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More than a century after the age of Enlightenment, Freud, in "The 'Uncanny'" (1919) attempted to define a phenomenon that is above all a "subdued emotional impulse" and "a special core of feeling." Freud's essay-filled with dolls, automata, "painted ladies," optical instruments and fetishes-remains interested in objects that fascinated eighteenth-century England. Observing that the uncanny arises when "the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is," and when "a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes," Freud revisits a dilemma about subjectivity that troubled eighteenth-century subjects.1 From Hume's exploration of "the gross polytheism of the vulgar" in Natural History of Religion (1757) to Henry Fielding's excoriation of London's "People of Fashion" as a grotesquerie of moving objects in The Covent-Garden Journal, No. 37, eighteenth-century authors interrogated the relationship between persons and things, condemning those persons who displayed too strong an investment in the irrational pleasures of disparate and random things.2
Recent critics have regarded Freud's uncanny as a "historical allegory" for the consequences of Enlightenment productions of rational and objectifiable knowledge. For Mladen Dolar, the uncanny emerged as a direct result of the "historical rupture brought about by the Enlightenment." As a consequence, Dolar claims, "It seems that Freud speaks about a 'universal' of human experience when he speaks of the uncanny, yet his own examples tacitly point to its location in a specific historical conjuncture, to the . . . Enlightenment. There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity."3 Similarly using Freud's interpretation of the uncanny to account for Western Europe's passage into Enlightened modernity, Terry Castle asks, "Might one argue, extrapolating from Freud, that the uncanny itself first 'comes to light'-becomes a part of human experience-in that period known as the Enlightenment?"4 These interpretations of the uncanny implicate the rationalizing and instrumentalizing energies associated with the Enlightenment with the Freudian structure of repression.5 In other words, the "Age of Reason," by attempting to suppress formerly acceptable beliefs in superstition and the supernatural, created a charged space for those beliefs to emerge as "the uncanny." Thus produced by "the Enlightenment," the uncanny represents the return of western civilization's repressed roots in such unenlightened beliefs as superstition,...