The Uncanny as Antisublime

Abstract Many authors have remarked on the relationship between the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the uncanny. Building on a suggestion made by Cynthia Freeland, my aim in this paper is to show how, once inverted, Kant’s theory of the sublime provides a valuable resource for developing a novel theoretical approach to the uncanny. Whereas, according to Kant, the positive feeling of the sublime is a feeling of the superiority of one’s faculty of reason over anything in nature, the uncanny as antisublime is a feeling that arises when something in nature overwhelms one’s faculty of reason. Using Kant’s distinction between the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime, I propose that there are two sources of uncanny experiences: one that involves a threat to one’s capacity to make sense of the world as a systematic whole (the “theoretical uncanny”), and another that involves a threat to the unity or autonomy of the thinking subject (the “moral uncanny”). I illustrate these with two examples from literature: the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, and the doppelganger in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson.”