PRASCENE STRANOG
THE UR-SCENE OF THE ALIEN

Summary/Abstract: This paper uses Freud’s psychoanalytic term the Ur-scene to confront the problem of the radically alien, which cannot be derived from the self nor integrated into any kind of commonality. In psychoanalysis, the Ur-scene is a traumatic experience played out before the subject who experienced it had become aware of his own selfhood. In this sense, alienness should be understood as something innate to the self. Taking as his starting point the fundamental motifs of modernity, the contingency of order, the self, and the Other, the author differentiates between diverse forms of alienness, the ecstatic, the duplicative, and the extraordinary, and concludes by drawing attention to the need for a policy in regard to alienness that would itself be permeated by the alien.

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