Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny: Ecoculture, Literature and Religion

155 Pages·2019·0.604 MB·English

by  Rod Giblett

Environmental Humanities
and the Uncanny
Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ is celebrating a century since publication.
It is arguably his greatest and most fruitful contribution to the study of culture,
nature and the environment. E nvironmental Humanities and the Uncanny brings
into the open neglected aspects of the uncanny in this famous essay in its
centenary year and in the work of those before and after him, such as Friedrich
Schelling, Walter Benjamin, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Bram Stoker.
This book does so by focusing on religion, especially at a time and for a world
in which some sectors of the monotheisms are in aggressive, and sometimes
violent, contention against those of other monotheisms, and even against other
sectors within their own monotheism. The chapter on Schelling’s uncanny
argues that monotheisms come out of polytheism and makes the plea for
polytheism central to the whole book. It enables rethinking the relationships
between mythology and monotheistic and polytheistic religions in a culturally
and politically liberatory and progressive way. Succeeding chapters consider
the uncanny cyborg, the uncanny and the fictional, and the uncanny and the
Commonwealth, concluding with a chapter on Taoism as a polytheistic religion.
Building on the author’s previous work in E nvironmental Humanities and
Theologies in bringing together theories of religion and the environment, this
book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental
humanities, ecocultural studies and religion.
Rod Giblett is Honorary Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in
the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. He is the
author of many books in the environmental humanities, including P eople and
Places of Nature and Culture (2011) and most recently E nvironmental Humanities
and Theologies (2018), and is a pioneer in psychoanalytic ecology.
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Jonathan O. Chimakonam
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Environmental Performance Auditing in the Public Sector
Enabling Sustainable Development
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Poetics of the Earth
Natural History and Human History
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Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny
Ecoculture, Literature and Religion
Rod Giblett
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Environmental Humanities
and the Uncanny
Ecoculture, Literature and Religion
Rod Giblett
First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 Rod Giblett
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Giblett, Rodney James, author.
Title: Environmental humanities and the uncanny : ecoculture, literature and
religion / Rod Giblett.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Routledge explorations in environmental studies | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056630 | ISBN 9780367181482 (hbk) | ISBN
9780429059759 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and the humanities. | Uncanny, The
(Psychoanalysis) | Uncanny, The (Psychoanalysis), in literature. |
Ecotheology.
Classification: LCC BF175.4.H85 G53 2019 | DDC 150.19/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056630
ISBN: 978-0-367-18148-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-05975-9 (ebk)
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by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Dedicated to Guan Yin (Goom Yan), the Goddess
of Compassion

Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 The uncanniness of Freud’s uncanny 1
2 Alligators, crocodiles and the monstrous uncanny 15
3 The uncanny urban underside 34
4 The uncanniness of Schelling’s uncanny 53
5 The uncanny and the work of Walter Benjamin 65
6 The uncanny cyborg 83
7 The uncanny and the fictional 96
8 The uncanny Commonwealth of Christianity 122
9 The living polytheism of the Fung Loy Kok
Institute of Taoism/Taoist Tai Chi Society 135
Index 144
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Elliot Patsoura for sparking my interest in Schelling’s uncanny,
which I had overlooked in Freud’s essay and now comes out into the open
(another instance of the uncanny) in the chapter ‘The Uncanniness of Schelling’s
Uncanny.’ Elliot also made helpful suggestions about what to read in Schelling’s
massive body of work (another instance of the monstrous). I am also grateful to
Warwick Mules for his critical comments and helpful suggestions that enabled
me to clarify the argument, foreground the focus and develop the methodology.
Finally, I am grateful to Sandra Giblett for asking ‘So what?’ about the biblio-
graphic detective story.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Board of Fung Loy Kok Institute
of Taoism for permission to reproduce material from Fung Loy Kok Insti-
tute of Taoism, A Path of Dual Cultivation: Teachings of the Fung Loy Kok Institute
of Taoism, Toronto: Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism, 2008.
1 The uncanniness of
Freud’s uncanny
The concept/metaphor of the uncanny is arguably the greatest and most fruit-
ful contribution of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) to the study of culture, nature
and the environment. F reud developed the uncanny in his essay of this title first
published in 1 919 in the psychoanalytic journal Imago . It was translated into
English by Alix Strachey in 1925 for Freud’s C ollected Papers . This translation
was then ‘considerably modified’ for her husband James’ Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Freud, 1955) and republished by
Penguin in their ‘Penguin Freud Library’ 30 years later and so 60 years after the
original publication in English (F reud, 1985 ). A new translation was commis-
sioned and published by Penguin early this century ( Freud, 2003 ).
While a whole swag of Freud’s concepts and ideas (such as the Oedipus com-
plex, penis envy and so on) are critiqued and problematized, or pooh-poohed
and dismissed as the years go on, the uncanny endures for a century as a useful
tool in the toolbox of cultural criticism, literary theory and political and philo-
sophical critique. Freud (1955 , p. 219, cf. 2 003 , p. 124) defines the uncanny as
‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar.’ ‘What is known of old and long familiar’ is specifically, though Freud
does not mention it, what Randolph (2001b, p. 97) calls ‘the mother-infant
embrace,’ both i n-utero and e x-utero . For Freud (1955 , p. 244, 2 003 , p. 151) the
uncanny is literally u nheimlich , unhomely, but also homely, contradictory feelings
which he found associated in the minds of adult males with female genitalia and
in his own mind with the first home of individual human life in the mother’s
womb. The uncanny entails a return of the repressed.
The return of the repressed occurs here and elsewhere for Freud as he does
not refer to the mother – his or anybody else’s – or to her body, or specifically
her womb. The maternal body is repressed in and by Freud in his essay on the
uncanny as Randolph (2001a, p. 184, 2001b , p. 97) points out. Freud’s uncanny
is uncanny in which the repressed maternal body returns. Freud (2003, p. 151)
relates that ‘it often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is some-
thing uncanny about the female genital organs. But what they find uncanny
[“unhomely”] is actually the entrance to man’s old “home,” the place where
everyone once lived.’ Freud is, of course, referring to the womb, but seems a bit