The Uncanny in Art and Poetics

Johannes Scott, 2025.

Modern art theory is shaped by a constellation of concepts that unsettle perception, reframe familiarity, and interrogate the conditions of meaning. Among these, the uncanny occupies a pivotal place—bridging psychoanalytic insight, linguistic mediation, and aesthetic estrangement. The Tate Gallery’s glossary of art terms includes “The Uncanny,” referencing Mike Kelley’s 2004 exhibition at Tate Liverpool, which staged the eerie and the abject as aesthetic provocations. But the term’s conceptual lineage reaches deeper into the theoretical substrata of 20th-century thought.

The uncanny (das Unheimliche) was first theorized by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906 as a psychological response to uncertainty and unfamiliarity—what he called the “unhomely.” Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” reformulates this notion, arguing that the uncanny arises not merely from the unknown, but from the return of the repressed: something once familiar, now estranged through concealment and deferred recognition. For Freud, the uncanny is a rupture in psychic continuity—a moment when the boundaries between reality and fantasy, self and other, collapse.

Yet Freud’s formulation, steeped in the metaphysics of interiority, was contemporaneous with a radical shift in epistemology. Unbeknownst to him, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was laying the groundwork for structuralist theory in his Course in General Linguistics (1906–1911). Saussure argued that our access to reality is always mediated by language—that meaning is not inherent in things, but produced through the differential relations of signs. He introduced the dyad of signifier (the sound-image) and signified (the concept), insisting that meaning arises not from reference to external reality, but from the internal structure of language itself.

This linguistic turn relocates the uncanny from the depths of the psyche to the surface of cultural production. If language constructs reality rather than merely naming it, then the uncanny becomes a function of semiotic disruption—a moment when the symbolic order falters and the familiar becomes estranged. As philosopher Mladen Dolar later argued, the uncanny is not simply a psychological anomaly but a structural effect of representation itself: a glitch in the symbolic matrix that reveals its own contingency.

Building on Saussure’s insights, Czech theorist Jan Mukařovský—writing in the wake of Prague structuralism and surrealism—sought to define art as a distinct semiotic function. In his essay What Is Art?, he proposed that poetic language operates by foregrounding its own materiality, slowing down automatic perception and intensifying aesthetic awareness. This “aesthetic function” mirrors Freud’s uncanny: both involve a deferral of recognition, a suspension of habitual meaning, and a confrontation with the strange within the familiar.

Russian Formalism, emerging in the 1920s, further developed this idea through the concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie), coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his seminal essay “Art as Device.” For Shklovsky, art exists to disrupt the automatisms of everyday life. In his analysis of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he shows how literary technique recontextualizes the familiar, forcing the reader to perceive anew. “Habit,” he wrote, “is the enemy of art.” Defamiliarization thus becomes a method of aesthetic estrangement—a way of making the known unknown, and thereby restoring its perceptual intensity.

In this lineage—from Freud’s return of the repressed, through Saussure’s semiotic mediation, to Shklovsky’s estrangement—the uncanny emerges not as a mere psychological curiosity, but as a central aesthetic strategy. It is the moment when the symbolic falters, when language reveals its constructedness, and when art reclaims the power to disturb, estrange, and recontextualize.

Sources:

Freud, Sigmund (1919). The “Uncanny”. Imago, Bd. V., 1919.

Uncanny. Author(s): Mladen Dolar Source: October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991), pp. 5-23 Published by: The MIT Press.

Scott, Johannes (2021). Cut Flowers, a Vase, and the Uncanny. https://www.johannesscott.com/single-post/uncanny-vase-theoretical-exposition

Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.