© 2003 by Society for French Studies
Encountering and Countering the ‘Uncanny’ in Descartes's Méditations
1 University of Sheffield
Starting with a discussion of what constitutes the ‘Uncanny’ for Freud and the lesser known Jentsch, the essay reveals how both theories of the ‘Uncanny’ find a surprisingly fertile field of investigation and application in Descartes's Méditations. These texts contain a series of remarkable manifestations of the ‘Uncanny’: men possessed by mad ideas, magical transformations, malign spirits, automata and instances of the castration complex at work. The essay contends that Descartes comes upon such atavistic and animistic thoughts in his Méditations as he rigorously exercises his method of hyperbolic doubting, first developed in his Discours de la méthode. This is specifically the case in his consideration of madness and of the phenomenon of melting wax. Yet having touched upon, even unleashed, these primitive and irrational thought processes, Descartes has then to reintegrate them into the reasoned, theological project of the Méditations. He does this, the essay argues, by invoking the Cogito; but it is invoked less as a logically deduced first premise than, discursively, as a spell to ward off the various, disruptive forces of the ‘Uncanny’ intruding upon his reasoning. It is in this way that the ‘Uncanny’ is encountered, then countered in Descartes's texts.