Three Modes of Terror: Transcendence, Submission, Incorporation

Abstract

In this article I discuss three modes of terror. The first, derived from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, sees terror as an operation of the narcissistic fusion of self and other: terror is produced when the ways of the world are reduced entirely to the narcissistic confines of the self.1 The second conception of terror, which emerges from Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, understands terror as a mode in which the desires of the self are forgone in deference to the authority to which one submits. This second mode of terror is thus characterized by a willing submission to the other. A third notion of terror, taken from Lucile Hadzihalilovic's recent film, Innocence (France, 2004), posits terror as something that must be accepted as part and parcel of human existence. From this perspective, terror is not something which the human being should strive to transcend (as occurs in Nineteen Eighty-four) or to which one must submit (as is the case with The Remains of the Day). Rather, for Innocence, terror is something which must be incorporated. These claims are made from within the context of psychoanalysis, most specifically by way of an understanding of Jean Laplanche's challenge to psychoanalysis: that the unconscious constitutes an 'internal etrangeretli' (alienness) which is both put in place and maintained by an 'external etrangerete'.3 For Laplanche, the origins of the unconscious are external. The unconscious does not spontaneously or biologically arise from within the human subject, but is instead an internalized externality, an external alien inside me. Orwell's and Ishiguro's novels narrate ways of quashing or expelling the external, alien qualities of the unconscious, whereas Hadzihalilovic's extraordinary film offers a version of the implantation of the internal etrangerete which is fundamental to the formation of