Al Alvarez, in his 1973 monograph on Beckett, considers how in Beckett’s post-war work (written originally in French) particular forms of techniques are mobilised where, as in Brecht’s alienation effect, characters are kept at a distance and any identificatory suturing of the reader to the text is disrupted (see Alvarez, 1973: 62). Beckett often gets his characters to break off from a piece of story-telling to talk about the narrative or directly to the reader, as if to prevent the audience from getting seduced by any narrative that hints at linearity. Alvarez thinks of this as a trompe l’oeil effect, a lure, designed to disrupt. The alienation effect, or estrangement effect, was employed by Brecht as a way of shattering the conventions of narrative, character and plot to promote a conscious engagement with the truth of the text, rather than being in thrall to the fetishistic glimmers that might otherwise be on offer.
With this in mind I turn to Laplanche’s neologism étrangèreté, which is a combination of étrange, strange, and étranger, foreigner, and which has also been rendered as ‘strangerness’. For Laplanche étrangèreté is an integral part of the unconscious (sitting alongside Freud’s twin markers of the unconscious: its atemporality and the absence of negation). It can be understood in terms of the idea of the internal foreign body: the unassimilable trauma that then may reappear in a deferred form – as in Laplanche’s articulation of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit as après coup or afterwardsness (Laplanche, 1992a: 66–67). In the classical Freudian formulation (Freud, 1917: 142), the ‘strangerness’ appears as if coming from the outside and is rejected by the ego, as a ‘foreign invasion’ (in Strachey’s translation). It can be countered, according to Freud, in the consulting room by reassuring the ego that what it assumes comes from without is actually a withdrawn portion of itself. But for Laplanche this move away from the ‘strangerness’ of the unconscious, the taming or domesticating of it, is a move towards a re-centering of the ego, rather than the de-centering revolution he proposes in ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’. The ‘strangerness’ of the unconscious is, he says, held in place by the ‘enigmatic relation of the other to his own internal alien’ (Laplanche, 1992a: 80).