Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 36: 484–495, 2011

doi:10.1093/jmp/jhr038

The Ill Body and das Unheimliche (the Uncanny)

ANDREW WARSOP*
King’s College, London, UK

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*Address correspondence to: Andrew Warsop, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, King’s
College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. E-mail: andrew.warsop@kcl.ac.uk

The ill body is sometimes phenomenologically interpreted as a “bro-

ken tool” encountered in an uncanny way. I argue that this is not
what is most uncanny about illness. Within the context of an account
of Freud and Heidegger’s work, I argue that in health, we are gener-
ally alienated from the way our bodies will become inert, lifeless
corpses. In the uncanniness of illness (and sometimes other situa-
tions), we may be reattuned to this horrific certainty and disabused
of the comforting view that our bodies are reparable tools. I revisit
Zaner’s characterization of the uncanny and show how his notion of
“chill and implicatedness” captures the dynamic sense of alienation
that characterizes how we are bodily Being-toward death.
Keywords: alienation, Freud, Heidegger, illness, uncanny

Phenomenological accounts of illness, for example, those by Toombs (1993)

and Svenaeus (1999), emphasize the lived disruption of illness over the natural-
ism of biomedicine, and they often invoke the way the ill body is encountered
uncannily as a “broken tool.” How is this to be understood? If we experience
something as uncanny, we generally mean that we experience that thing in an
ambiguous way; our encounter is familiar yet somehow strange and anxiety
inducing. The uncanny is encountered in many ways, and since I am con-
cerned with its relevance to illness, it is important not to use the term in a
derivative way but to be guided by the phenomena. It is, of course, quite pos-
sible to be ill (e.g., with a cold) and not experience any associated sense of
uncanniness. However, I will discuss diverse instances of illness experience
and try to bring into view a “core” sense of uncanniness that, though not ex-
clusive to illness, is phenomenologically salient and, I argue, independent of
the notion of the body as “broken tool.” It is characterized by the existential
awareness of how one’s own body intimates one’s mortality. In this connection,
I will discuss Freud and Heidegger’s appropriation of the uncanny before mov-
ing on to discuss its importance in the field of phenomenology and medicine.

© The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc.
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 The Ill Body and the Uncanny 485

So, to enter into the appropriate Stimmung, let’s think about what it might
be like to find a lump on one’s body. Has this ever happened to you? What
was it like? Often this sort of frightening encounter tends to happen in the
most familiar and comfortable of places; perhaps when bathing or taking a
shower. Having found a lump, one’s attention is occupied by it in an uneasy
way and it tends to provoke a pervasive sense of anxiety. Even if it turns out
that the lump is a cyst or a lymph node that disappears after a couple of
weeks, for a while, one lives in fear that it might be cancerous. For most of
us who have experienced this sort of thing, this prospect is at least a nagging
worry. There is a similar concern if one finds a mole that looks as if it has

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changed. And one is not merely worried about the lump or the mole. There
is a kind of aspect shift in how one sees oneself. One’s body ceases to be
the comfortable, easy source of pleasure it was before. It is less “homely”
and one feels less capable, ill at ease in the world, uncanny. For some peo-
ple, this worry turns out to be well founded.
Patients who find lumps which turn out to be cancerous often express the
paradoxical way in which their bodies feel as if they have been “invaded” by
what is “outside” the body—while at the same time somehow acknowledg-
ing that this uncanny change occurs within them. Helman (2000, 89) quotes
from Gordon’s (1990, 275–97) study looking at the experiences of women
who, after discovering a lump, later found that they had breast cancer. One
woman describes how the cancer “is a thing in the air . . . . It plants itself in
a part of the body, then begins to eat the whole person,” whereas another
says “I see it as something that comes from outside that disturbs something
perfect that is inside of me.” Weiss (1997, 456–76) in another study, looked
at the metaphors that patients have used to describe cancer. Such metaphors
evoked flux, transformation, and the destruction of the body’s boundaries.
Cancer was described variously as an alien “thing,” an “amoeba,”
“octopus,” “spider,” a “worm” or “parasite” that “eats up” the victim’s body
from within. Indeed, the very name “cancer” invokes a crab-like creature
that supposedly consumes one’s inert (and consumable) flesh. Cancer is not
merely a histological diagnosis—it is a live possibility that many of us will
have to face up to. In such encounters, one becomes acutely aware of the
existential burden of one’s own mortality. One’s whole world is under threat.
And, as the above account suggests, the uncanny encounter is characterized
by a peculiar sense of horror or anxiety.
This characteristically unpleasant Stimmung is reflected in two classic
accounts. Freud (2001, 219), in his seminal 1919 essay, adopted a dual strat-
egy to render the uncanny intelligible: a historical survey of its meanings and
an account of the situations and experiences we recognize as uncanny. This
leads him to specify the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads
back to what is known of old and long familiar.” When he proceeds to
review the instances which give rise to uncanniness, he considers, following
Jentsch, “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or
486 Andrew Warsop

conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate” and cites the
uncanny effects of lifelike mechanical dolls (the prime example in literature is
Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffman’s story “The Sand Man” [Hoffman, 1982]), and the
witnessing of an epileptic seizure to be good instances. He says “many people
experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bod-
ies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.” In the un-heimlich,
Freud sees the prefix (“un”) as a token of repression. The uncanny is something
secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it.
Things that make us feel this way unconsciously remind us of forbidden and
repressed impulses, which are seen as an uncanny threat to the super-ego.

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It is likely that Heidegger was aware of Freud’s essay when he wrote
Being and Time, which was published in 1927 (Heidegger, 1962). The
uncanny has a specific role in the existential analytic related to the notion of
authenticity. Dasein (the entity we are) is the entity whose essence is its
existence as thrown projection. Unlike other things, we are not “whats” but
“whos,” live possibilities constrained by the existential structure of Being-
in-the-world rather than the categories that apply to physical objects. We are,
despite being characterized by “mineness,” thrown into the lived (existentiell)
possibilities of how we are with others and who we can become. Dasein
exists “factically”—it is constrained to exist in certain ways, and it is “guilty”
and finite—its thrownness means its possibilities are never its own. For the
most part, it is concealed from itself in everyday Being-with-Others. It exists
as the public and comforting possibilities of das Man and is, in this sense,
unknowingly alienated from itself. In anxiety, this changes—when anxious,
one may not be afraid of anything in particular but one’s familiar world col-
lapses and one exists in an uncanny way. Dasein’s tranquilizing involvements
are seen to be irrelevant and it is revealed to itself as alienated from its pure
Being-possible. There is one distinctive possibility, however, that seems to
condition all the others. Death can never be experienced, but as the possibil-
ity of the collapse of all our possibilities (the possibility of world collapse), it
affects us uniquely.1 Dasein is, as Heidegger puts it, Being-toward-death. In
relation to it, Dasein stands before its ownmost potentiality for being which
“is certain or ineluctable” (no one can evade it) and “non-relational” (Sein
und Zeit [hereafter S&Z], H 250. The prefix H denotes the author’s pagina-
tion). What Heidegger means by this is that it is the possibility I cannot depu-
tize to Others—my death will always be mine and no one else’s. Death is an
“existential”—a constitutive structure of Being-in-the-world—and by facing
up to it in situations of uncanniness in a certain resolute and open way,
Dasein can become authentically itself.
Notwithstanding their diverse points of departure (Heidegger’s concern is
the question of Being while Freud’s is psychoanalysis), both thinkers share
the idea that the uncanny characteristically involves a dynamic sense of
alienation. It reveals something constitutive yet “other” about ourselves from
which we have become alienated and which is, in some sense, in conflict
 The Ill Body and the Uncanny 487

with who one is socially. Freud and Heidegger give different accounts of the
characteristic unease associated with the experience. In Freud’s theory, one’s
primitive impulses are revealed in uncanniness as having been repressed by
one’s admonishing super-ego (or conscience) while, according to Heidegger,
Dasein as comfortable yet “lost” das Man hears its authentic “ownmost
potentiality-for-being-itself” as the disruptive voice of conscience silently
calling to it. The anxiety of the uncanny stems from fear of punishment
(Freud) and Dasein’s awareness of its basic uncanniness or unhomelike-ness
(Heidegger). Both writers emphasize in different ways how the uncanny is
associated with our becoming aware of our own death.

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There is little discussion of the phenomenology of uncanny encounters in
S&Z. This is in marked contrast to Freud, for whom the uncanny is a distinct
“class of the frightening” characterized by the sorts of intentional objects
discussed above. This might lead one to think that Heidegger’s account is
quite abstract and that he neglects the analysis of concrete encounters. But
such a view fails to do justice to his insight—that the uncanny “arises in the
most innocuous of Situations” (H189). Heidegger’s point (and here he nota-
bly departs from Freud) is that the uncanny is not characterized by the object
of our fears. Rather, in uncanniness, there is a radical shift in how one exists.
Everything that was once familiar and homely is suddenly revealed in anxi-
ety to be un-homelike. Fear is existentially founded in anxiety, which, char-
acteristically, has no object and reveals us in our basic—uncanny—mode of
Being-in-the-world. Most notably, and again in contrast to Freud, Heidegger
does not concern himself with the way in which the body figures largely in
experiences we would tend to call uncanny.2 But, if we are guided by the
phenomena, examples such as the ones above show us how we encounter
death existentially in an uncanny way, often in suffering illness of our bod-
ies. When faced with the discovery of a bodily lump that may be cancerous,
one is rudely awakened to the possibility of world collapse.
Contemporary accounts of the phenomenology of illness, such as those by
Toombs and Svenaeus, tackle uncanniness as it is encountered in the factic-
ity of illness. Illness, for Toombs, is “fundamentally experienced as a global
sense of disorder—disorder which includes the disruption of the lived body
(with the concurrent disturbance of self and world) and the changed relation
between body and self (manifested through objectification and alienation
from one’s body)” (Toombs, 1993, 90ff). In health, one’s body is unnoticed;
it is lived unreflectively. But when illness strikes (say, if I injure my hand), it
suddenly becomes an object for me in a peculiar new way. Rather than sim-
ply “existing” in my body, I am forced to recognize that I “have” a body. In
order to pick up the cup of coffee, I have to attend to my hand as an object.
More specifically, in her words, I attend to my hand as “a malfunctioning
physical entity”—a broken tool. On Toombs’s view, “such bodily objectifica-
tion separates self from body,” and it is associated with an uncanny sense of
alienation.
488 Andrew Warsop

In explicating the nature of this objectification, she draws on Zaner (1981,

54), who pointed out four distinct phenomenological aspects of the uncanny:
(1) the inescapable/the limitation, (2) chill and implicatedness, (3) hidden
presence, and (4) alien presence. While it is inescapable that I be embodied,
it is a matter of contingency that I have this particular embodiment (i.e., this
particular anatomical and physiological makeup). And this embodiment car-
ries with it certain radical limitations I come to terms with. For, as Toombs
points out, it is unlikely that I will become a professional basketball player
if I am only 4 feet 11 inches tall. Since whatever happens to my body affects
me, bodily experiences are experiences of “corporal implicatedness.” I find

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myself to be that person who is bound to this particular embodiment and
who is irrevocably bound to suffer whatever this particular body suffers. The
recognition of this (especially in its most radical form, that of my own going-
to-die) may be accompanied by a sense of chill or dread.
In addition to these aspects of uncanniness, the body is experienced as a
“hidden presence” in that, as biological organism, it includes events, pro-
cesses, and structures over which I have no control and of which I have no
awareness. Even if I study anatomy and physiology, I do not directly encoun-
ter my body. Rather I learn about “the” heart, lungs, and metabolism. Finally,
my body manifests itself as other in the form of an essentially “alien pres-
ence” which has its own nature, its own biological rhythms, and so forth. As
Toombs says, “Whatever I want, wish or plan for, I irrevocably ‘grow older’,
‘become tired’, ‘feel ill’, ‘am energetic’ . . . .” In illness, the body reveals itself
as an unwelcome intrusion that is “other than me,” an alien entity whose
processes are hidden and “in opposition to oneself.” It is a broken tool—to
which one is somehow bound and implicated whether one likes it or not. In
her example, the injured hand is too weak and uncoordinated to pick up the
cup of coffee. One recognizes the uncanny machine-like nature of one’s
body and the chilling way one is implicated in the failure of this tool or
mechanism. One is dependent on it and this “sense of inescapability and
limitation is intrinsic to illness-as-lived.”
In his recent book, Svenaeus is concerned to develop “steps toward a
philosophy of medical practice” (1999, 181ff). He takes over Heidegger’s
account of existential anxiety and the notion of the uncanny to develop his
account of health and illness. Illness is glossed as the revelation of a latent
“unhomelike” attunement brought about by bodily disruption. Svenaeus
further develops the idea that the ill body is a broken tool. He alludes to
Heidegger’s famous hammer in the workshop and the associated distinction
between our more primordial nonreflective practical understanding of things
as ready-to-hand, or zuhanden, which is basic to the traditional and contem-
plative understanding of objects as present-at-hand, or vorhanden. We
always find ourselves involved in the world in practical ways, and this forms
the basis of how we invest the world with meaning. As an astute reader of
Heidegger and sensitive to the way in which the biological limits of “inside”
 The Ill Body and the Uncanny 489

and “outside” the body are not phenomenologically well founded, Svenaeus
claims that “there is no valid argument for restricting the concept of tool
(Zeug) as it is used in S&Z to things outside the human body.” The hand, like
the hammer, can break and our involved activity in the world will be dis-
rupted. The hand can, of course, be replaced by a prosthesis, but, as he
points out, “the confusion and annoyance of the broken hammer can hardly
be compared to the pain we experience having broken a wrist.” Such pain
is, he says, typical of an attunement to illness. In such situations “the mean-
ing patterns of the world are disturbed as a result—in this case—of the body-
tools breaking down.” In contrast to Toombs, who focuses on the otherness

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of the body in illness, for Svenaeus, the alienation we suffer represents an
invasion of that which, in Heidegger’s words, “can break in upon us and
destroy us” (H152). In illness, we encounter unmeaning, incomprehensibil-
ity, a breakdown of our everyday “totalities of relevance” whereby one’s
body bestows meaning in its world. This breakdown confirms the way we
are, as Heidegger thought, fundamentally uncanny or unhomelike.
In what follows, I suggest an alternative interpretation of the uncanniness
of illness to the one put forward by these writers. I am not challenging the
thesis that the ill body is usefully seen as a broken tool (it is, although there
are limitations to this view), and there are occasions, no doubt, when one’s
ill body is encountered this way. I am not challenging Svenaeus’s insight that
it is our uncanniness (or our fundamental unhomelikeness) that is revealed
in illness. Nor do I maintain that the core bodily sense of the uncanny I
describe is confined to illness experience (though it is most likely to be suf-
fered in this connection). However, I do challenge the interpretation that it
is primordially the “body-as-broken-tool” that is revealed when the ill body
is encountered uncannily. I shall show that the uncanniness of illness reveals
how our bodies are existentially Being-toward-death. The instrumentality of
our bodies is different from that of tools—when we are ill the finitude of our
bodily capacity is revealed to us.
Why challenge the prevalent view? After all, using our bodies as tools
seems integral to how we understand ourselves. It is natural to speak of our
bodies as “working” in health and “not working” in illness. The philosophi-
cal pedigree of this view is ostensibly impressive. As Dreyfus points out in
his commentary of S&Z, Heidegger indirectly refers to embodiment in his
account of the primordiality of the “available” (ready-to-hand) as opposed to
the “occurent” (present-at-hand) and in developing his existentials of direc-
tionality and spatiality, even though his treatment of it is “unsatisfying”
(Dreyfus, 1991, 137). With respect to the way we bodily disclose our percep-
tual world, Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers, for example, to the perceptual
environment as “a set of manipulanda” as opposed to “objects in the Kantian
sense” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, 122). Indeed, his lengthy discussion of the pa-
tient Schneider shows that what the latter lacks is not merely the ability to
recognize objects but the kind of awareness that allows us to encounter the
490 Andrew Warsop

environment as an environment in a skilled but non-reflective bodily way. In

this sense, it seems reasonable to see the body as a unique sort of tool—one
that allows us to encounter the world as a world. Is it not, therefore, a bro-
ken tool in illness?
One reason to be cautious about conflating the instrumentality of the body
with that of a tool (and such a conflation is implied in Toombs’s and Sve-
naeus’s work3) is that there is strong textual evidence that Heidegger sharply
distinguishes between the two. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphys-
ics, he distinguishes between a tool’s (equipmental) “readiness” and a bodily

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organ’s “capacity”:
Readiness in this specific and well-defined sense belongs to equipment. As equip-
ment, the pen is ready for writing, but it has no capacity for writing. As a pen, it is
not capable of writing. It is a matter of distinguishing readiness, as a particular kind
of potentiality, which we ascribe to equipment, from capacity. (Heidegger, 1995,
220)
An organ is fundamentally different from a tool. Whereas the latter is service-
able for some involvement or other the former is part of the organism. It is
not that the organism is an assemblage of organs. Rather, the organs are what
they are in virtue of the way “the organ stands in service of the capacity that
develops it” (Heidegger, 1995, 226). Organs, such as the eye, for example,
subserve a capacity to which they belong, but they are not serviceable in the
way a hammer is serviceable. Organs are the manifestation of an organism’s
capacities; the eye subserves the capacity for seeing and the hand subserves
the capacity of grasping. What ultimately has capacity is an organism, and
Heidegger insists that an organism does not see because it has eyes; rather,
it has eyes because it can see. Tools, on the other hand, are serviceable
rather than subservient because they are what they are in virtue of the in-
volvement to which they belong. (The pen is a pen by virtue of its involve-
ment with the paper, the writing desk, the postal service, etc.). This distinction
is, of course, borne out by the phenomenology. Although the hand is “used”
in diverse involvements, it is, after all, an atypical organ. Our organs are not
what they are by virtue of what we do with them, and they are not encoun-
tered by us or separable from us as tools are. My pancreas produces en-
zymes that digest fatty foods, but it is not what it is in virtue of meal
involvements, and I can never encounter it as a tool.
However, sometimes the ill body is encountered as a broken tool. And
there are many therapeutic situations when it is usefully seen as such.
Orthopedic and plastic surgery, for example, demonstrates the success of
this approach most obviously. But, it might be illuminating to ask, how is the
uncanny associated with the idea? As Heidegger observed, the uncanny can
be encountered in diverse ways, as he says, “in the most innocuous of situ-
ations” (H189). It is not, like Leder’s notion of dys-appearance, confined to
the concretely encountered “unusable” body (Leder, 1990, 84).4 The uncanny is
 The Ill Body and the Uncanny 491

encountered in illness and in health, in the imagination, dreams, and litera-

ture. We may feel uncanny and not notice any bodily change, for example,
when reading about the student who falls in love with Olympia—the lifelike
doll in Hoffman’s famous story. Or we may encounter our own body in
uncanny ways independently of illness. After reading Kafka’s “Metamorpho-
sis” (Kafka, 2002), for example, I might imagine what it is like to wake up as
a beetle. I may feel my own body in a vaguely uneasy and uncanny way, but
I’m not ill, nor am I aware of the body as a tool or a machine, much less a
broken one.
Even though we do not, for the most part, encounter our bodies as tools,

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it is quite common in our biomedically attuned culture to see one’s body as
a machine or a tool and to do so in such a way that the experience is neither
unpleasant, nor uncanny, nor in the context of illness. There are, for exam-
ple, advertisements for low fat margarine, which make explicit reference to
cholesterol “blocking” the blood vessels to the heart. But by living healthily
(eating low fat margarine) and looking after one’s heart (a pumping ma-
chine), one is persuaded that this process may be prevented. While taking a
shower or a bath, one might, like the pioneering physician Harvey, be inter-
ested to note that one’s own veins fill with blood when they are below the
level of the heart and that the blood in them flows in a certain direction.
Similarly, one feels one’s pulse, perhaps, and is reassured that the heart
pump is going at a steady 70 beats per minute. The body is experienced as
alien but in a comforting rather than an anxiety-inducing way. It is a perceiv-
able mechanism, “other” than or over against myself as perceiving subject
and, in this limited sense, alien.5 One is aware of the possibility of malfunc-
tion but also reassured that the body-machine/body-tool is working just fine.
There is no uncanny experience of alienation.
However, given that we can experience our bodies this way, is it not un-
reasonable to maintain, as Toombs does, that our bodies are experienced as
broken tools or machines when we are ill? For her, the notion of the ill body
as a broken tool/object is integral to the uncanniness of illness. On closer
inspection, this idea is not supported by the phenomenology. If I break my
wrist, my hand does not become a perceivable object “in the Kantian sense.”
If I position it on the table among the other items, there I do not think of it
as on a par with the lamp, the laptop, or the paperweight. Nor is the loss of
use of my hand on a par with the loss of use of these items qua equipment
or tool. When I break it, my hand is still subservient to my capacity to grasp.
What I encounter is the privation of the lived possibilities (of it revealing
other objects) that I enjoyed before I broke my wrist. I encounter my
prehensile capacity in a privative way as my whole world not being right.
Primordially, my broken wrist is not “other” in the sense of a perceivable
object or tool, but it is the privation of the lived possibilities of my body habitus
that somehow shows up in this “broken-wristy” way. My whole perceptual
“background” somehow shrinks. To employ Heidegger’s distinction outlined
492 Andrew Warsop

above, I find myself in a new incapacitated world (as opposed to a tempo-

rarily unserviceable involvement) and my wrist dys-appears out of a global
privation of my lived possibilities.
This highlights another crucial phenomenological difference between
tools and bodies—one implied in the distinction between the “capacity” of
bodies and the “serviceability” of tools. Suppose I choose to mend my door
and select a hammer for this task. If my hammer breaks, I may deputize door
fixing to others. But the situation is very different when I break my wrist.
I do not choose to use my wrist for the tasks I undertake as I choose a ham-
mer to fix my door. My wrist is integral to my capacity to perform such tasks.

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It constitutes the background required for the hammer to appear as the tool
it is. As Toombs says, I just do things in a non-reflective way. I am, however,
in virtue of “corporal implicatedness,” bound to suffer whatever conse-
quences my chosen tasks may have on my body. I cannot deputize the bur-
den of its illness to others. The way I own my broken wrist as a privation of
my capacity is markedly at variance to the way I possess the broken ham-
mer. My injury isolates me from the others who have the capacity to just get
on with their everyday work.
Despite this privation of my lived possibilities in illness, it does not always
follow that I’m alienated from everyday meaning (in Svenaeus’s precise
sense of a breakdown of meaning patterns). When illness strikes, it may not
“break in upon us and destroy us.” If I break my wrist skiing, for example,
there is a sense in which such an injury is a live possibility in my enjoyment
of the sport. The risk of falling, at some level and to some degree, makes it
meaningful. Similarly, if I am of a religious and fatalistic disposition, perhaps
I anticipate illness as some sort of divine punishment and, insofar as I accept
it as such, there is no breakdown of meaning when I become ill. However,
even if illness does bring the sort of meaning breakdown Svenaeus de-
scribes, I may still break my wrist without any particularly uncanny sense of
alienation. Perhaps what matters to me is modern medicine, and I trust that
my orthopedic surgeon will get on with repairing my bodily capacity and
thus maintain my “totalities of relevance.”
To see the difference between tool failure and the core sense of uncan-
niness in illness, let’s go back to our discussion of the phenomenology of
bodily lumps. In what sense is the discovery of a breast lump something
other? Recall how the lump was paradoxically both from without and from
within. It was a “thing” which “plants itself” “from outside.” Cancer “eats
up” the body. These patients encounter their bodies in new, disturbing
ways and are somehow alienated from them. The “otherness” of the inca-
pacitated “dead” hand when one breaks one’s wrist is redolent of this too.
This otherness is not merely in Toombs’s internalist sense of the body
being other than the experiencing subject; nor is it merely a breakdown in
everyday meaning patterns (Svenaeus’s unhomelikeness), although such
breakdown is likely. It is other in a dynamic sense of alienation. True to
 The Ill Body and the Uncanny 493

Freud and Heidegger’s conception of the uncanny, the lump and the bro-
ken wrist remind me of something about myself that I have always known
but evaded or repressed. This is the finitude of my bodily capacity. In
bodily uncanniness, we become aware of how our bodies are like other
objects not merely in the sense that we see them as perceivable and outside
us but other in the sense of being inert or life less material. When we are
well, we are absorbed by the diverse ways our bodies disclose the world
to us, but in illness, we are reawakened, in a bodily way, to impending
world collapse. Death manifests itself as the inevitable going-to-die life-
lessness of our bodies. We see how our material bodies may occupy and

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share “lifeless” physical space with other inert things. Medicine encourages
us to think of our bodies as tools or machines that perpetually serve us
and, in this sense, guarantee our living through them. But in uncanniness,
we see how flesh will fail us and how we have been wrong to think other-
wise. We are, as Heidegger pointed out, Being-toward-death, and, although
we can defer to others, surgeons for example, to help us restore our bodily
capacity, we cannot deputize the distinctively ineluctable possibility of our
own death.6
We cannot experience the event of our own death but we are, one might
say, existentially related to it in a bodily way. Indeed, it seems to be Zaner’s
“chill and implicatedness” that captures this primordial, dynamic sense of
alienation we may suffer in the uncanniness of illness. With the above cri-
tique in place, I want to re-examine his account more closely. Do the four
phenomenological strands he describes each contribute to uncanniness in
the same way, or is there one that governs the others? For example, is the
“inescapeable/limitation” always uncanny? Arguably, there are ineluctable
aspects of how one is embodied that may be enjoyable. OK, if I’m 4’11” I’m
not going to be a good basketball player. But I may be a damn fine jockey.
And if it so happens that I am, ineluctably, 6’7”, I could enjoy a great career
in basketball. The point is, inescapeable limitation is not always associated
with the unease we associate with the uncanny. Neither is “hidden pres-
ence.” We may be unperturbed or even comforted by hidden presence, as,
for example, when taking one’s pulse or learning about physiology and
anatomy. Prospective mothers and fathers experience a unique joy at the
first sight of their baby during an antenatal ultrasound examination. This
is (usually) a happy revelation of the body’s hidden presence. Alien pres-
ence, too, is not always experienced in an uncanny way. We can admit,
with Toombs, that our bodies do their own thing. We “become old,” “get
tired,” and “put on weight.” But our bodies are also alien presence in ways
we enjoy and even relish; we can “eat lots and not put on weight,” we can
“get pregnant,” or discover that actually, we “are energetic.” We might find
ourselves becoming sexually aroused when we did not expect to be.
These are all ways we might discover our bodies as “alien presence” in an
enjoyable way.
494 Andrew Warsop

However, the phenomenological core of Zaner’s characterization of the

uncanny is, I suggest, chill and implicatedness. We may be implicated in
our bodies in benign ways (the adolescent may enjoy having to shave his
chin for the first time), but what Toombs calls the most dreadfully and
chillingly implicative, my own “going-to-die” is not benign. Heidegger
recognized that this peculiar impending possibility is ineluctable and un-
shareable, and we see it in the fragility and finitude of our bodies. Chill
and implicatedness is how the body manifests Being-toward-death, and it
is the primordial feature of the uncanny that modifies all the others. The
other features, when they are uncanny, are uncanny by virtue of the way

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they suggest this core feature. Admittedly, this dynamic aspect of bodily
uncanniness may become apparent in situations other than illness—perhaps
when one sees one’s reflection in the mirror and realizes how one’s body
has aged. But it is in the acutely threatening situation of illness that we
are most poignantly reminded of this aspect of ourselves. It is, for ex-
ample, in the chill and implicatedness of finding a lump on my body
when I see how I have become alienated from the way my body will be
lifeless, inert and anonymous “stuff.” This capacity I enjoy now is not
forever. The horror of this existential burden may be revealed in the most
innocuous of situations when one is reminded of our fundamental uncan-
niness and rudely disabused of the comforting illusion that our bodies are
living tools.

NOTES

1. There is considerable debate in the literature about exactly what Heidegger means by death, but
it is clear that it is not to be seen as an event in the same way that biomedical death is the terminus of
one’s natural history. World collapse is the ever-present possibility of impossibility, the possibility that
one’s world of possibilities may utterly breakdown. This may pertain to cultural possibilities or to the
peculiar finite possibilities enjoyed by an individual, for example, being a teacher or a parent. Dreyfus
calls the irremediable collapse of an individual’s world (such as the sort of collapse endured in terminal
illness) “terminal world collapse.” See Dreyfus (2005), 30.
2. This may seem surprising, but Heidegger’s neglect of the phenomenology of the body in S&Z
has been extensively commented upon. Overgaard (2004, 116–31) points out that although Heidegger’s
talk of equipment as ready-to-hand and Dasein’s concernful engagement with the world clearly evokes
“a working, walking, grasping subject,” he has good methodological reasons for not giving Dasein’s
embodiment a fundamental role in the existential analytic. According to Overgaard, it is Heidegger’s
view that the terminology of the body furthers conceptions of Dasein’s being “composed” of a number
of different types of entities. Mention of the body almost inevitably carries with it complementary notions
of “mind” and “soul” and “the mental.” This can only serve to detract from the unitary phenomenon of
Being-in-the-world which is to be secured and exhibited in the existential analytic.
3. Svenaeus is explicit that the instrumentality of the healthy body is to be interpreted as equip-
ment or as tool-like. Toombs claims that the “lived body is both the total center of reference which things
indicate and the instrument and end of my actions” and she is clear that it is an “‘instrument-for’ actions
within the world.” Its instrumentality is tool-like; the only difference between it and other tools is that it
lies at the center of equipmental involvement, and its tool-like nature is not obvious until we are ill. For
both writers, the body is, in Heidegger’s terms, serviceable for diverse involvements.
4. When the body dys-appears it “appears as a thematic focus but in a dys-state”—it appears not
in a pleasant or appropriate way but in the sense of “bad” or “ill.”
 The Ill Body and the Uncanny 495

5. While the body may, in certain conditions, be perceived this way, it is never experienced simply
as another perceivable object. As Merleau-Ponty points out, bodily space is “the darkness needed in the
theater to show up the performance, the background of somnolence or reserve of vague power against
which the gesture and its aim stand out” (2002, 162).
6. We cannot deputize this possibility to others, but it is a possibility which Dasein, qua embodied,
shares with all other Daseins. Patient and therapist must both deal with this existential burden. In seeing
death in this way, one is not committed to Heidegger’s autarkical individualism.

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