Research presentation by Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Transcription
Lucas Ferraço Nassif:
When Claire and Polymnia invited me to come to talk at the Becoming Press event concerning my book, I wanted to make somehow the genealogy of this schizo- journey that is Unconscious/Television (2025), but I also want to step a little bit further, so what is the development of the theory and the clinical practice that I've been elaborating with moving images since Unconscious/Television was released.
So first I'm gonna start with the story of this schizo- journey, and then I will go into what's going on now in terms of clinic or theory. So, I am part of this project at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy that is called Film & Death. It is a project that is funded by the European Research Council, and there is this professor from the NOVA Institute of Philosophy who proposed that: to “film-philosophize”—meaning to philosophize using moving images instead of maybe words, so using time-based media to make philosophy—it is a way of meditating about death.
And then she got this funding, and she started elaborating on this concept of the “death-image”. And she opened the positions and I got one of the positions for the investigation, and the reason I got this position is because I was the one that was trying to talk about the death-drive with moving images, but I didn't want to talk about Freud and moving images in a way that it was looking for meaning and representations of death, but instead I was trying to look for intensities of transformation that we can understand with the death-drive.
So, especially because my background would be Guattari more than Lacan, but also because I studied a lot of Lacan, I wanted to go beyond the limit of the Oedipus complex when I was looking into the images. So I was always trying to push a little bit further on this understanding of representation within cinema. And then I got this idea that I maybe should not be looking into cinema, but I should be looking into television, and then comes the story.
Before going into television, I just want to say about this diagram of Lacan, because Lacan uses this diagram in Seminar XX, that is the seminar which is called “Encore”. We can say “Encore” is something that should be “done again”. You say encore for a band, when the band has to play some songs after the concert, but un corps is also “the body”. So un corps: something that is an “affecting body”. The problem with Lacan is that Lacan is going to say that the body is an affect of the symbolic.
And going beyond Lacan, especially working with Deleuze & Guattari’s schizoanalysis, I wanted to think how the body would counterattack the symbolic and the world, and produce virtualities off other worlds from the materiality of the world here. So my proposition of the “death-image” for this project, and that's how Unconscious/Television became a book, was to, maybe, see the possibility of doing a short-circuit between two categories of the Lacanian thinking. So it would be a short-circuit between the imaginary and the real. Instead of doing this always mediating symbolic thing, that would be the clinic of psychoanalysis.
I love this diagram because it's very clear; I can translate Lacanian theory here with this diagram. Lacan is going to divide the Unconscious, and our lives in the world, into these three categories: the imaginary would be libidinal investments, and your relation with “the myth”. And especially you being this thing that should be what is necessary to complete what is lacking in “the Other” and “the Other” being the symbolic, being culture, being something that is stoked by a myth, a mythological thing that would be the complex of Oedipus.
So this would be the imaginary where you invest, and how you invest your libido into this narrative that should be completed. Most of us, when we go to psychoanalysis, your psychoanalysis is going to try to elaborate on this within the familistic realm. So how your mum and your father and your grandmother and your aunt, think about you and where you should be placed in that family. The problem for me is that the mediation to the imaginary would always be concerned with a symbolic castration. That would be the familistic myth. So you are existing there to replace what is lacking for “the big Other”, because “the big Other” is the symbolic. So you are always in a relationship there.
And for Lacan the condition of desire would be—and that's a huge problem for me—but the condition for desire would be to produce some representation, that in the end of your analysis, you understand that it is only phallic representation to deal with this imaginary gap that you are always feeling. The real is precisely what does inscribe very much in the symbolic, but can be obtained by the relationship with “object a” that for Lacan is the basis of all representation—and I think even Lyotard would agree with this intense basis of all representation. That's the most important concept that Lacan has ever made. This thing that goes between the symbolic and the real, that is not representation per se, but it is always this potency that is untranslatable, that is always radical somehow.
But the problem is that Lacan is always going to put this “little a” in relation to the “bigger a”, that is “l’autre”. For Guattari we should take this “a” and do it maybe as a “non-object”, as exactly what refutes representation and refutes existing in this “symbolic”. If for Lacan the real is impossible, but for Guattari and Deleuze—I think it's actually Guattari influencing Deleuze—the impossibility is the “symbolic”. That's why we always, in the schizoanalytic realm—impregnate it with a language to come. We are always impregnated with a symbolic that is not yet there. And that's actually, the most difficult part of schizoanalysis, but it is the most important thing that they teach us.
How can we listen to someone in the practice of psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis—but I'm going to say psychoanalysis, or a contemporary psychoanalysis, without looking for the basis of any representation. Actually, not having your desire as a desire of “the big Other” that comes from the symbolic, but a desire for another, for another symbolic that is impossible but is yet to come. So that's the paradoxical or the impossible quest but that's the beautiful thing. And my proposition working in this ERC project is to think that maybe “death-images”—so the images that my colleague and P.I., the main investigator, Susana Viegas, proposes—maybe this concept of “death-image” is precisely this image that's going to destroy all the layers of this geological strata of representation.
And how can we do this? How can we deal with moving images with this in mind? Looking for like micro-perceptions, and that's a Deleuzian concept after Leibniz and the fold, like micro-perceptions that are singular yet mutable, that are always in this entanglement with the world, but looking for something that is not like in the world per se, but it is a virtuality in the world. So these micro-perceptions maybe would be the “death-image”, images that a single individual in the individualization process can notice, but it's maybe untranslatable and it's not a basis for another representation. It’s a basis for a radical other symbolic that maybe is not structured as language but maybe is structured—and that's my hypothesis—with haptic images.
And then, that's the diagram here, I wanted and that's my thing there, I went to put “object a” between the imaginary and the real. How can we produce images from the body? And then that's the point that I propose in the introduction of Unconscious/Television. Language is not a technology. Language is no transcendent “barred A”, “barred” like “big Other” that produces the unconscious. Language is a secretion of the body. Language is sweat, it’s cum, it’s spit and it’s something that the body is constantly producing. Language is exactly what Zora—my dog that is part of my life everyday—is doing when she barks.
So there is, in this multiplicity of the living beings in the planet, my Language is exactly in the horizontal place where Zora’s Language could be, and it is in the same place that another kind of expression can appear. So we are always in this impossibility of the symbolic looking for other universes of reference, other possibilities of expression, and because we're looking for this, we are also looking for other possibilities of existence. And then I understood that I wasn't looking for cinema, I was looking for television. And that's the thing that I always keep working on and telling you, that is why am I looking for television? Because television is haptic, because television has a body, because television is in the middle of everything happening in the world and in the house, and because nowadays television is really everywhere, especially when we think about expanded television.
We have this in the devices that we’re using and they're sending messages to others and producing information the whole time. Those screens emit electricity, they emit things that touch our bodies and change the complexity of our bodies. So these things are much more interesting as micro-perceptions producing folds and vibrations and contractions in the body and maybe new organs and mutations than the moving images that we see in the cinema theater. Especially because in the cinema theater, and then we go in another elaboration, the cinema theatre has this Cartesian perspective that television, especially with the multiplicity of screens that we have and the sizes, is constantly playing with, and is intruding in the ways that we are looking at images nowadays. For instance, Lady Gaga made this huge concert in Copacabana Beach like four months ago, and it was like 2 million people watching Lady Gaga, but all the huge screens for people to see her were not in the shape of cinema screens, but they were in the shape of iPhones.
I mean, it's brilliant. So everybody was watching this show, the concert, on huge iPhone screens, and I’m not moralistic with that, I actually find it interesting for us to elaborate because we're dealing with another capability of the image that is much more perverse and much more powerful somehow for us to deal with. And then I go to this groundbreaking thing that is the background of it all, that is the 1997 episode from Pokémon, “Electric Soldier Porygon”, when over 600 children in Japan had epileptic shocks when they were watching this episode from the first season, we could say—there were no seasons in that time—but it would be considered the “first season” of Pokémon in 1997. But this Pokémon that is called Porygon—the polygon—is introduced. I keep talking about this because this is the event that allows us to think about this potentiality of the hapticality of images.
Porygon is this Pokémon that can cross from the virtual to the real world, and it is precisely on that moment that over 600 kids in Japan had epileptic shocks when Pikachu does the thundershock. It could have happened in any other episode, but it was precisely in that one. Of course, neuroscience is going to debate that it was because the blue and the red light was flickering too fast, but then, it's something that Thomas Lamarre is going to argue: for us to think a little bit more with the Unconscious, we don't have laboratory conditions in everybody's houses. So how can we say that is precisely because of the flickering, or because of the antennas that were transmitting at a certain frequency, that the kids had epileptic shocks. So there is a singularity that looks for a multiplicity that allows us to think in a different way of the danger of images.
But if we look to these images in a moralistic way, we are going to stop watching them, and my interest is not that, my interest is how can we watch it more? How can we see the folds that those images are making? And then, with Susana Viegas, we invited Thomas Lamarre to talk to us, and I think this was the most important moment in my academic career, because I was already a psychoanalyst, and I was receiving lots of patients. And when I got this position, I had to quit my practice because they wanted exclusivity for my work, and I thought it was very important to do so because I felt that I really wanted to go inside of academia again, with all this new background that I was having after my PhD.
On this bridging between Deleuze & Guattari and Lacan, because people were not really talking about this when they talk about Deleuze, they're very Hegelian and they try to quit Guattari, and when they talk about Lacan nowadays, there is this Hegelian thing that always appeals to a symbolic. And I said that Lacan has given us several tools for us to think beyond the symbolic. So let's listen to Guattari as the most Lacanian one, and even saving Freud from himself as well, sometimes. And then we, Susana Viegas and I, invited Thomas Lamarre to give a workshop at Nova, and it was super interesting. He gave a workshop on electromagnetism, but actually it was on radioactivity.
And he was thinking about Godzilla, made by Anno Hideaki, that is the same director from Neon Genesis Evangelion, and he was talking about this radiomancy of animation. It was a brilliant workshop during a whole Saturday, but the previous day, on the Friday, it was raining like cats and dogs—pouring. We walked with Thomas Lamarre from the restaurant to the Institute of Philosophy, and they were soaking wet, but we had an interview with him for like one hour and a half and I don't know, everybody got a cold afterwards, but it was great. And then, this interview is in the latest issue that we published in the journal that the Institute publishes that is called Cinema—after Deleuze, and in this interview, I ask a question to Lamarre, that is what I want to tell you; that is the next step of Unconscious/Television.
So this was the whole thing to go a little bit like... what is going on now? After all of the anime productions, all the anime elaborations—or Twin Peaks as you can read in Unconscious/Television—that's the place where I'm going a little bit further on the “death-images” producing this “schizo-cogito”, or the “death-images” producing this epistemology of dizziness, not an epistemology of “the Lack”. So if Unconscious/Television had this as an embryonic desire, I think I'm putting it further in the new works that I'm doing in this presentation. I asked Lamarre about this, because in his book, The Anime Machine, he talks about Anno Hideaki, the director from Evangelion, the creator of the show, and all the other films, and everything that has Evangelion nowadays. It’s brilliant, I love Evangelion, even though we have several Lacanian discussions on being too conservative sometimes.
Listening to agency and assemblage of, say, people wearing mecha suits. So that would be that. And that's a part that I talked once with Claire, when Claire was talking about Open Secret, and we were talking about Core-Core and, this goes in the same Seminar. I mean, Lacan proposes this diagram in Lesson II and then he goes to this quotation that is brilliant, also very debatable. And I love it because it gives the ground for all the debate.
Then it’s Lesson III from Unheimlich to Cosmology, where Lacan is going to criticize a lot of Lévi-Strauss, and he produces maybe the best image of the narcissistic systems that he elaborates after Freud. Lacan is going to say that the most important part of narcissism is the jubilatory, this jubilation of the child looking at their image in the mirror, being confirmed by “the big Other”. So, let's go to this chart again, to this diagram again—so let's say that this is the fragmented biological being of a child being confirmed by this “big Other”. And at this moment, both of them are going to be outside of the picture again.
So that's the phantom and the ghost appearing there. That's the illusion that appears exactly at the same time that this jubilatory confirmation happens. That's neurosis and that's the imaginary being like colonized by a symbolic. How can we decolonize the imaginary afterwards? And my hypothesis is that we colonize the Lacanian conceptualization, and we counterattack it with our Guattarian colonization.
So we have like this clash of forces, a conceptual one. Then I just want to show you that there was a scene of Serial Experiments Lain, which is an anime from 1998. This turning from the 1990s to the 2000s is brilliant, and we have great stuff, and Lain is just one year later, after the Porygon thing. Lain is this girl, she's like 13, 14. She lives her life like a teenage girl in Japan, kind of shy, but she has some friends.
And then one day, a girl from the class kills herself, jumps out of a building, and this girl who killed herself starts sending messages to Lain through her computer. The question is, they don't use the term “internet”, they use the “wired”. So the “wired” would be this network of connections, and afterwards we come to understand that Lain has a very important, symbiotic relationship with that. And Lain is going to start to have this realization in relation to the “wired” after this episode with the friend that she's going to become part of the “wired”, and she's going to be like a master of perverse metamorphosis and dominating the technology of the “wired”.
She will destroy the limits between the “wired” and the “world”. And then the theory of the anime produces its own elaboration of what the “wired” would be. The “wired” is this connective place that you can access with computers. And for Lain, she wants us to access the “wired” without the necessity of computers. So in a way, “the wired” can become an understanding of the Unconscious.
But what is most important there is that Lain is constantly, during her schizo journey, talking to a friend that she has, who is called “Arisu”, that is Alice, we could say. So there's all these ideas of Wonderland, and Lain is always telling Arisu, “you don't need a body, you can give up the body and become part of the ‘wired’.” But then what is very interesting is that there's one episode where Arisu goes to visit Lain. And Lain is, I would say, in a very addictive relationship, in a very intense symbiosis with the “wired”, with wires connected to her and entangled with that.
It's very interesting because her room is full of water. Her room becomes like a data center in 1998; it's very beautiful with all the machines. And when her friend Arisu, one of the creators of the “wired”, who is this programmer that exists as a god or as a representation of what God would be, goes to Lain. He appears and starts threatening Arisu, her friend. And Lain was just a few moments ago telling Arisu maybe you don't need a body, but at the exact moment where her friend was attacked by this programmer being God, Lain starts verbally having an argument with this person, the deity, who is the programmer that wants to become some kind of despotic god, and Lain’s argument is precisely about the necessity of the body.
And that's so strange because it's paradoxical to the whole narrative. It doesn't make real sense, as with everything that Lain was saying just minutes ago, and then she destroys God in an argumentation. So it's very strange because in this next episode, which is the last episode of the anime, called “ego”, so “the I”, “Ich”, in the translation, or “le moi”, Lain disappears, so she gives up her body, even though she defeated God by talking about the body. But Lain keeps herself as a presence among other people.
She meets her friend Arisu, and Arisu grew up, but Lain is still a teenager. And my hypothesis—thinking with this idea of multiple Unconscious, Unconsciouses—is that maybe instead of having this transcendent Unconscious as culture and the “barred big Other” or the “barred symbolic”, we can think that all of these perverse relationships with technology, and symbiosis and “hands-on” an image, can produce several new Unconsciouses. Instead of having one that is always going to fill the interpretation, and our interpretative limits and desires. So maybe my idea is that Lain produces this concept of “the crypt”. She disappears with her body, but she becomes an Unconscious.
Can everyone become their own Unconscious? And that's beautiful. I talk in the book about that, when I'm talking about Twin Peaks, but now I'm exploring it more and more, this possibility of this “schizo-cogito”, as the possibility of an epistemology of “dizziness” that would be an epistemology made with “death-images”, small little “particles” of perception, nano-perceptions, something that is timely dispersed or that, in a way, produces breaches in a smooth line of understanding in the timeline of editing images. So there is a little glitch there. So how these micro-perceptions are things that we can hold and work with so we can produce this multiplicity of singular but multiple Unconsciouses in the plural.
This is a beautiful diagram that I was looking at again today, from the Anti-Oedipus, and it's very interesting because what Deleuze & Guattari—and once again, I really think that it's Guattari there—are going to say is that there is this relationship between the body of Earth, of the landscape of Earth, and the “body-without-organs”, and this immanent relationship there is going to produce differentiations from Earth, that is body, is a perverse composition. And that would be this schizoanalytic journey, and the schizoanalytic potentiality for the clinic. So I think, of course I'm not looking at anime as an interpretation for Deleuze & Guattari, but Thomas Lamarre already saw it, and I'm just going after him and going more into psychoanalysis with that.
But what I believe is that anime, when it becomes so global, it defeats what would be an interpretation of like Japanese culture or a Brazilian culture, or Portuguese or French culture. It becomes something that is like everyone can have a piece of it and produce their own pieces out of it. There's something in those potency of colors that attract the micro-perceptions that we can fold with, that we can contract and vibrate, as Deleuze now is going to say in his book on Leibniz. And that is the basis for “What is Philosophy?” and the concepts of percepts and affects, and concepts.
And then just to finish, we have this image, that is the “monads”; can we think in monads, crypts and then Unconsciouses. The last thing of my proposition is: this is a diagram that Deleuze produces for his book on Leibniz. So we have the monads, and let's say that monads are spaces of adjustment, spaces of assemblage, and the monads go in relationship with the world, and then it goes back. I think it's an understanding that Deleuze is going to explore because of his reading of Foucault. I'm using this graph a lot because that's what I'm aiming to do differently from them.
It's problematic when you desexualize it because you get the cyclical thing again. And we need to sexualize; we need to think with sexuality, otherwise psychoanalysis wouldn't be made. When Freud is going to conceptualize “the I”, “le Moi”, “das Ich”, he's going to say there is this place where sexualization can be somehow overcome. But that's a problem. I don't know if we need to evolutively “overcome” sexualization. We need to explore it in different depths, producing other virtualities.
So maybe when the monads, as spaces of assemblage, meet the world, we need other lines. In conceptualising the war machine, Deleuze & Guattari are going to do it. You need the lines of flight there. That's from A Thousand Plateaus, and that's from the chapter on several—it’s not a chapter, it's a plateau—I mean, we can read it as though it’s the body of the earth from every piece or every place that you want to see, a landscape. When you have the line of flight attacking a neurotic stratification of the individual, I would say, we can produce a non-cyclical possibility.
And I don't know what the non-cyclical is going to do, but I'm here to elaborate and to listen and to be a neighbor of it. So how can we operate with this line of flight between the five and the six instead of going in this direction that comes? So number one would be the despot space, and the place of the signifier for Lacan, as this place of like the “barred Other” and the “barred symbolic”, that's going to “despiralize” and produce a destiny somehow. How can we produce lines of flight, that agency, that are going to assemble other destinies, or there may be bodies that assemble all their destinies or their anatomies that assemble all their destinies, etc.
And then, just in the end, this is a beautiful screen from an anime that I like, that is Kill la Kill, from 2013. It's beautiful because it's all about fashion, and the people have to wear those uniforms, and the uniforms extract blood from each person. But the person becomes very powerful because they are wearing the uniforms. And then there is this special uniform, the scouts and kids suit, that can talk to this character, which is the main character, but only she can understand its language. It's brilliant and she destroys everything.
That's—and I'm closing with this—the most important thing, at least for me when I read Deleuze & Guattari and schizoanalysis: desire is not the desire of “the Other”, desire is not the desire for another “big Other”, but above all, the specificity of desire is not a “Lack”, it’s revolution. That's an important part. What is important to listen in the psychoanalytic practice is this potentiality for revolution that we don't actually know what's going to happen because the deterritorialization and territorialization are always operating together. So there's always a way of capturing things.
So you can always have another institution occupying the place that it was made empty after a revolution. So it's an always tense field that you have to operate. And, for instance, in this revolutionary predicate of desire, we have to think, for instance, with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who is going to say that we have to be precautious when we get inside of the woods, when we get inside of the forest, because we don't actually know what we are going to become. And that's it. Thank you. I can show some images of Lain, but I think I talked too much.
It's beautiful; I'm going to show you the moment that she fights with God. Hang on, it’s at 17:45. It's here. We can watch these last three minutes.
Note: Lucas Ferraço Nassif, the author of Unconscious/Television, is supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant FILM AND DEATH [number 101088956].