Monstrosity and the Psychoanalytic Dimensions of the Uncanny

Part of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis series - more in this series

Book Details

Publisher : Routledge
Published : September 2025
Cover : Paperback
Pages : 246
Category :
Forthcoming
Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis
Catalogue No : 98210
ISBN 13 : 9781032568881
ISBN 10 : 1032568887

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This accessible and meticulously researched book is a philosophical study dedicated to the psychoanalytic dimension of the uncanny, and the discussions on monstrosity as fundamental concepts to address contemporary experiences of anguish, desire, suffering and alienation.

Examining the uncanny in Freud and Lacan, the book explores its emergence through psychoanalysis and aesthetics, as well as its meta-psychological implications. Chapters in this book explore the history and connection between the uncanny and monstrosity in both philosophy and psychoanalysis, following on from the construction of Freud's 'The Uncanny' in 1919, and focusing on these concepts through different perspectives, such as Marxism.

Offering new insights and arguments on these fascinating concepts, this book will be of interest to philosophers, psychoanalysts and psychologists, as well as appealing to professionals and students in the worlds of arts, film and history.

Reviews & Endorsements
Table of Contents
About the Author(s)
Customer Reviews

Reviews and Endorsements

Monsters and other figures of the inhuman have become an ethical and political task that this book tackles with excellence and originality. Drawing on the strangeness that inhabits us and the very specific type of anguish it causes, Rodrigo Gonsalves paints a portrait of the monstrosities of our time, showing how every monster is always a re-edition of a previously forgotten monster, that returns to remind us that the past has not passed yet, even when they present themselves as a future to come.
Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker, University of São Paulo

Rodrigo Gonsalves’ book is a landmark in the politics of negativity. In our subjective economy, negativity has to be read through the lenses of the Freudian notion of the uncanny – in this way, a new perspective opens up to investigate recent figures of monstrosity and to further our understanding of angst, fears and desires in the face of the ideological predicaments of nowadays. Gonsalves’ monstrosity suggests another look at Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, one pertinent for today's dimension of subjective suffering which derives from our capitalist global structure. An essential book for anyone interested in where we stand today!
Slavoj Žižek, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London

As an author who more than three decades ago happens to have written one of the seminal texts on the uncanny, I now rejoice at this new book which takes the multifarious clue of the uncanny much further and wider, using it systematically as a red thread leading from Freud’s initial insights through Lacan’s complex ramifications to Marx’s logic of commodity universe, the horror in popular culture and to the monstrous logic of the present-day capitalism – finally proposing the prospect of a monstrous materialism that could be a match for the monstrosity of late capitalism. A very necessary reading.
Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana

Introduction

1. On Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: an (Uncanny) Compossibility
2. Monstrosity in Dispute: Monsters in History and Its Implications to Thinking
3. The Uncanniness of Monstrosity (or is It the Other Way Around?): The Contours Towards Another Grammar Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
4. Monstrosity and Impasses of Fetishism: a Marxist Approach (or, a Debate Towards 'monstrous Materialism')
5. A Monstrous Grammar for Psychoanalysis

Conclusion