RISS Materialien 6

Behind »uncanny 101« is a leap from a too early to a too late, or vice versa: »uncanny 101« developed from the symposium »uncanny 99«, which took place at New York University in 2018 and focused on celebrating the centennial-minus-one of the publication of Freud’s text »Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny]« (1919). How can the uncanny be commemorated in anything but an untimely manner? Is what motivates Freud’s essay on the uncanny not an untimeliness, which again and again takes Freud to a dubious district during his stroll on a »hot summer afternoon« in a »small city in Italy«, and consequently (namely in his 1920 essay »Beyond the Pleasure Principle«) impels him to conceive his theory of drives anew based on such untimeliness? Repetition and belatedness are figures of temporality that had already haunted Freud’s thinking since his early »Entwurf einer Psychologie [Project for a Scientific Psychology]« and are concentrated further in this primal scene [Urszene] of a stroll in 1919. The primal scene/encounter with the real – according to Lacan – is »always too early or too late«. The same can be said about the uncanny.