Eerie: de-formations and fascinations

Abstract

In this paper, we explore what it means for an object to be eerie. We argue that the Eerie is an index of phenomenology’s limits: it is a complex, contradictory moment in the dialectics of subject/object formation. If the familiar story of phenomenology correlates the contours of objects along transcendental vectors of subjective experience, the de-formations of eeriness emerge as the object’s resistance to our assimilation of it. An object’s eeriness is its pulling away from the pall of familiarity the subject throws over the object-world; even as the eerie object recedes from us, that very recession re-establishes it as part of a material, object field, no longer fully correlated to the subject. Yet as disturbing as eerie objects are, we also seek them out; they are compelling in their strangeness. As such, we develop a view of the Eerie which involves conflicted polarities of experience: repulsion and attraction.