Another facet of the uncanny: the double. Why is the encounter with a double, or the idea of a double, so disturbingly uncanny?
I think the logic may be similiar to the human/ inhuman distinction. In both cases there is a doubling but at the same time an indefinable subtraction. It is because the inhuman thing is so like us that it confronts us with a lack - the indefinable human X is 'not there' and we are alarmed to come into direct contact with this lack. So how does this logic work with the double?
We again have that sense that what disturbs is nothing you can put your finger on, nothing present in any positive feature - the face, the gestures etc. The uncannyness resides not in a positivity, but in an absence. Something is missing. What? the double looks like me, acts like me even; everthing thing can be the same and yet it is not me.Here we have it, the subtracted x, the missing thing resides in this small word 'is'. The double has confiscated from me that wherein I thought my identity resided - my face, my gestures or whatever, and left me with the pure fact of my being. Thus the subtracted X is here being itself, and this, this confrontation with being divested of its trappings, is what we find uncanny.
Again, this seems to have led us back to Heidegger, and his insistence on the radical uncannyness of being - the overly, overly familiar, buried beneath the most stubborn (and necesary, to some extent) amnesia. And yet, in occasional airs, its faint voice can still be heard.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with this position, but it's at least a resting place. It can be left there for now. And I hope to say more about it anon.
n.b. Gareth, at Any Street Corner draws attention to the literary example of Saramago's The Double:
What happens when Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a 38-year-old professor of history, discovers that there is a man living in the same city who is identical to him ion every physical detail, but not related by blood at all.