ABSTRACT
“I got so scared,” so Clarice Lispector writes in The Passion According to G.H., “when I realize I lost my human form for several hours. I don’t know if I’ll have another form to replace the one I lost” (Lispector 2012, 6). Losing our human form may not be an experience that many of us have had, but in the course of everyday life, there are moments in which we can feel ourselves slipping away from a sense of the world as a locus of familiarity. During such moments, we might feel alienated not only from our surroundings, as though the same surroundings were synthetic, but also from ourselves. For a brief moment, we might catch sight of ourselves as strangers, as though our identity were a flimsy construct deployed to ward off unfamiliarity. In such moments, it might be that we have had a feeling of the uncanny.
