The popular understanding of the term uncanny designates the recognition of something familiar in what should be unfamiliar. For example, when we meet a stranger who has a striking resemblance to a loved one-say, one's mother-we remark," You have an uncanny resemblance to my mother." This usage is amazingly divergent from what Sigmund Freud (2003) meant by the uncanny. For Freud, it is just the opposite: the uncanny is an experience of the unfamiliar in something that should otherwise be quite familiar. Freud's famous examples are his thinking he saw a strange man in a window but which turned out to be his own reflection in a mirror, and his experiencing a street as new when in reality he had been there just moments before. What produces this uncanny sensation is the return of some repressed content that was formerly kept secret. In this essay we will deploy this precisely Freudian sense of the term in an analysis of the home. Our argument is this: the home, which is something that should feel most comfortable and familiar, has increasingly, in late capitalism, become a space where the uncanny is experienced. The question becomes, what repressed content of capitalism itself comes to the fore in the figure of the" un-homely" home? We contend that the uncanny home is a symptom of the repressed truth concerning the alienating results of private ownership.

As a point of orientation (and of departure) we will use Theodor Adorno's reflections on the home to examine this thesis. Although the fate of the home has been a central concern for many philosophers in the twentieth century-including Martin Heidegger's reflections on Being and dwelling (1993); Gaston Bachelard's topoanalysis of homes,