Fear of the Strange: On Weird Ontologies and Eerie Agencies

In his 2016 essay “The Weird and the Eerie,” Mark Fisher argued that contemporary aesthetic media established new modes of the strange that could no longer be described in terms of Freud’s concept of the unheimlich: While the unheimlich remains within the opposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the weird and the eerie represent experiences of radical strangeness that are beyond the familiar. This chapter focuses on these new types of radical strangeness. It examines the systematic differences between the unfamiliar and the defamiliarized and reflects on the social functions of the different historical aesthetics of the strange.