With a distraught face, Maria slowly descends the stairs leading to the courtyard. She is disoriented. With a vacant gaze, she tries to sit down on the steps. As she does so, she covers her face with both hands. She cannot believe it. She has left behind her a life that suddenly comes back to face her, but with the distance that allows her to see herself. Jean Baudrillard would call it a return-image or “returning image”: its effect consists of coming back to us with a bang and putting before our eyes a perspective that, because of its proximity, we did not see. María is struck by the present consequences of the violence of the past not because she had repressed it and it has suddenly become manifest, but because she is aware of what she has experienced, where she has been and how it may have affected her: “That was the first time my mother realised what she had suffered and how lucky she was to be alive. And also how traumatised she was, even if she did not show it.”
The scene belongs to the Greek series Teacherin Spanish titled Symphony in Blue (Papakaliatis, 2022), in which Maria is aware of the mistreatment she has suffered after seeing the damage in other people. Maria, sobbing, whispers: “God, what have I suffered? What did I let him do to me? What have I suffered? How am I going to get better? What have I suffered, God?” Maria remembers everything, so that if the “returning image” hits her it is because she now knows how to interpret what she always had before her eyes. This knowledge frightens and distresses her. The damage is much deeper than she believed, not only because it has marked her, but because it has conditioned a way of doing and behaving for years. By “seeing” for the first time, her life itself has changed or, as Sigmund Freud said of the uncanny when analyzing the etymology of the term Unheimlich, Suddenly the familiar, what was normal for her, becomes strange. It takes a lot of courage to continue once your eyes have been opened.
Linked to superstition and ancient beliefs, the concept of the uncanny is often understood as something repressed or hidden that returns: “The uncanny would not really be anything new, but rather something that was always familiar to psychic life and that only became strange through the process of its repression. And this link with repression is now illuminated by Friedrich Schelling’s definition according to which the uncanny would be something that, having remained hidden, has manifested itself.”
I do not wish to contradict Freud, his reading of Schelling, and all those who have followed this conception, but in view of what happens to Maria I would like to propose, in relation to evil and harm, another definition of the uncanny: “That which, always in sight, has not been perceived and has even been normalized until something or someone disorients us and we are aware of what we see, in such a way that what has been normalized breaks down and what was familiar becomes strange.” This is, for example, the question of horror films: the appearance of the ghost scares us, but what is really disturbing is knowing that they have always been there without us seeing them.
The problem, to follow Freud’s reflections in his 1919 text, is not that we are afraid of having our eyes torn out and that is why the character of Coppelius The Sandman ETA Hoffmann’s story is not “sinister”, as the Austrian says when analyzing the story, but for the first time we use our eyes. And we see. In this way, everything that was normal shows that it never was.
The uncanny would not be understood as an aesthetic category related to literature, but would fall within an epistemic dimension: it supposes a change in the gaze that reveals the biases with which we have been understanding the world, that is, it is not something that should remain hidden but has been manifested, but is always manifest, but we have not seen. Maria experiences the uncanny in her own life. She remembered everything, nothing was repressed, she knew of the damage of the situation and, nevertheless, she did not know of the depth of the evil. Until now.
As an aesthetic category, Freud says he has never experienced the uncanny, but as an epistemic category we all have experienced it at some point or should do so when we realize what we have normalized, as happens to Maria. This knowledge changes everything. It can paralyze us but it also opens up the possibility of change and becomes a political category: even if we do not see evil, it continues to have effects that can only be combated with awareness.
Please excuse me for the theoretical development above. Now comes the question of practical application: what is sinister in our societies? What evils do we not see that hearts feel? Reality becomes strange when we are aware of the evil that we have normalized and the harm that we have justified: that of mistreatment, neglect, abuse, the one that Maria suffers, but there are also other, everyday, insidious ones, to which we have become accustomed.
What is happening in Gaza is not sinister, it is terrifying. What is sinister is our attitude towards the pain of others, our way of dividing the world into good and bad. What is sinister is not the murder of an 11-year-old child, but the mental, social and moral conditions that have led someone to commit this crime. What is sinister are our ways of acting and living together that we repeat and of which we are not aware because they point to crystallizations of the evil that we have accepted. One may ask what evil is and whether it is inherent to being human. Certainly, life is not free from pain, from difficult moments that seem or are insurmountable, from necessary evils related to our vulnerable nature (death, illness) or those that arise from disagreements between human beings, but what is not necessary is our way of facing it and acting accordingly. Evil is, therefore, a form of relationship.
Hannah Arendt said, against Immanuel Kant, that evil has no roots because whoever lets himself be carried away by it limits himself to living on the surface of events without ever penetrating them. Now, the fact that we pass over the facts without thinking about them does not mean that the events do not penetrate us without realizing it and generate a way of acting that we do not perceive at first sight. Evil forms a rhizome. Horizontally, its circular ramifications generate damage that we carry unnecessarily incorporated, although we only see it in the concretions of extreme moments. It would then be necessary to dare to look at how we cross ourselves, in pain, before the inextricable evils of existence and how, however, we do nothing about what we can change, of course, for the latter, as happens to Maria, you have to be very brave and it is possible that it hurts: a necessary pain to avoid unnecessary suffering.
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