Thomas Hirschhorn on the Swiss Uncanny

Authors: Morales Aparicio L*

DOI: 10.23880/phij-16000240

Volume 5, Issue 2

Abstract

Switzerland as a nation is a construct dating to the late eighteenth century, codified by the Swiss political and intellectual elite. Switzerland as an idea, as a holistic nation-state, determines four culturally and geographically distinct demographics into a whole – one unified by Romantically natural, thus neutral, icons such as the Alps, agrarian production, and a medieval oath sworn by the founding forefathers in a meadow outside of Zürich. Swiss national identity is, even today, still being determined and refined for her citizens. In recent months, there has been a persistent drive by the Swiss political elite to apply yet a further Ockham’s Razor to Switzerland’s national construct: to reduce the number of cantons (federal, independent states) from twenty-six to a mere seven. This historical and socio-political situation flags for us the fundamental question of a collective identity, its construction, and its remainders by demonstrating the continuous and concerted effort to manage the icons and structural systems of Swiss national, regional and cantonal identity. Indeed this pressing and pervasive issue of identity must be understood at once as a social phenomenon/problem and also something the self is undergoing while in a state of its own becoming. Thomas Hirschhorn’s artistic work, as we shall see, seems to assume and perform this tense and multi-tiered predicament. At the same time, these issues of subjectivity will be well-served by a consideration that is specifically alert to the philosophies of Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger – particularly the paradigmatic scope of the Uncanny in their diagnoses of subjective experience. That is, the topological problem of Swiss identity will be treated as a manifestation of how the Uncanny (for this artist and these thinkers) is understood and treated as a phenomenon, and then also what this phenmenon leads to – what the Uncanny might ‘do’, or what we might ‘do’ with the Uncanny.

Keywords: Swiss; Phenomenology; Sigmund Freud; Martin Heidegger

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