister) allows to consider uncanny as something latent, invisible, secret that was primarily internal, "own" but was extruded, repressed and then became external, "alien". Uncanny, thus, is an effect of the "return of the repressed" (in terms of Freud's psychoanalysis). The opposition "heimlich / unheimlich" may be regarded as an opposition between the immanent and the transcendent, the subjective and the objective. In this case, uncanny can be defined as "objectivation of subjectivity". In other words, it is subjectivity that is repressed but then emerges as a "return of the repressed" in the structures of objectivity. The place of subjectivity is conceptualized as "Heim" which is, according to M. Heidegger, the language home of being for a person. People's only home is thinking because man is defined as a "thinking being". The empty place of eliminated subjectivity produces the uncanny effect (according to Aristotle, a place is what remains after a thing has been replaced or exists no more). This empty place begins to work as a phantasmatic space producing conspirological myths about invisible social forces which manipulate social reality according to their sinister project. Our own subjectivity finds itself externally in the uncanny figure of "Other" as a structuring basis. Assumption of the "uncanny Other" initiates deconstruction of the deceptive reality and finding authentic reality beyond all the constructed illusions. But facing such "pure reality" causes shock, the uncanny emotion, because there is noting but chaos of total indefiniteness and non-being beyond the symbolic order and meaning in which a person feels like home.

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