Resisting the Place of Belonging: Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative and the Arts. Edited by Daniel Boscaljon.

Abstract

Of Freud’s influential essay ‘The Uncanny’ (a work and term that both undergirds and haunts this collection of essays on home and homecomings), Hélène Cixous writes: ‘The whole enterprise, from its inception, may be designated as an act of theoretical boldness and as an answer to a solicitation issued from a domain waiting to be explored.’ 1 She perfectly articulates my response to this bold and uncanny work I so often experienced as simultaneously difficult to approach whilst irresistibly attractive. Reading it was an aesthetic, ethical, spiritual journey, often unnerving, yet delightful even in its unsettling discomfort. There is an unusual force here, an uncanny nature that is both theme and actuality, as the essays frequently perform what they are about; a strangeness emerges from this writing about the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange, making the book itself an artifact of the uncanny. It is a necessary book, especially in these stagnant and fearful times when in academia, in theology, literature, and culture, so much seems dulled and tepid, for it makes grand claims upon us, suggesting that by challenging our notions of home and by privileging ‘becoming unsettled’, we may know the possibility of ‘a more rich, full, open and ethical future’ (p. 6).