In my paper I will deal with the Heideggerian concept of Unheimlichkeit and its usages in the framework of phenomenological and humanistic geography.
My paper will be articulated in two parts. In the first part, I will introduce the concept of Unheimlichkeit by following Heidegger in Being and Time (1927). Here Heidegger reinterprets the psychoanalytic notion of uncanniness (Freud 1919) in onto-phenomenological terms, also retrieving its originally spatial character (Unheimlichkeit literally means “not-feeling-at-home”). According to Heidegger, spatiality is a fundamental characteristic of the Dasein. The constitution of a meaningful world happens when the Dasein is able to transform her surroundings into familiar places, where she can orient herself safely. Unheimlichkeit makes its appearance in relation to the analysis of Angst: when we feel Angst, everyday meanings of the world are suspended. According to Heidegger, such suspension of meanings is the most original phenomenon concerning the Dasein (paragraph 40). In this uncanny situation, however, the Dasein learns to understand the world as possibility: its meanings are never fixed once for all, its virtualities are never really saturated by any possible actualisation. At this point, uncanniness shows its potential: after the discovery of Unheimlichkeit, our gaze is refreshed and our existence is open to possibility.
In the second part of my paper, I will show how the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino has interpreted “uncanniness” with reference to the spatial practices of settlement and migration of both nomadic and settled populations. In this framework, “not-feeling-at-home” constitutes one of the two poles of the “geographical experience” (Dardel 1953); the other pole is represented by being emplaced in the world, “feeling-at-home” in it. I will show how phenomenological geography retrieves the qualitative, affective, and experiential aspects of our “being-in-a-geographical-world”. Familiarity (or “sense of place”, Relph 1976) and uncanniness are used to evaluate the quality of the relationships between subjects and places. Given its nullifying power, uncanniness is often related to displacements and diasporas; however, it retains a positive meaning when it is associated to the experience of the elsewhere, in the framework of a journey of discovery, thanks to its potential to challenge stereotypes about places (and their inhabitants), enhance our attention to space (which is, quite often, what we take for granted as the neutral backdrop of human action), and refresh our gaze towards it.