In his
essay titled "The World and the Home" Homi Bhabha draws on Sigmund
Freud's concept of the "Uncanny" ("unheimlich"). In its
original sense, Freud's uncanny or "unhomely" refers to the estranged
sense of encountering something familiar yet threatening which lies within the
bounds of the intimate.
In "The
Home and the Home" Bhabha uses Freud's concept of the uncanny to describe
the somewhat dismal state of (post)modern sense of belongingness and the sense
of "home". According to Bhabha the state of the "unhomely"
is not a state of lacking a home, or the opposite of having a home, it is
rather the creeping recognition that the line between the world and the home
are breaking down. As Bhabah puts it: "In that displacement the border between
home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public
become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is
disorienting".
For
Bhabha the unhomely is expressed in the sensation that your home is not yours,
and he broadens Freud's discussion from personal to political causes. Bhabha's
unhomely appears through "holes" in the fabric of reality, things
that remained unsaid, questions that remained unanswered, a place "where
the relation of "object" to identity is always split and doubled"
at the edge of the knowable. The
unhomely for Bhabha, like "the uncanny" for Freud, is the result of
repression: "To "un"-speak is both to
release from erasure and repression, and to reconstruct, reinscribe the
elements of the known. "In this case too," we may say with Freud,
"the Unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home like, familiar; the
pre-fix 'un' is the token of repression". It is the repression of certain
expressed truth which has suddenly turned foreign. Bhabha concludes his discussion
of the unhomely by arguing that "As literary creatures and political
animals we ought to concern ourselves with the understanding of human action
and the social world as a
moment when something is beyond control, but it is not beyond
accommodation".
