Abstract

From Descartes onwards, modernity has proposed various categories and theoretical models – mental illness, the unconscious, ideology - to characterize an outside force capable of depriving the punctual, self-present subject of rational autonomy. Hypnotic trance constitutes another foreign body or agency that can take possession of the self-possessed Cartesian subject. Inhabiting the blind spot of reason and reflection, the hypnotic relation remains alien to the Cogito of psychoanalysis, a mysterious challenge to its authority. This essay explores the relationship between hypnosis, subjectivity and authority in two literary texts - Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' and H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau - in which hypnosis mediates various postulates of the inhuman: death, the animal, tyrannical authority. Simultaneously depicting hypnotic fascination and reproducing its uncanny effects, these texts testify to the enigma of hypnosis.