ABSTRACT
In view of what we have said so far, what, we might ask, would be the more uncanny: to see the thing, the object, only in terms of what it is; or to see it in terms of what it is not, its identity as formed by the other? Metaphor is a crucial way in which we can apprehend the quality of the uncanny, considered as the process which establishes the inseparability of the familiar and the unfamiliar. To say that something is like something else is already to establish complex hierarchies of understanding; it is also to establish that in order to recognise something we have to ‘see it again’. Thus, metaphor needs to be seen in terms of operations of power, by which something is recapitulated into recognisable terms; at the same time, this operation of recapitulation can never be complete because it falls under the sign of repetition, which points back towards the limit and incompletion of coherent subjectivity and threatens us with the possibility of uncomprehended returns. My concern here will be to make Freud’s thinking clear on topics such as the uncanny and repetition, through the use of examples.
