SOURCE: “The Sublime Simulacra: Repetition, Reversal, and Re-covery in Lem's Solaris,” in Critique, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1995, pp. 177–94.

In the following essay, Easterbrook draws upon Sigmund Freud's description of “The Uncanny” and the theoretical statements of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard to explore aspects of psychic, symbolic, and textual doubling and repetition in Solaris.

How does the thunderstorm happen, in other words, repetition, the event, which is also to say, a tear, a rupture? Something, perhaps, blows or blows up, pops, pierces, opens and shows up. There it was, and now here it is. It happens.

Repetition: what does it produce, give (back), duplicate, yield, deliver, conceive, return, engender? (152)

—Sylviane Agacinski

What happens to the perished Other when mourning is inhibited?

—Avital Ronell

Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, in “Reflections on My Life,” an essay on the nature and focus of his work, published in the collection Microworlds, assigns...