Unconscious/Television (2025)

Author: Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Edit: 0nty
Edition: 2^nd
Date: November 2025
Cat^NO: (becoming)08B
ISBN: 978-9925-647-07-1 (Print)
Language: English

Format: Softcover
Binding: Perfect Bound
Dimensions: 14.8cm x 21cm
Pages: 230
Umschlag: Bilderdruck Matt 300g/m²
Inhalt: Munken White Vol 1.75 80g/m²

Layouts & Design by Becoming
(Claire Elise,
& Polymnia)

To be cited as:Nassif, L. F. (2025) Unconscious/Television. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-647-07-1.

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines.

This book stems from the author’s discontents with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by drawing from psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari and Sándor Ferenczi, as well as authors like Viveiro DeCastro, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated.

As Lucas Ferraço Nassif elaborates on the possibility of a multiplicitous Unconscious, or rather, a mass of many Unconscious(es), he attempts here to fold the book itself into the text, to make the organisation of the physical book itself a part of the elaboration.
This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White.

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too.
Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. Unconsciousness operates as the multiplanar compositions of Japanese Anime do, so this book has been organized accordingly—different texts, different temporalities, different voices—and like the Japanese concept of Ma (negative space), or even like CoreCore, something jumps out of the breaks, the gaps in between the layers, and therein lies, for this book, a departure point for elaborating on not just one, but many, Unconscious(es).

About the author
Lucas Ferraço Nassif holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a researcher in the ERC project FILM AND DEATH and an integrated member of CineLab - Laboratory of Cinema and Philosophy, part of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy, and a member of the Portuguese Center of Psychoanalysis. Director and editor of the films Reinforced Concrete, Being Boring, and Unfamiliar Ceiling/The Beast; and author of the book Missing Links, published by Barakunan, and awarded by the Association of Moving Image Researchers [AIM] in Portugal as the best monographic book of 2023. Lucas Ferraço Nassif's investigations happen between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis, operating with the clinical approach to the unconscious that aims at the entanglement of art and the production of thought.

(The author was supported by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant FILM AND DEATH number 101088956).

Related works

Gazing into the Flames of Anamorphosis @ Casa do Comum

Book Launch @ Linha de Sombra: Unconscious/Television

Lettre de l'éditeur: Psychoanalyse, Film, Publication

Trans-crypt: the Becomings of Unconscious/Television (2025)

Announcing: Unconscious/Television (2025)

Endorsements
“The new book of Lucas Ferraço Nassif about the Becomings of Unconscious Television will certainly be a fundamental reference for several fields of knowledge – from anime and media studies to literature, visual arts, psychoanalysis and even fashion. It is probably one of the most original and audacious narratives written in recent years. The organization was conceived in partnership with the editorial team, and the result is a dynamic game of metamorphoses between content and form, without the traditional dichotomies. During my reading, I thought about a book becoming a film (or anime), a visual narrative becoming gesture, and all these images becoming an internal musical composition. The dialogues with Thomas Lamarre, Sandor Ferenczi and, of course, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reverberate in the flesh.
In the first pages, Nassif quotes Isabel Ghirardi: “language is secretion”. I immediately thought about the butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, who used to say: “expression is secretion”. Let’s keep this in mind during our reading. This will be a powerful strategy to make words, feelings and images flow through our bodies reinventing ourselves.”

— Christine Greiner,
Chair of the Department of Art São Paolo Pontifical Catholic University

“This book is one of a kind: a beneficial bomb! Lucas Ferraço Nassif is not content with destroying a certain traditional brand of psychoanalitical criticism, he offers bright new vistas: updating Lacanian Theory to new mediaphilosophical levels, infusing it with a pinch of deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis, following the logic of the dream, waves of productive chaos crushing against oedipal academy. The wonderful design of the book is not a gimmick: it’s a generous eye-candy that nourishes and backs up the book‘s conceptual force. They made a dream-team, and this fractal structure really invites readers to grow their own crystals at each and every point … a remarkable achievement!”

— Bernd Herzogenrath,
Researcher & Professor

"How to imagine a psychoanalysis that dethrones the symbolic order? Jacques Lacan, but make it process philosophy. Schizoanalysis, but make it multinaturalist. Theory blossomed during the heydays of television and this book somehow reads like an artefact from those bygone days, but written by someone plugged into a terminally online unconscious – an unconscious saturated with moving images (on the small screen), not written like a language. I have to be real: Unconscious/Television puzzled me. I don't know if it is intended to be understood on the level of meaning or content. It is composed to be experienced. Words behaving like animated images, written in a metonymic chain of jump cuts. That makes Lucas Ferraço Nassif's work really exciting, and proves Becoming Press once more as the most forward thinking publisher of today."

— Persis Bekkering,
Writer

"Unconscious/Television is as tenacious as it is audacious in its bid to trace the electric torsions of anime. Lucas Ferraço Nassif provides a series of brilliant demonstrations, remonstrations, and ultimately monstrations that what is (temporarily) excluded from attention is the very event, the whole show, the stuff of television."

— Thomas Lamarre,
Researcher & Professor, Writer

Dr Lucas Ferraço Nassif’s writing confronts psychoanalysis’ weakness in understanding the Real. In facing the TV images, Dr Lucas Ferraço Nassif does not repeat psychoanalysis’ compulsion to know everything, rather, he finds a position of dwelling between the known and the unknown – staying true to the enigmas and writing about them without the symbolic’s colonization. This is exactly how we want to get in touch with the Real – not only can we have a close reading of late Lacan and Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis, but we relive it, dream within it, and get lost in it through the texts, which are mapped out resembling the maze-like unconscious.

— Yuchen Li,
Researcher, Psychoanalyst

Unconscious/Television reads as if it were carved directly into matter: on skin, on stone, and on the screen itself, piercing its surface. This is an image that Lucas Ferraço retrieves from Thomas Lamarre: in anime, perspective perforates the flat screen. Unlike a long-standing tradition that frames images as dreams, hallucinations, or mental projections—from Münsterberg to Schéfer, from Metz to Mitry—ethereal and ghostly realities, here images have weight; they contaminate, poison; television occupies a physical space, displacing bodies, reshaping the landscape, and making us ill. The act of reading it is also experienced with discomfort. One must allow oneself to be torn apart by the book—and the book, too, is torn, fragmented, reordered; at times the text is missing as air is missing.

— David Ferragut,
Researcher

In this book, Lucas Ferraço Nassif’s written gestures carry forces that fold upon themselves, producing something unlike anything seen before. Something begins to vibrate here — a connection with the multiplicity of cinemas, anime, psychoanalysis, and schizoanalysis. This book is composed of zones of proximity, of productive alliances for a war machine. A basic lesson of this text is to look toward the minor, to play with the becomings of the unconscious; it is a text for new allies, far from established chapels.

— Anderson Santos,
Researcher, Psychoanalyst

“In a delicate move, Lucas asks us to consider the material parallax between animation-planes as more than a simple optical illusion. He asks us, after Guattari, to reconsider the “iron curtain” between the traditionally Lacanian abstract-machines of the unconscious, and the machinic processes of what Guattari himself already diagnosed, in film, as ‘asignifying’ semiotics, as semiotic forces outside of language and representation. Guattari, who was well aware of the emerging field of extended cognition promoted by philosophers like Francisco Varela, asks us to adopt a decidedly cybernetic point of view in noting that the ‘unconscious’ reaches ‘down’ into material infrastructures just as these same infrastructures reach ‘up’ into the Freudian psyche, the psyche which, we have to say, Freud himself declared ‘extended’ in his dying breaths. The relationship between the Unconscious and Television as articulated by Lucas, is in fact one of mutual relation and causality, rather than ideological distance between material processes and a ‘cultural’ or ‘psychological’ superstructure. It is not enough, Lucas’ methodology suggests, to interpret Television as a frame for narrative, to subject it to an ideological deconstruction which remains, as Guattari suggests, far too ecumenical.” — from the Lettre de l’éditeur by 0nty

“Les inconscients ne sont pas structurés comme un langage, ils sont comme des garçons.”

“The Unconscious is not structured as a language, it is structured like... the boys.”

BECOMING PRESS