BOOK LAUNCH: Unconscious/Television (2025) @ Linha de Sombra
Transcription:
LUCAS:
Firstly, thank you. Thank you to Linha de Sombra for welcoming us here and to Becoming Press, too. I, as part of the ERC Film and Death Project, am here with Claire, one of the editors of Becoming Press, a publishing house based in Berlin, and in Nicosia in Cyprus, along with Polymnia.
They accepted my proposal for Unconscious/Television, and I’ll tell you a bit about the book. This book comes from a questioning of clinical psychoanalysis in regards to moving-images. And I think it started back in 2021, with a text I wrote on two films: firstly on Mishima by Paul Schrader - who sounds a lot like Schreber who is Sigmund Freud’s psychotic character -, and secondly on Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice.
It was a text that tries to elaborate on the concept of lamella by Jacques Lacan. It’s also a text that began with a presentation which I made for the Portuguese Centre of Psychoanalysis with a clinical enquiry about the lamella. This “unreal organ” that would occupy the body and that would basically be the occupation of the Oedipus Complex in the body. And I elaborate on it with Mishima Yukio, because I believe that Mishima operates as a war against the lamella which will culminate in his Harakiri, in his Séppuku, and that he’s always there placed as a production of new words.
In Unconscious/Television, I wanted to think about Japanese Television animation and its unique complexity, and I would go on to focus on Neon Genesis Evangelion in one of the texts of this book, on Devilman Crybaby in another text, and in other texts I would talk about a range of other Japanese animations such as Serial Experiments Lain, Cowboy Bebop and more.
Then, there is a final text which is about David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. This final text on David Lynch was also the basis of a presentation I gave recently at Ifilnova’s CineLab as part of our Film and Death investigations. As you can see in this Film and Death Seminar, I discuss the concept of the crypt.
To begin with, I will talk today a bit about David Lynch, because I believe that the last touches of this book Unconscious/Television come with two deaths. First, with the death of my grandmother and then with the death of David Lynch. Why am I talking about this?
Because David Lynch died last Wednesday and I attended this loss, very much, somewhat shocked by it. It was something unexpected, and although I knew he had emphysema, his death was something we didn’t talk about. One would say that maybe he wouldn’t make films anymore. And he dies. Nobody was really expecting that as we don’t necessarily expect death, even though we know about it.
Then I talked to Susana Viegas, saying, damn, David Lynch died… and Susana said: it’s as if someone in the family died. And it is: someone in the family. Because he has a function there. We learned something through him. Afterwards, in a conversation with Alexandre, my husband, I said that it seems that a father died through this relationship that David Lynch had with me, as someone who taught me how to make cinema; I was alphabetized in the question of cinema by watching David Lynch, even if I didn’t like one or another of his films, I knew their importance and tried somehow to mimic the style he teaches. If I try to think of a great moment of learning, learning how to edit, it would be by watching how he would edit Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. A strange editing, a weird film that doesn’t really work. Some people say it is one of his bad films, but it is a very good film as well. It is interesting how strange it is to see a film made after a TV show.
I had a dream and this dream happened the Thursday after Lynch’s death. I was thinking about this question that I mentioned about the father and the death of my grandmother… The dream says: “All the women are dead, the Mothers have died.” What comes to mind is this idea of my grandmother.
And the dream keeps going: “The father will appear and he will talk to you.” And this father, who is David Lynch in the dream, comes closer to me and I don’t know what to do. So I hold my breath… and jump out of the window, which makes no sense - why would someone hold their breath before jumping out of the window? This is a question of analysis. “Why do you hold your breath… so you can jump out of the window?” It wasn’t, supposedly, the ocean.
Given this, I thought about the importance of Lynch’s work for this book Unconscious/Television, a book that desires to think about the tensions between, first Sandor Ferenczi’s Thalassa, which would be this chaotic sea of forces and potentialities, pre-human, in an inter-species relation, and secondly the Bedrock of Castration, which is what I take as, at least in a Lacanian elaboration of Psychoanalysis, as the name-of-the-father.
So I find this dream very interesting, and I’m not interested in interpreting it too much, since I believe that we don’t have to do this to our dreams, and we must let dreams bring chaos into our lives. But I think that, in a way, this dream speaks about a question that is transversal to this book. A question of how is it possible to produce theory, how is it possible to produce philosophy out of a matter that is more related to Chaos, and to the Thalassa, than it is to this way of conceptualizing with, or under, or in a way that follows, the name-of-the-father, — which, in this case, would be “the symbolic” — “the symbolic” related to representation and to Castration.
I believe there is something of the Thalassa that is chaos, that is much more important than Lacan’s “anxiety”, or “anguish”. Something that he elaborates on, in Seminar X, I believe, is that the ocean of the Thalassa works in a “psychotic” way, much more multiplicitous and intensive in the production of concepts for philosophy. I hope this is the contribution that the book offers.
Then I move to anime, which I believe is a fruitful place for us to think through, or in relation to, “psychoses” and “perversions”. And that’s what I’m talking about.
CLAIRE:
Hi, my name is Claire, and I'm one of the directors of Becoming Press—and that's kind of an inside joke for us at Becoming Press, because there is not much structure to what's going on, so it's as if we are saying that we are the directors of a situation that doesn't have much direction— I will speak a little bit today about the way the book has been structured, as the editorial team, which was myself, Lucas, Polymnia over there with the camera, as well as a friend that we have in Montreal who goes by the alias “0nty”, put quite a lot of time and thought into how we can interact with the book that Lucas has prepared, in the sense of, we are asking the question, in what way does the book itself, the physical book itself, the printed matter, interfere or contribute to the actual text itself? And is it possible for us to use the physical arrangement of the book to benefit the text itself or to contribute to the arguments of the text?
And I don't exactly remember how things began. And that is always the case with Becoming. I can never quite remember where things started. Pools of molten relations cooling to structures, seemingly by themselves. But in this case, we were presented with a manuscript from Lucas, one that I read and I was taken aback with, and felt that it was very relevant to what we were doing at Becoming at the time. We were confronted with some “problems”, or some interesting things going on within the text.
For example, the manuscript contained three intersections. It contained three breaks that were a part of a yet indeterminate vision for the book that Lucas had. And we took this as our point of departure. What can we do with these three intersections? In what way can these intersections impede or relate to or benefit the text? And in what way can they serve the text?
But floating alongside this was another idea. You see the book is made up of six parts, and we had this idea floating around that we would split these parts into smaller parts and to perhaps rearrange them and to shuffle them together. When we did this, we ended up with a situation where the structure of the book felt a little bit like a Television show. It was somehow episodic in the sense of having a Wolves part one, and a Blades part five.
But then it also looked theatrical, because we had some clear acts divided by interludes. But then there was also something quite “Television” about it, in the sense that we had three commercial breaks. So we asked the question, what can we do with these breaks? In what way can these breaks benefit the text? Or how can we work with these moments where we break out of the text and dive back in as if coming up for air before diving in again?
And in many ways, this was quite exciting for us. And it had some success. For example, Christine Greiner, who is the chair of the Department of Arts in São Paulo Pontifical Catholic University, said that their experience of reading this book was like a book-becoming-film. Although having said that, it is another question entirely to ask or to evaluate or to judge the effectiveness of the decisions that we made and to evaluate the kinds of decisions that we made about how to utilize the structure. But it was a big question throughout this process, and we explored a lot of potential uses for these intersections. And at some point we were very close to publishing or republishing Penthesilea from Kleist within the intersections of this book, or perhaps something like Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
So as a byproduct of the structure of this book, with it being arranged with this kind of three intersections and with the chapters being split up into smaller parts — as a byproduct of this structure, there were multiple ways of interacting with the text. It could be because you could go page by page, or you could follow the lines of each chapter as if hunting a venison in the forest. Now that's an interesting image. And from here we can think about the psychoanalytical woods where the jaguar lives. And recently we have been thinking about Diana, the goddess of the hunt, who was also the goddess of the undivided woods. But she was primarily the goddess of the moon, who resided over transversality, above all, the crossing of barriers. Hence the goddess of birth.
And in thinking about the woods, we start to think about the idea of the periphery and the center. And in one myth, Diana punishes King Agamemnon for hunting in the undivided woods, because in doing so he crossed the line. As by hunting the animal the king had forgotten that he already takes from the woods, as the idea of the center, the king in the city, was dependent entirely upon the peripheral. And perhaps this is one interesting way of interpreting the form that we have created with this book — we aren't exactly sure ourselves, and it's quite open to interpretation, as various figures like the Möbius strip could be projected onto it. So how then you interact with this book, in particular with these territories that lack a direction changes how you move through the text and that affects how the text is read, overall. It affects the superstructures that seem to emanate from the base, which then informs the base and opens up this kind of more dialectical process and so on. And between the four of us at the editorial team, we felt that we were able to fold the form back in on the text, and we hope that we have done so in a way which reinforces the arguments of the text. But that is for the reader to think about.
So with this in mind, I will leave you to read the book. Lucas is a really unique writer who writes as they speak, and they are very capable of speaking for themselves. So we thank him for the time of working on this book together. It was extremely fun and thought provoking, and we sincerely hope that you are glad that you and we sincerely hope that you are glad that you approached us in the first place. I offer the floor back to Lucas, or to anyone who has any questions for Lucas or for myself, but I just wanted to take the time to say thank you for coming today, for supporting us through supporting Lucas. And we are all obviously incredibly flattered for you coming here today.
LUCAS:
Even though I am a member of the Portuguese Center of Psychoanalysis, which is mostly Lacanian, I wouldn’t say that my formation of psychoanalysis within this book comes from Lacan. It comes from Félix Guattari. And I believe that it is necessary for us to think what is the most poignant in the book Unconscious/Television, as a publication, which is the desire to think with a minor literature, and that is something that tomorrow at Ifilnova we will debate more. But this notion of minor literature is a notion of a literature that may produce a foreign language inside the native language. I think it is a place. The person who will conceptualize this in a very interesting way is Gilles Deleuze, in Critique and Clinic, when he is proposing us to think that this is a clinical work, a work on health. So it is a Deleuze, who is very influenced by Guattari, nevertheless, he is still very Lacanian; to think the foreign language inside the maternal language. But this is something that both Deleuze and Guattari are working on in a beautiful way in Kafka for a minor literature.
So… How can we make an academic publication that will work on concepts and that is interested in the production of concepts, which, at the end of the day, is what philosophy is all about. But in a way that is another “structure”. In a way that is a maze, a labyrinth. In a way that it is a structure that is without the name-of-the-father, as a master signifier that is somehow lost, disorganized, or disoriented. Because the main problem that my proposition wants to pose, between psychoanalysis and philosophy, is: How can we think concepts? How can we work in relations that are much more schizoanalytical than neurotic when we are producing concepts? Because I believe that the production of concepts, philosophical production, needs a work that is much more schizoanalytical, much more of a journey that is schizoanalytic, so new things may appear.
I believe that if we think with this book, that it is a Japanese book. We have access to Japanese books in their original form when we buy mangas. This is something interesting. When we buy mangas in the West, mangas are also published with the story read from right to left. Publishers respect that. It is interesting that when I proposed to Becoming Press that we should gather these six texts for the book, we composed this assemblage, which is much more of an assemblage than a structure, since it is much more molecular than it is structured. I placed, as the last text of the book, the one written after Mishima. This text which elaborates on Mishima was actually the first text written for this book, and I think that we should have this back and forth going on. And what is the most important thing in this text written with Mishima, is the production of new words, after a performance of the body.
There is something there in Mishima’s literature that culminates in the Séppuku. The Séppuku is a literary act. A literary machine. Because it is a literature that isn’t domesticated. A literature that doesn’t know what it is. If we think with the act of the Séppuku, it is a philosophical act of literature that we are entangled with here. With a thought that is going to a place where Devilman Crybaby goes. Demons and humans use fusion when they merge in a war against the human symbolic. It is an issue in Evangelion, when the phantasmatic neurosis of being what is missing for the big Other breaks down. When this breaks down, it is possible to produce another world, because one will not attend to the demands of the big Other — what the big Other demands of you. And this is something that David Lynch teaches us when he makes Twin Peaks, above all. Because Twin Peaks is a work of art for television, much more than it is for the cinema, it enters our houses, it is made to be watched in the middle of things. This is very subversive, it is a minor literature composition as well. Television is capable of producing something that is maybe much more disruptive than cinema. You go to see cinema as a projection in a cinema theater. And that is what is important in this book.
There is something that is very interesting. Television has a body. The TV. The TV set. The box. You can hold it, use your hands to grab it much more than a projection at a cinema theater. The projection will be there, we can interact with it in a way like in Bergman’s Persona. But you can touch the screen. Jean-Luc Godard even mimics this act. But he also makes another image.
Godard does the Persona act in JLG/JLG. He is there touching the projected cinema screen as in Persona. However, Godard also produces this other image that I think is more important for this book: an image found in Prénom Carmen, in which this character hugs the television, he embraces it in a way that is “autistic”. In a certain way, this book tries to meet these lines of force that resist the symbolic, as much as we meet them in clinical works, with psychosis and autism. The form of the book comes from that, from a minor literature, a minor something which is taken as strange. Something that is taken as not very perceptible, or comprehensible.
That is why I approached Becoming Press and proposed to them: “Let’s make something… minor.” I would say, maybe even transgressive, but I don’t know if that is the question. The question is maybe something that is more difficult to perceive or to comprehend at first, but that should anyway be read, “understood”, elaborated on, debated… I think that is the relationship between Cinema and Death that I have been investigating… My question with the minor is because we are looking for possibilities of rebirth. But a rebirth that must never be interpretative or hermeneutic. A rebirth that must always be… Thalassian… A force of life, in multiplicity, not a relationship between subject and object. It is much more multiple in its composition - something that is the affect of a body, which could be my body, or your body, but the body of the book as well. A book: a being of sensation. All these objects here work… “animistically”. This is something you learn with anime. All the moments — not exclusively within narratives of anime, but also when, for example, we see cosplay… Cosplay seems, in an elaboration, as something… “animistic”. The force of the image is so strong, or at least stronger than the force of a symbolic, and you have to somehow work semiotically with these “signifiers” and the unconscious that will appear in a field of forces.
Q1—MATILDE SOUSA:
Why did you choose these objects?
LUCAS:
I always wanted to write with anime. I always thought it would be very interesting and during my clinical practice of psychoanalysis anime appeared a lot. I received youngsters, teenagers, and anime would appear in several sessions the whole time, and I noticed that it would be something that I should work alongside the unconscious. That wasn’t a coincidence. I always worked with anime, I was always a consumer of it as a global phenomenon. It was always there for me. I have the tattoos! It is something that interests me, profoundly, as production of life, really, production of body…
When I had the opportunity to work with anime and the theory of the unconscious with psychoanalysis, I said: Alright. What am I elaborating on here? I thought I should first begin with a question that is present in a classic anime. What we think from the 1990s onwards would be Evangelion, and clearly for most of the people who watched Evangelion, it is a question of Lacanian psychoanalysis that appears there. But it is a Lacan which is the most neurotic Lacan that there can be. Which is very interesting, but that irritates after a while, because what we could think about as Lacanian psychoanalysis would be the traversée du fantasme. Ikari Shinji is a boy, who has a very difficult relationship with his father. The mother was absorbed by the mecha, the robot. He has to pilot the mecha to accomplish this Human Instrumentality Project, which means: the science that produces a robot desires Shinji to occupy a place, to have a role as the pilot of the robot. This is basically the phantasme. One enters there as that which is missing for the completeness of the big Other: that would be language or science in its final analysis.
I wrote a text about that in a very detailed way, about the question of the relations between the death drive and desire. A desire that would not be a lack, but a desire that is the production of difference… By thinking with Guattari, Evangelion is an object that is somehow annoying, in a sense that we are stuck in neurosis. And, at the same time, every time you try to get somewhere with Evangelion, a new film is produced - a film that reinforces the neurosis, because until the very last of them, the struggle between father and son is still going on. So I wrote this text and noticed that this wasn't enough of a guidance to my hypothesis, in regards to what I was trying to achieve as a thesis.
Then I found Devilman Crybaby, which was this object that could provoke different, other thoughts. We had this workshop with Thomas Lamarre which was very important. Lamarre showed that scene in which Fudo Akira swims in the air. Yes! Isn't it what he does? And Thomas Lamarre brilliantly showed that scene. Because the characters do not care anymore what gravity is, or what Newtonian laws say, or for us here making philosophy, the characters do not care anymore about Cartesian laws. This was a big insight for me, in terms of thinking that I should watch it again and write. I went to this object, this object which provokes thought. So I first watched Devilman Crybaby and then read the manga, something is said there that is incredible for us who work with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari… It is said there — and the character who says it is Lucifer, who isn't just any character. Lucifer is at war with the humans — he says: Humans produce weapons. Our weapon — the weapon demons are producing — is fusion. We merge among us, and with humans, to attack humans and to survive in this war between humans and demons. The question of fusion, I believe, is that if we think about it with the concept of multiplicity, from Deleuze and Guattari—with affects and percepts—it’s something that was important to bring up here for an elaboration on the anime and the unconscious.
I also wrote this text with Devilman Crybaby, which is the most important text of the book. I mean… It isn't the longest text. The longest text is the one about the crypt and that one is also very important. Now regarding the crypt in Twin Peaks and David Lynch… That text was presented in my recent seminar at the CineLab two months ago. I think it is a question of… rebirth, possible rebirth and facing death at the end of the world. Demons merging… And that is a question that appears in anime, which is something very productive. And from that, I went to several places, for instance, Comme des Garçons and the work of Kawakubo Rei, the fashion designer and director of Comme des Garçons. In 1997 she produced this very interesting collection — this passage between the 1990s and the 2000s… There are incredible Japanese animations that deal with the possibility of reworking the body in a way that attacks the symbolic. Here the opposite happens: it isn’t the body that will be produced by the symbolic in the way Lacan proposes. This means that the body isn’t an effect of language. This is something that we really need to re-elaborate on as psychoanalysts. Japanese television animation talks about that very well. In that passage from the 1990s to the 2000s… The body is what reworks the symbolic and the symbolic is not what structures the body. I think that these tensions are in Devilman Crybaby, in a way which Masaaki Yuasa takes from the 1990s… In the end of the 1990s, anime ranging from Serial Experiments Lain to Cowboy Bebop, for instance, thought about the production of new genres… The plot of Cowboy Bebop… Every time you see the… the ad-breaks, this sign appears and says something like: Those are the jazz players, they gather in a jazz club and they are producing a new genre… What this will be, we don’t know but this will produce a totally new possibility of life. This is very interesting and Devilman Crybaby does that as well in a more contemporary fashion in 2018 and breaks the neurosis found in Evangelion, which I do like… but even if I find Evangelion aesthetically beautiful — and for sure it has a strong relationship with me, producing desire in me and in my life — I find Evangelion very stuck. Too close to… Ingmar Bergman… Too close to the family drama… Devilman Crybaby is something different…
Another important object for my thesis in this book is Twin Peaks, the last Twin Peaks: The Return. I believe that Lynch — and I was talking to Claire and Alexandre about that… While Evangelion proposes its drama outside of a larger cosmogonic context and of course you know the politics and what is going on in the narrative, Evangelion doesn’t explain what has happened, it doesn’t say where things started. The lore, the expanded narrative… You don’t know how things happened. For you to know that this is the story of an alien race that reaches the Earth, you need to look that up on the internet. That isn’t in the anime. It isn’t. But even if you look it up… Even if you search... It is a strange search that is only answered online, but it is nevertheless considered to be the lore, and that is quite strange. David Lynch with Mark Frost do it differently. Lynch is thinking… Is there anything weirder, beyond Laura Palmer’s and Dale Cooper’s narrative? And so he makes Part 8, the atomic bomb, the Trinity Test. With that episode in mind, I try to think about the concept of the crypt; a concept, which in this book I propose, that it is another unconscious. And that is very strange for some Lacanians. In the book Le Verbier De L'Homme Aux Loups by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, they go on to think about the case of Freud’s Wolf Man: that he has a vibration of possibilities of other unconscious that are not one unconscious, but are several. Unconscious organized along paths of psychosis. Lynch is going to propose that. He escapes the family drama… to produce another drama… perhaps a social one? Actually, no, it isn’t a social drama. It is a cosmic drama! Cosmic drama! In which you can reorganize… enriched uranium and make an atomic bomb. This is a cosmic drama. You take a piece of a star, energize it and make a bomb. Win a war against Japan. There is something very intriguing there, in the production of the bomb that, I propose, would be the production of a crypt. And this crypt is another unconscious. This book wants to think about that. How can we think of other possibilities of the unconscious that are not organised in a symbolic, structured as language, but that do the inverse? It is the body that attacks the symbolic, and not the symbolic that alienates the body. I don’t think that it is there, in alienation, that psychoanalysis should operate. Mishima does that when he acts with the Séppuku. He says: listen, I’ll write this last act, that is an act of theater and its cruelty. An act of literature – finally.
CAROLINA BOLDRINI:
Could you please elaborate a bit more on Kawakubo Rei?
LUCAS:
This collection by Comme des Garçons is a runway from 1997, in which Kawakubo Rei produces what she considers the least unsatisfactory of all her shows. This is excellent because… CdG was a global phenomenon. In the 1990s, Japanese fashion designers were big in the Paris Fashion Week, and she makes this collection that she calls Body meets Dress, Dress meets Body. It’s 1997. Evangelion is from 1995-1996, Serial Experiments Lain is from 1998… It's all a bit tangled up in this epistemic possibility of Japan. And Kawakubo Rei has this very interesting approach when she is going to make a collection. She doesn’t go with pre-elaborated sketches. She arrives at the atelier with a word. And she will work by trial and error with the pattern cutters. For people who are working with cinema and death, it's not just any word that she's going to use in this collection. She uses the word Renaissance in French. At first, was she referring to the European Renaissance? And that is very poignant. Isn’t it? Well, that amplifies a perspectivist problem: working with Japan and the Renaissance, which isn't Japanese. The idea that came out of the studio, through trial and error, is these bodies. Bodies that the fashion critics will call… a runway of lumps and bumps. Of tumors and… curves.
She says that she wanted to make bodies, not clothes. She was very much interested in this meeting… between body and dress, much more than making something that would be bought and already elaborated. And that someone would say: this is stunning, I buy it! It was the worst CdG sale in history, because nobody bought it; because what are you going to do there? Nobody wants to wear a garment that produces tumors, but it's incredible at the same time, because it says a lot about the concept of the crypt, it says a lot about the concept of the radioactivity of the encounter. If we finally think about another author that I work with in the book, alongside Guattari, Lacan, Lamarre… which is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. There is something about this perspectivism, that it is a combat, a crash, a meeting. Something that is given and that is troublesome, that needs precaution, more than simply wearing it and being pretty because you are wearing it.
So, she makes this interesting move in fashion. A bold move. CdG took the risk. And I don't think it was a simple risk. She took the risk because the risk talks about desire. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, in what they write in the book A Thousand Plateaus: the risk talks about a war machine, and the concept of the war machine is very important here in this book, because the war machine is a manifestation of desire and its forces. Sounds like a Brazilian title for a soap opera… It is something disruptive. Kawakubo, I believe, makes something that is a manifestation of forces, that paves the way for our thinking. We will need to think from that physicality, from that meeting, and I believe that the images of anime are doing this the whole time.
If we think with the fusions in Devilman Crybaby: What happens when the body of a demon merges with the body of a human? Who leads the way? Is it the human or the demon? You don’t know. The schizo is there. The schizo is at play. The same thing happens when you pay a lot of money for haute couture. You don't know what it's going to look like, because the body will only be produced afterwards, with the encounter. So, even going towards the idea of minor literature and of the people to come. It's something that doesn't know what it is yet. Deleuze and Guattari say: I speak for a people yet to come. I speak for people that are not here yet. I agree with that, conceptually, in regards to affects and percepts— in the relationship between art and the production of thought— which, after all, I think is the place of philosophy. That's what we're talking about here. We talk for a people yet to come. Not about but for. I think that for all of that, and for the clinical thinking of psychoanalysis, reading Cannibal Metaphysics helps a lot, because Viveiros de Castro will say: You have to be careful. When you enter the forest… When you go into the woods… You don’t know what you’re going to become. It depends… What you become depends on the forces you summon in these compositional relations… And it is very interesting when a designer does that. Body meets Dress, but Dress meets Body. There aren’t any subjects and objects. There isn’t nature and culture. There is no divide. No Cartesianism.
So I realise that it's going to be that way, because it was perceived that way. It's something that has to take place in that tension, in that neighbourhood. And I think we learn a lot from Japanese television animation. I think it's even the fact that it's very popular among children, says something of a wild thought that can't be abandoned, mastered or educated; savage thinking, polymorphous and polysemic productions…
MISCHA DOLS:
I was wondering… You chose some very specific animation shows, and… They also come from quite a specific time, even though Devilman Crybaby is way newer, it is referencing something from… the 1990s. It's a remake, right? Like a reinterpretation. And it was Japanese, obviously. And I was wondering, why were you drawn to that territory, and how do you relate that to other animation, for example, Western animation — just as an example like Avatar: The Last Airbender, or something like that. What do you see in the territory that you chose? What do you find more difficult… to see in other territories of… either more contemporary media or, other animation territories?
LUCAS:
Thank you for the question. I mean, it's super good and it compliments Matilde’s question, you know, with like, the choosing of the objects. Yesterday, trying to prepare something for [this event], I said maybe I should see a film, maybe I should see something, maybe I should try to… I don't know, clear my mind. Yet at the same time, go into a movie that I didn’t talk about in the book but maybe it's there… And then I watched The Matrix—but it's really there! I mean… I don't think it's for nothing that Trinity is called Trinity in The Matrix.
I think there is this relationship from the 1990s to the 2000s that follows another relationship with the virtual… that is very new. And also you get like Existenz, from Cronenberg… It's in the same year, from 1999. So I think there is… there is this kind of Stimmung of what is going oAnd if you get like Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa Pulse is also a film that is talking about the magic of this computer technologySo... I think the best place that we can find this is Japanese animation. I didn't mention that the book is dedicated to this person that really helped put Japanese animation into a philosophical context, which is Thomas Lamarre, a Canadian professor. He proposes that we should see Japanese animation not as something that is less than Western animation, because… the thing with Japanese animation is that in its form… It is a “less”... animated film, because they use a lot of still frames. So… It would be a “limited animated film”.
So, then Thomas Lamarre made a book where his main point is: these things that move less are much more important, maybe, than what we are producing in Disney, for instance. And then he goes onto, as a preposition of the book, how anime thinks about technology, and how anime thinks the philosophy of technology. And then he goes in the first half of the book… I mean… It's more than half of the book that he goes into Nausicaä, and elaborating on the comparison between Nausicaä and Disney. But he proposes there
is another elaboration of technology that comes from Japan that's much more animistic and much more like Signaletic Animism. That's a concept that he's going to produce in his second book on anime, that is called The Anime Ecology. There’s something alive in those still frames. Maybe… It interested me because the 1990s… were something that I was maybe… less… intellectual? Because I was looking at those images as a teenager, and I think it really affected me in a way that like built… like… what I'm talking to you right now. So there is more an affective way of dealing with it… So it's not so intellectual, so elaborated, but it’s picked up more in the flesh and that's really important here. But… What I like about this idea that Lamarre is going to say comparing like Western animation and, Japanese animation is that he proposes… a name for it that is called “Animetism”. And Animetism is something that happens between the layers. So… It’s images, that don’t move. So you work with zoom in and zoom out. You work with repetition a lot, much more than Western animation. But… There's something in between. And then that's the work of the philosopher to elaborate on. Like, what's this in-between there? I didn't say that, but I think it's important here. What happens in this meeting, what happens in this… What is going on in that forest… where the jaguar meets the human, and then the human becomes the boar because the jaguar is going to devour you, because then and then the human becomes the boar because the jaguar is going to devour you, because then you are in the… in the semiotic realm of the jaguar, because we are weaker than the jaguar.
So what is this layer in between?I think… when Lamarre elaborates this concept of Animetism, we're maybe talking about what Susana is thinking about… Death-Image. So it's an image that is always trying to, to put… another possibility of life that is not life here or life in the symbolic, but something else. Because if we tension a lot the concept of the death drive, the death drive is not destruction, per se, the death drive – and I think especially in the Deleuzian reading of the death drive, the death drive is another possibility of life. It’s another possibility of life, that escapes the panopticon of language. And then I think when Lamarre is saying that there is an in-between, something that is not distinguishable there, that is not experience-able in a way. I think he's talking about the unconscious. So, yeah, pretty much, I think… and that's something that happens in between the realms of digital and real.
And Lacan is going to elaborate a lot on that. But I think the one that elaborates the best was Guattari with The Three Ecologies. This thing of the unconscious that happens in like social, technological, and also, corporeal. And I think Japanese — it’s not only Japan. I'm a Brazilian, if you get Oswald de Andrade, he’s thinking about that in the 1920s. Oswald de Andrade is thinking about Anthropophagy. So there's something that is in devouring those things in the world that are making something else that are unpredictable. So it’s much more humus than human. See… It's much more transitioning. Viveiros DeCastro is going to say: You need precaution, because what is constant… The consistency of this world is changing. So the consistency is this thing of… Conceptual body… World. Change.
CLAIRE:
I was just going to mention, this idea of multiplanarity because we were discussing a little bit about this yesterday, and something that we didn't mention was this multiplanarity. And… the fact that you have these kinds of layers, and I think that's a really important aspect of why this subject matter has become such an interesting field for you to, to look into. Because… Yes... the “between the layers”… it is a very interesting philosophical area that you don’t find in Disney, as you say, because everything moves in a Disney animation, illusion is there playing a big role.
LUCAS:
Everything moves in what is not moving… Because the image in the Japanese animation is not really moving… That’s very interesting because those compositions are multi-layered. So there's something that's moving that you have to elaborate because the image, per se, it's kind of fixed.
Yeah. So, what is the movement inside, in the layers within of those fixed images? It’s a beautiful insight that Lamarre had… Both of his books are amazing, but I think since they are in the Communication Department, they should go further, you know, into Strenger and Guattari, but he kind of keeps himself from exploring so much the concepts with the notion of the unconscious, for instance, but he really proposes it and it's brilliant. Yeah. Finally: What is the best part: It's the second book, The Anime Ecology. He has a great session on the Porygon Attack. We know this “attack”: several kids were watching TV in Japan. The year is 1997. The kids were watching Pokémon and there is this episode. Electric Soldier Porygon. Suddenly… Pikachu… He does “electroshock” — it's his super power. He's the most powerful Pikachu that there is. 600 kids in Japan had epileptic attacks watching this. They had seizures watching TV. And then there was a huge debate in Japan and globally, asking: Why? What is the reason for these kids to have epileptic shocks while watching TV? And then Lamarre, in his notion of Ecology, tries to think what happened there. And it's totally inconclusive, even though neuroscience is going to say something, even though common knowledge is going to say something else. People say that it could be because of the flickering blue and red that it was too strong. It could be because the kids were watching too close to the television. But for me, as a psychoanalyst, I think we should also include that it's an episode that Porygon crosses the realm, of what is virtual and what isn’t, because Porygon is this Pokémon that can really cross from one to the other, from one place to the other. And I think this narrative part affected their bodies...and then their bodies reacted to this narrative. And I think this is very interesting for us to elaborate what from the Unconscious is happening there, maybe, I mean, going further, I think this is... a proof of the existence of the Unconscious.
Because we don’t have a full result. I mean, there's no… proof of really why that happened, but it happened. And then we have to elaborate after that. And I think with Freud and Hysteria… it’s the same thing. What's going on there that those kids had an epileptic attack? And there's no conclusion per se. What are the things that happened in between the layers.
CLAIRE:
Well, I actually think that’s kind of why we ended up going into this, this figure of the goddess Diana as the one who is kind of the goddess of transversing these kinds of barriers. And that's why we called upon this kind of the myth of Agamemnon and Diana. Because… Yes, we are very curious about this exact position of the transference from what's going on on the screen to what's happening in the other side of the barrier, let's say. And that's really, reflecting what we're talking about when it comes to multipanarity that somehow these layers are apart but there is a way of crossing them… And that sort of reminds me of this kind of schizophrenic line that you may have referred to at some point with David Lynch and storytelling, about… Kind of finding ways to go across, to transverse a kind of barrier that seems otherwise... that you cannot pass, let’s say.
LUCAS:
When Deleuze & Guattari are going to make the conceptualization of the nomadic war machine, they're going to say — especially coming from Kleist and coming from Sacher-Masoch — Hunting... is a constant in those German written pieces. They're going to say that what is important to elaborate as a weapon in the war machine is when we are supposed to be the hunters of the image with Hermeneutics, we are supposed to understand the images and talk about them and say what they're meaning. And then,especially with David Lynch, those images are actually investing on us and hunting us and our elaborations. And I think when we say that a concept is an intensive multiplicity, I think it's really that, it's the operation of the war machine. I think when Porygon and Pikachu are there in the crossing of the transversality of the realms and a bunch of kids have epileptic shocks, it's the image hunting us. It changes the perspective. We are not the ones that are giving elaborations on the image. The image is saying something... the image is producing something.
And I think the notion of the crypt as another unconscious is the same. It is saying something that is... maybe never... reachable, never, apprehended by us. But it's saying something. And we have to elaborate. We have to do something. I think the notion of the black hole in science is that.
MISCHA DOLS:
When you say the image is hunting us or the image is saying something, is it in language or not?
LUCAS:
I don’t know. When the kids have an epileptic shock, is it in language? I don't think so. Or... when Mishima is doing something — it's not with the image, but, it's very imagetic in a certain way — I don't know, I don't really think when you watch the Pokémon attack, that it is “in language”. I mean, we were discussing this... Lacan makes this beautiful elaboration that the unconscious – he does it in the seminar in the US when a lot of those structuralists or kind of pre-post-structuralist philosophers go to Baltimore, and there's Derrida and there’s Lacan, and I think there’s even Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, and they travel to the US. It's very famous among the Americans. In Brazil, and I think in France neither, they don't elaborate on that a lot, because... the text was in English. It's funny that in Brazil we don't read that text, and I think maybe not in Portugal either.
It's a text called Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever. Lacan is going to say, in this Baltimore conference that the Unconscious is Baltimore at dawn. It's a beautiful image. “The Unconscious is Baltimore at dawn.” It's a very beautiful, poetic image that, I mean, I love this from Lacan. But then Lacan is just afterwards going to say: But listen… the unconscious is not semiotic, it is not cinema: the unconscious is language. And when he says language, he says that the unconscious is... French language, Japanese language. English language. Portuguese language. Culture! And I don't like that. I mean… When you elaborate on, for instance, the Pokémon Attack, it's much richer than that. That's why we should go with Guattari, it's semiotic, the unconscious – or the unconsciousness: in plural. It's much more semiotic, so it's composed. Why “Baltimore... at Dawn”? Because... it's the... neon signs. It's cars passing. It is maybe the river and the sea, the other side you cannot see, so you imagine what there is on the other shore. It is the buildings. It is the landscape. It's a multiplanar unconscious. Much more than language. I mean... much more... than culture.
I think culture is the problem. That's very Lévi-Straussian there. Freud and the Myth, and castration. Less vibration… Unconscious that is too much structured with the symbolic, as the barred big Other, that is no Es, Thing, vibrating Thing… I don't think the unconscious is cultural. I think the unconscious should be semiotically elaborated, with the Thalassa. Because the Lacanian elaboration — I mean... a conservative Lacan... – is different even from the Lacan of the end of his life, with lalangue, also with Freud, that proposes a phylogenetic transindividual Es… they are much more vibrant. I think Lacan in his late life is much more interesting when thinking with the unconscious than in the middle of his career, Lacan from the 1960s… Maybe this is because of Guattari’s interference. He did read Guattari, didn’t he?
CLAIRE:
I mean, there's a lot we could go into, in particular, I'm really interested in talking a bit more about these static images and the motion of static images and what relevance that has to the... psychoanalysis and philosophy that’s going on.
But we have a lab tomorrow where we will sit for two hours and discuss in as much detail as possible the arguments of the book. So I highly encourage you to come tomorrow to Ifilnova.
LUCAS:
Thank you. Thank you very much. The amount of people today… Dear people, from Ifilnova, Patricia, Susana, Marco, Vasco, João; friends from Psychoanalysis, from CPP and from the Coletivo de Psicanalistas. So amazing. I’m very happy and there are also people who I don’t know and that I am meeting for the first time today, which is even better. I believe... The most important question for us to think with philosophy and theory, is the possibility of intersections and alliances.
And I am very happy to meet you today. So... Thank you.
Note: Lucas Ferraço Nassif, the author of Unconscious/Television, was supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant FILM AND DEATH [number 101088956].