Calling

Continuing with the matter of the 'uncanny', one notices how often this idea appears in Heidegger, especially in relation to the 'Call', and the 'call of conscience' in particular. Conscience
calls us from our 'lostness' in the 'Everyone'. But more generally, Heidegger (Martin, not John), has some very suggestive words about the concept of 'being called':

Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. 'It' calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not some from someone else.. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.

The call is at once deeply familiar and something like an alien voice. Two literary examples follow:

When Hamlet says, in response to the ghost's story of murder, 'oh my prophetic soul', he reveals that the ghostly words resonate with or answer something already deep within. This is part of its terror. It is the terror of answering one's own deepest intuitions, of being 'true to oneself'. Needless to say, this is typically experienced as a burden, as something imposed not freely chosen. This is the tyranny, the unconditional demand of the Call: that which is truly you imposes on you the ultimate blackmail: if you do not do this, you will not be able to live with yourself. But 'yourself' in this formula is not the self of everyday life and its sundry accomodations and compromises, it is what precisely is concealed by such accomodations. The Call comes as a terrible unconcealment. It 'unconceals' the nakedness of the Subject you are in truth.

A second example, from Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan, where the Uncanny Call has a more obviously political colouration. The scene is rural Ireland at the time when the French landed at Killala in 1798 to aid the United Irishmen's rebellion. Michael is preparing to marry Delia, and the family is consumed with talk of dowries and other calculable advantages. There are reporta of an old woman wandering through the countryside. Soon enough this nameless Old Woman appears at their house. She has wandered far, they are told. And when asked what put her to wandering she replies 'too many strangers in the house'. The strangers had taken from her her 'four green fields'. When they ask her who she is she tells them: 'Some call me the Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call me Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan'.She is, in other words, Ireland itself, itinerant and unrecognised amond her own kind, exiled by the English 'strangers'. At the end of the play, Michael answers the 'call' of the Old Woman and goes off to fight for Ireland. The play ends as follows:

Delia. Michael! He takes no notice. Michael! He turns towards her.
Why do you look at me like a stranger?
.....

Bridget to Peter Tell him not to go, Peter.

Peter. It's no use. He doesn't hear a word we're saying.

Bridget. Try and coax him over to the fire.

[The fire - most obvious icon of domestic securities. Once Michael has attuned himself to this other voice, this other frequency of commitment, the everyday solicitions are dumb as never before. Or, in other words, corresponding to the frequency of the calling is new mode of hearing. we must hear where it is coming from, and this renders us deaf to the solicitations of the everyday.]

....
Old Woman's voice outside. They
shall be speaking for ever, The people
shall hear them for ever.

Michael breaks away from Delia, stands for a second at the door,
then rushes out, following the Old Woman's voice. Bridget takes
Delia, who is crying silently, into her arms.

Peter to Patrick, laying a hand on his arm. Did you see an old woman
going down the path?

Patrick. I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a
queen.


So:
The Old Woman wanders unrecognised and nameless through her own land (Heimat). This land has been occupied by strangers to such an extent that strangeness has sunk back into familiarity, and familiarity - the Homeland, as it were - has become strange. Michael, in answering the strange yet familiar call of the old woman is in turn rendered strange to his family. This uncanny call leads him into the unknown, incalculable future but also reunites him with a lost object (Ireland). It is no accident that this 'lost past' is incarnate in the disembodied singing voice of the Old Woman, the voice which never quite coincides with the old woman, but which seems to speak through her. There is something spectral about the voice, as if it were not simply attached to its bearer. It is as if it were coming from another place.

The call always carries the enjoinder 'come away, come away' (Yeats's words). The call is a kind of magnetic field towards which we are drawn rather than a positive content to which we assent. Indeed, Michael makes this revealing comment about the song of the old woman:' I do not know what that song means, but tell me something I can do for you.' To use a received Lacanian distinction, he knows that the voice means something or demands something of him, without knowing what. (But also Heidegger: 'It calls without uttering anything).

This distinction between the that and what of signification is one drawn attention to by both Laplanche and, among others, Eric Santner. Hieroglyphs, for example, are radioactive with a lost significance - we can intuit its presence but cannot decode its actual content. But it is this very nimbus of significance, this inkling that something signifies which seems to exert such a powerful demand upon us. In responding to a 'call' one simply has to trust the that before one has apprehended the what. Hence, the call carries with it a blindness and a wager of trust. From the point of view of Common Sense, one is thus behaving utterly foolishly: leaving behind reasonable and predictable rewards for something undefined. Exactly, except this very 'common sense' point of view has been suddenly revealed as indigent and inauthentic (to use, for convenience, a rather out of fashion terminology) and there is no going back to it. One has no choice but to choose fidelity to this new truth, which answers something in yourself, but also seems bigger than yourself, and will in the end perhaps destroy and recast the familar self. The Call is taking you somewhere both deeply familiar and terra incognita. I seem to have arrived, for the moment, at an almost Heideggerian idea of the uncannyness of the call. For the time being, so be it. the last word can go to him:

'The call points forward to Dasein's potentiality for being, and it does this as a call which comes from uncanniness.''

update: Heidegger's Call is discussed in the comments at I Cite. Indeed, the question I've deliberately avoided above is raised there: 'of how to differentiate the call of the superego (the stupid blind injunction) from the call of the Act (as in Antigone being called) .'