Dr. des. Mihnea Chiujdea

Research Project

The Uncanny – Finitude and Renewal

My project proposes a new philosophical investigation of the uncanny. While there has been a considerable amount of research on the uncanny in other fields, the depth and significance of the concept have received insufficient philosophical attention. My guiding hypothesis is that only normative beings, like ourselves, can experience not just angst, fear, uneasiness, or strangeness, but specifically the uncanny. Conversely, the experience of the uncanny is a specific mode of relating to our existence as normative beings. Therefore, an appropriate understanding of the uncanny can provide a new perspective on our existence, highlighting the precarity, finitude, and transformability of our being.

Methodologically, I suggest developing this notion of the uncanny and the corresponding understanding of normativity by means of an in-depth study of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. While there is much literature exploring Heidegger’s contribution to normative theory, Heidegger scholars have given the uncanny short shrift. Exploring this gives us a new outlook both on Heidegger and on normative theory.

The upshot of the project is fourfold: 1. to deliver a new genuinely philosophical perspective on the uncanny, as yet restricted to cultural analysis; 2. to disclose a neglected dimension of Heidegger’s contribution to normative theory; 3. to make a systematic contribution to the ontology of the normative, specifically with regard to the leeway allowed by normativity and the productive potential of the uncanny; 4. to elucidate the origins and nature of the aesthetic forms of the uncanny.