| Heidegger on Being Uncanny There are moments when things suddenly seem strange--objects in the world lose their meaning, we feel like strangers to ourselves, or human existence itself strikes us as bizarre and unintelligible. Through a detailed philosophical investigation of Heidegger's concept of uncanniness ( Unheimlichkeit ), Katherine Withy explores what such experiences reveal about us. She argues that while others (such as Freud, in his seminal psychoanalytic essay, "The Uncanny") take uncanniness to be an affective quality of strangeness or eeriness, Heidegger uses the concept to go beyond feeling uncanny to reach the ground of this feeling in our being uncanny. Withy Katherine : Katherine Withy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University. |