This miserable love of system rejects what is strange, often without any patient examination of its claims, because, were it to receive its place, the closed ranks would be destroyed, and the beautiful coherence disturbed. There is the seat of the art and love of strife. War must be carried on, and persecution, for by thus relating detail to finite detail, one may destroy the other,while, in its immediate relation to the Infinite, all stand together in their original genuine connection, all is one and all is true. These systematizers, therefore, have caused it all. Modern Rome, godless but consequent, hurls anathemas and ejects heretics. Ancient Rome, truly pious, and in a high style religious, was hospitable to every god. The adherents of the dead letter which religion casts out, have filled the world with clamour and turmoil.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers
The uncanny is a modality of the sacred in just this respect, in its unnatural duality and its potential for the proliferation of doubles and monsters. With writers like Poe and Kafka, it constitutes a resurgence of the sacred in a desacrilized world. Its thematization in criticism is not fortuitous, being evidence of our sacrificial crisis, in which our neighbor, our double, emerges as a fantastical and fantasized reflection of our own desire, of a violence we cannot consciously own up to...
p. 164. Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction. Andrew J. McKenna
Strange and familiar, homely and sinister, the paradoxes of the uncanny are those that Derrida discovers in metaphor (as well as more generally in writing, in the gramm) and sacrifice in the victim. In its simultaneous attraction and repulsion, the uncanny exhibits the antinomial structure of the sacred, the sacrilized victim, the object of desire. The uncanny is a modality of the sacred, with this difference when related to the sacrificial scenario (that is, when conceived anthropologically): it is no longer unknowable when traced to its institutional origin; its very unknowability is knowable as the mystification informing sacrificial substitution. Deconstruction is accordingly historicized rather than invalidated once its attention to the uncanny is shown to reflect łthe crisis of all cultural signs.˛ If it is to survive, it must not mistake the symptom for the cure.
ibid. p. 176