The Image & the Poison
[*Review of Unconscious/Television (2025) by Lucas Ferraço Nassif]
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.
The reader can grasp this feeling through an example. Consider the chapter “Where the Desertshore was, there should be the Crypt”, which explores the implications of Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924) by Sándor Ferenczi. In a few words, Ferenczi suggests that genital drives imply a form of nostalgia for the prenatal state. In this sense, Ferenczi—like Freud with Oedipus, and Romain Rolland with the “oceanic feeling” in relation to religious experience—constructs a myth, a scene, in this case a place, that accounts for certain behaviors. And every form of genital sexuality would ultimately imply the repetition of the same event: returning to the amniotic fluid. There is an example of this in the film Ride Your Wave (2019) by Masaaki Yuasa, one of the key directors in the book and the creator of the series Devilman Crybaby. Hinako meets Minato when he rescues her from a fire; they fall in love and Hinako teaches him to surf. Minato, however, dies during one of his outings at sea. From that moment on, he appears to Hinako in every water-filled space. He appears in a water balloon, in a glass, and even at the bottom of the toilet bowl. Here thalassa is present even in these excremental waters, the most abject waters. And yet there too reside love and the desire for fusion. It is along this path that Lucas Ferraço leads us: to the most unexpected, the most hidden; he inserts himself into the interstices of our thought and the ways we articulate discourse. After all, the concept of the Crypt, which he derives from Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, is precisely this: an indomitable and untranslatable place, a kind of unconscious of the unconscious, something that cannot be spoken and has been lost forever. It is as if every form of rest were forbidden, as if the state of mind required for thought were nothing but discomfort.