Jonathan Lear’s ‘ironic uncanniness’ pushes Freud’s uncanny in a direc-tion similar to the one in which I have pushed it, but in a way that further extends our conceptual arsenal.40 Lear appropriates Freud’s concept to characterize what he calls ‘the ironic experience,’ in which I fi nd myself committed to an ideal—say, being a teacher—but no longer have a sense for what living up to this ideal would look like. Received understandings of what it takes to be a teacher no longer seem adequate to the ideal itself.
I am, we might say, profoundly struck by the question “What is it to be a teacher, anyway?” Lear takes pains to distinguish this ironic uncertainty from ordinary refl ection on the adequacy of our practices, conceiving it as a very special kind of breakdown. I will touch on this later, but in general the details of Lear’s picture will not concern me any more than is necessary to see how Lear makes use of Freud’s uncanny. Recall that for Freud:
(a) something familiar (and prior) (e.g., belief in animism) (b) undergoes a process of defamiliarization (e.g., is surmounted) (c) and returns to awareness—in such a way that it is marked by both
the familiarity (a) and the unfamiliarity (b).
40 Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Now consider how Lear describes the experience of ironic uncanniness:
[A] person gives a familiar designation to himself. He takes on a practi-cal identity. As the irony unfolds, not only does the designation be-come weirdly unfamiliar; one suddenly experiences oneself as called to one-knows-not-what.41
When irony hits its mark, the person who is its target has an uncanny ex-perience that the demands of an ideal, value, or identity to which he takes himself to be already committed dramatically transcend the received social understandings. The experience is uncanny in the sense that what had been a familiar demand suddenly feels unfamiliar, calling one to an unfamiliar way of life; and yet the unfamiliarity also has a weird sense of familiarity; as though we can recognize that this is our commitment.42
As I understand it, the experience has the following structure, which Lear captures with the name ‘pretense-transcending aspiring’:
(i) Pretense: a familiar identity (‘teacher’), to which I am committed (social role)
(ii) Transcending: . . . suddenly becomes unfamiliar; I experience it as transcending the available social understandings of it (irony) (iii) Aspiring: . . . but in such a way that it remains oddly familiar since
I remain committed to it (Eros)
Pretense-transcending aspiring—the experience of irony—off ers itself to be described as ‘uncanny’ because of its play of familiarity and un-familiarity. It looks like we have the Freudian uncanny: x is familiar at one point, then unfamiliar, then both together. What takes the place of repression in the ironic experience is my transcendence of the received social pretense. What the two share is that they each serve to defamiliar-ize. We see a ‘return’ of this ‘repressed’ insofar as my commitment to the ideal persists despite this defamiliarization: I remain committed to being a teacher, despite not knowing what this commitment should look like—
that is, how to be a teacher.
This experience, as described, does not cleanly fi t Freud’s structure.
Notice, fi rst, the diff erence between (iii) and (c). One way to get at this diff erence is to say that what is oddly familiar in ironic uncanniness is not quite the same thing that was originally familiar. Step (i) speaks of
41 Ibid., 16.
42 Ibid., 25.
the familiar pretense (the socially available ways to put oneself forward as a teacher) but (iii) involves the familiarity of the ideal itself, which the pretense or social role purports to fi ll out. The center of this tension can be seen in (ii), in which the reference of ‘it’ is ambiguous. The ‘it’ that be-comes unfamiliar is ‘being a teacher,’ but is this the transcendent ideal or the socially available pretense or both? Does the distinction cease to mat-ter here? Or does the distinction fi rst open up at this point? This latmat-ter strikes me as most plausible: the role/ideal suddenly comes to fall short of itself, and it is to express this self-undermining move that we distinguish an ideal from its expression in a social role. The splitting of self that is accomplished in Freudian repression is here accomplished as a splitting of the practical identity in terms of which I understand myself.
Yet for Freud, it must be the same thing that is originally familiar and that returns or persists. This is what produces the simultaneous familiar-ity and unfamiliarfamiliar-ity. Lear’s picture would have to look like this:
(i) An ideal is familiar to me, because I am committed to it (aspira-tion) and live it out in terms of received social understandings (pretense, social role),
(ii) but it becomes unfamiliar because I experience it as transcending the social pretense,
(iii) although it remains familiar since I am still committed to it (aspiration).
This revision makes plain that there are two senses in which the ideal is familiar. The revision works by shifting the original problem—that of having two distinct objects in (i) and (iii)—onto this doubled familiar-ity—marked by the ‘and’ in (i). First, an ideal is familiar insofar as I am committed to it; second, an ideal is familiar insofar as I know how to go about living it. In ironic uncanniness, the former persists and the latter does not. Are we still entitled to describe this as a simultaneous famil-iarity and unfamilfamil-iarity, given that the ideal is familiar in one way and unfamiliar in a distinct way? It seems that the split here is intractable because what happens in (ii), the moment of defamiliarization, is that a divorce is produced within my understanding of how to go about being a teacher. The split is between being committed to such going about and knowing how to do it (two senses of familiarity) and correspondingly between the ideal to which I am committed and the social role through which I express this commitment. It is this divorce that characterizes the ironic experience and which, presumably, distinguishes it from ordinary refl ection on our practices and practical identities, which address only
the social role. It is also this divorce that distinguishes ironic uncanniness from Freud’s uncanny and garden-variety uncanny experiences.
Lear himself situates the persistent commitment to the ideal (iii) be-yond Freud’s uncanny. He describes it as “erotic”:43
[I]n an ordinary experience of the uncanny, there is mere disruption: the fa-miliar is suddenly and disruptively experienced as unfafa-miliar. What is pecu-liar to irony is that it manifests passion for a certain direction. It is because I care about teaching that I have come to a halt as a teacher. Coming to a halt in a moment of ironic uncanniness is how I manifest—in that moment—that teaching matters to me. I have a strong desire to be moving in a certain direction—that is, in the direction of becoming and being a teacher—but I lack orientation. Thus the experience of irony is an experience of would-be-directed uncanniness. That is, an experience of standard-issue uncanniness may give us goose bumps or churn our stomachs; the experience of ironic uncanniness, by contrast, is more like losing the ground beneath one’s feet:
one longs to go in a certain direction, but one no longer knows where one is standing, if one is standing, or which direction is the right direction. In this paradigm example, ironic uncanniness is a manifestation of utter serious-ness and commitment (in this case, to teaching), not its opposite.44
Lear is perhaps adverting to our common understanding of ‘uncanniness’
rather than to Freud’s technical use of the term, but he seems to be attempt-ing to solve the problem that I have identifi ed. In eff ect, Lear tries to entwine the two senses of familiarity by showing that the loss of one manifests the other. He says that the unfamiliarity of not knowing how to go on in light of an ideal is a manifestation of familiarity qua continued commitment to an ideal. What it is to have a commitment, then, is to be serious about fi nding or having a way to manifest that commitment in our social lives—and so, to make it familiar in the ordinary sense of knowing where it fi ts or how to go about it. But the commitment itself is associated with familiarity in a diff erent way. It is familiar insofar as it is mine, proper to me (L. proprius:
one’s own, personal, private, peculiar, etc.). This is what I want to bring out: a new resonance for the ‘familiar,’ which will be important for us later.
Using this new vocabulary, we can gloss Freud’s uncanny in this way:
(a) something that is mine (e.g., belief in animism) (b) is alienated from me, rejected (surmounted, repressed) (c) but then returns to me, as both mine and not mine.
43 Ibid., 20.
44 Ibid., 19.
This is a common way to think about the dynamics of the psyche and particularly the act of repressing as an act of disowning. The gloss relies on the thought that what is familiar is not only what is known or under-stood but also what is recognized, plus the thought that what I recognize fi rst of all is what is mine.
But even in this vocabulary, Lear’s picture does not quite map onto Freud’s—especially in the second step: repression or transcendence. Tran-scendence works as an equivalent to repression only if the sense of famil-iarity or unfamilfamil-iarity at this step is diff erent from what it is in the fi rst and/or third step. This is because transcendence is the opening up of the distinction between the ideal and its expression in social practices, which Lear needs but which introduces a new kind of familiarity/unfamiliarity.
So I am inclined to disagree with Lear’s assessment that the erotic, di-rected, and serious, aspect of ironic uncanniness is not present in Freud’s uncanny. Either it corresponds to the return of the repressed (the part of the picture to which it is supposed to correspond) or Lear’s picture is not a picture of Freudian uncanniness.
The real diff erence between Lear’s ironic experience and Freud’s un-canny lies in the temporality or the kinetic structure of each. For Freud, what is originally familiar belongs to the (often distant) past, as does its repression. (If we think of repression—as we should—as an ongoing ac-tivity, then it is the initiation of this activity that we locate at a prior point in time.) The return of the repressed can occur at any time and when it does so it is a sudden return. Thus:
(a) (more or less distant) past
(b) (more or less distant) past (or ongoing) (c) now, all of a sudden
On Lear’s picture, in contrast, what is equivalent to repression (defamiliar-ization) is what happens in the experience rather than the condition for it, and the ‘return’ of what is thus repressed is less a return than a continu-ation. What is moving and what is staying still are entirely diff erent from what is moving and what is staying still on Freud’s account. For Lear:
(i) past/ongoing (ii) now, all of a sudden (iii) ongoing
We could possibly say that (ii) and (iii) both happen now and all of a sudden, if my continued commitment to the ideal is in fact a reaffi rmation
of my commitment despite its defamiliarization. There are interesting is-sues here surrounding the temporality of commitment. Notice, in this regard, that (i) does not mark a literal past or a temporal priority. It is not even a conceptual or essential priority. Rather, what makes my com-mitment to an ideal ‘prior’ to its defamiliarization is the foundational character of that commitment. Being committed to being a teacher, say, is ‘below’ or ‘before’ any particular event in my life. It is always already there. It precedes any experience I might have as teacher, including my loss of the sense of what it is to go on as a teacher. This introduces a new kind of temporality in terms of which to think about the uncanny, in ad-dition to those that we have seen before.
What happens in the experience of irony is that this ‘past’ of an on-going commitment, which is normally ‘below the surface’ of our lives, forces its way up to us as a question. As such, ironic uncanniness remains a disruption of temporality—or, strictly, priority. Usually, in being com-mitted to an ideal, what it is that one is comcom-mitted to is largely settled before one goes about trying to live up to it, in the sense that it is the foundation for such going about. In ironic breakdown, however, one is committed to an ideal and experiences a desire to go about living up to it but lacks any idea of how to do this. As Lear puts it: “one longs to go in a certain direction, but one no longer knows where one is standing.”45 This is the ironically uncanny version of what it is like to have the time-line of psychic life disrupted. Recall that it is this disorder of time that distinguishes the Freudian uncanny proper from mere uncertainty. So too for Lear, we might say, it is the ideal itself (and not the social pretense) coming into question that distinguishes irony from ordinary refl ective assessment of practices. The ideal itself, which usually recedes beneath daily life, comes to the fore.46
A related point is that what occasions an experience of ironic uncan-niness is not some external event but the ideal itself. Ideals disrupt them-selves. This is why Lear rejects the metaphor of the ‘outside’ irrupting into the ‘inside,’ which I have used (and will continue to use). In response
45 Ibid., 19.
46 This way of thinking about the temporality of commitment suggests an alternative route that one might take to map this experience onto Freud’s uncanny: we take on an ideal, which retreats into the background (the priority of a commitment) and can then irrupt into ordinary life when it becomes questionable. The problem with this reading is that it is likely false of commitments and ideals that we take them on consciously; Lear in particular is committed to rejecting this (see especially the second lecture, “Ironic Soul,” in Lear, A Case for Irony).
to Christine Korsgaard, Lear writes: “Insofar as there is a narrative here, I do not think it is captured by the image of inside and outside. Rather, the image is of a form of life and a moment of breakdown internal to that form of life.”47 There is nothing external, alien, or other that intrudes upon the ideal and my life with it. Rather, ideals are self-undermining.
Although for Freud the uncanny feeling is possible because repression, as a part of psychic development, is not a perfect mechanism, it remains the case that he requires something to ‘set off ’ the return of the repressed.
Something has to get into the crack that the imperfection of repression has produced and wedge it open. For Lear, ironic uncanniness is possible because ideals are inherently unstable and can manifest this instability at any point without any particular catalyst.
Lear explains that if ideals or practical identities must be expressed in particular social practices, and if these practices never exhaust or fully express the ideal, then there is always a possibility of this gap showing up to us.48 Such disruption does not require the intrusion of any third party or the appearance of any third term. We can put it actively by saying that I must be able to transcend received social understandings of an ideal, or passively by saying that the ideal manifests itself to me as exceeding these.49 The metaphor most appropriate to this experience may thus be not ‘inside/outside’ but ‘depths/surface’ or ‘background/
foreground.’ It is not that something external intrudes but that some-thing submerged comes to the surface or that I reach a new height of perspective.
Much depends, however, on how we identify the ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’
I think that there are ways of using this vocabulary that avoid the mis-leading impression that Lear is worried about. If the ‘inside’ is ordinary daily life, then an explicit encounter with one’s commitments and ideals is indeed an intrusion from the ‘outside’—not in the sense of what is not mine or foreign to me but in the sense of what makes possible and shapes the inside. Here, the ‘inside’ is what is ordinarily familiar, the everyday. It is only when we identify ‘the inside’ with ‘what is mine’ that this vocabu-lary is misleading. Once again, it is important to keep these two senses of familiarity distinct.
47 Ibid., 116.
48 Ibid., 22.
49 Lear also allows (or this may be the same thing) that the experience of irony can arise from a confrontation between one’s conscious practical identity and one’s unconscious practical identity. See the second lecture, “Ironic Soul,” especially ibid., 60–61.
In any case, because ironic uncanniness is not occasioned by something other than me and my commitments, what is revealed to me in it is some-thing about me and my commitments—namely, the instability of the lat-ter. For Freud, what shows up in the uncanny experience is the object that occasioned it (e.g., the Sandman, the crocodile table) and only second-arily (on refl ection or for the analyst) what it is about me that makes this experience possible. So too for Jentsch: we do not simply grasp the gap between our ways of making familiar and the things that are made famil-iar; we experience this gap through a particular entity—for example, the sun. In ironic uncanniness, we are directly exposed to the instability of our ideal rather than to some consequence of this instability. Lear contin-ues the passage I quoted earlier:
But, as I shall argue, a stronger claim is warranted: namely, developing a capacity for ironic disruption may be a manifestation of seriousness about one’s practical identity. It is not merely a disruption of one’s practical iden-tity; it is a form of loyalty to it. So, my ironic experience with teaching manifests an inchoate intimation that there is something valuable about teaching—something excellent as a way of being human—that isn’t quite caught in contemporary social pretense or in normal forms of questioning that pretense. [ . . . I]t is a mistake to think that if we just got our social prac-tice—say, of teaching—into good shape, there would no longer be room for ironic disruption of practical identity. It is constitutive of our life with the concepts with which we understand ourselves that they are subject to ironic disruption.50
The instability of our ideals is not a failure or defect that we ought to seek to remedy. It is part of what it is to have ideals, and so facing up to this risk is part of what it is to have ideals well. We are essentially erotic creatures whose lives are unstable, risky, and subject to breakdown. The ironic experience depends upon these features of human life and exposes us to them. This latter claim may be going beyond Lear, but it seems to me that what the ironic experience reveals to us is nothing other than the
The instability of our ideals is not a failure or defect that we ought to seek to remedy. It is part of what it is to have ideals, and so facing up to this risk is part of what it is to have ideals well. We are essentially erotic creatures whose lives are unstable, risky, and subject to breakdown. The ironic experience depends upon these features of human life and exposes us to them. This latter claim may be going beyond Lear, but it seems to me that what the ironic experience reveals to us is nothing other than the