Uncanny Objects: Lacan, Heidegger, and the Return of the Gaze

In an old beat-up copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, an anonymous reader has annotated Nietzsche’s famous aphorism. “When one fights monsters, he should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you,” Nietzsche says, and you let it, writes anonymous. The experience of ‘uncanniness’ is intimately linked with the returned gaze of an object. The uncanny returns something to the subject that is intimately bound up in the subject’s unconsciousunconscious. Freud and Lacan disagree, however, on exactly what is returning in the gaze.