The reciprocity between human and animal began to gradually fade with the emergence of agriculture and domestication during the neolithic. The taming of wild animals in particular, says Berman, altered the relationship between “self” and “other” and “created a kind of flattening effect in one direction, and an effect of heightened opposition in another. The ‘friendly’ part of the animal kingdom started to almost disappear from view, whereas the ‘unfriendly’ part now stood out in stark relief.” Self and other began to split apart. From this moment on, the hybrid creatures of mythology became increasingly disturbing to humans, and animals such as reptiles and amphibians, and particularly snakes, acquired a simultaneously menacing and sacred status. It is in this experience, in the encounter with “that which is not-me and yet disturbingly resonant with something within me,” where we can verify the beginning of repression and emergence of the unconscious. The answer to the question: Is sovereignty and its terrible places a pathological configuration stemming from a faulty division between the self and the world? (4.10) is yes, as long as repression is seen as the primal manifestation of a “pathology” that divides the human from the world and, therefore, separates the world into self/other, inner/outer polarities.

In fact, Freud associates the return of the repressed to a feeling called unheimlich which means literally “not of the home”, (from German heim, “house, home”) and has been commonly translated as the uncanny. Unheimlich evokes a feeling of dread when the individual faces not something “new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.”¹ Thus, it is in the return of the “other”—that animal part which is not-me and yet is disturbingly resonant with something within me—where we find the origin of the unconscious.

In regards to domestication, the original sense of the verb to tame, from Latin domare, was to force a wild animal into the human world, something palpable in its etymology which, according to Roberts and Pastor, comes from the Protoindoeuropean root dem-, “to force, constrain.” Related to it there is another homonymous root that gives rise to the latin domus, “house,” and to a group of words that include domicile, domestic, dominant, domain and dominate.² Given the relationship between domare and domus, it becomes evident that taming—and dominating—means not only forcing into the human world but into the house, which is the domain of the human who has separated himself from the rest of the animal world. It means to bring into the human home—domus in Latin and heim in German—that which is wild, to force it to conform to an imposed order. It is rather telling that everything that is repressed and forgotten—the “other,” our animal side—is called unheimlich, not of the home. Seen in this light, domestication was instrumental in the emergence of both the unconscious and the dynamics of dominance and sovereignty. This matter leads to an important conclusion: dominance and sovereignty are activities whose origin and mode of operation lie beyond conscious control.

Following domestication—the entrance of the animal into the human domain expressed in the voice domus—the relation between the self and the other, initially complementary and polar, becomes antagonistic. The human starts repressing the other and gradually becomes an enemy of all that is not-me. What cannot be dominated and domesticated must be hunted or banned (0.17).

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1. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 13. ↩︎
2. Nowadays most linguists separate the etymology which originates domo -are and domus in two different roots. However, it is important to note that in Sanskrit, the oldest language of the Indoeuropean family, the word damya, coming from the same root, means both “domesticated or tame” and “familiar or homely,” which would indicate that both roots probably derive from a single concept. (Franco Rendich, Comparative Etymological Dictionary of Classical Indo-European Languages, 242) ↩︎