Unheimlich Quotes

“In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

“Wenn er groß war, wollte er Streichholzmacher werden. Das war so schön gefährlich, an seinen Fingern könnte Schwefel hängenbleiben, so daß niemand ihm die Hand zu geben wagte. Er würde bei seinen Kameraden großen Respekt genießen wegen seines unheimlichen Handwerks.”
― Knut Hamsun

“In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.”
― Ernst Jentsch, Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen

“We do not have to plump for the one or the other [extreme].
We experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the event and the non-event. Just as, according to Hannah Arendt, we are confronted in any action with the unforeseeable and the irreversible.
But, since the irreversible today is the movement towards virtual ascendancy over the world, towards total control and technological 'enframing', towards the tyranny of absolute prevention and technical security, we have left to us only the unpredictable, the luck of the event.
And just as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish chance - that is to say, there would never be an ultimate dice throw which, by its automatic perfection, would put an end to chance - so we may hope that virtual programming will never abolish events.
Never will the point of technical perfection and absolute prevention be reached where the fateful event can be said to have disappeared.
There will always be a chance for the troubling strangeness [das Unheimliche] of the event, as against the troubling monotony of the global order.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact