Transcription of “Unconscious / Television Book Discussion at Ifilnova, Lisbon (2025)”
Lucas Ferraço Nassif:
Today is pretty much about trying to elaborate on the book, on the questions that the book puts on the hypothesis that the book brings and the problems to philosophy that it elaborates on with anime...
When we read about the concept of the crypt, like in the elaborations of cinema and animated cinema and the crypt, it's not the ghost of an illusion. The crypt that I'm trying to elaborate on in the book with the compositions of anime is something else. It is maybe the death image. It is something in between the circle of life: in between being a caterpillar and a bird that we cannot really hold, but we can talk about. Being in a world that you are human, but that you are not very safe because you are human. You have to elaborate on another possibility of life constantly, because death is there, because death is going to happen, death that is not destruction, but another assemblage, something else that can be elaborated on, that can be produced, production of production, not as a lack, but as a constant production. So you have to go inside of the sea. Grab whatever is possible when you go to the sea and come up with something else, with a new thought. I mean, the brain plunges into the water and goes out as mind, but it’s still as brain.Deleuze and Guattari are going to say that the brain comes out of chaos. It's brain, not thought and mind, it's brain and the brain is mind and mind is brain.
And in a certain way, Vitalism is important there, and I know it's very criticized. I think Vitalism is important because it’s a possibility of Autopoiesis that doesn't depend on the symbolic to exist. So if you go with Lacan, for Poiesis to exist, it needs a relationship with language, with a culture. And what Deleuze and Guattari are proposing is that art didn't wait for humans to exist. The world is producing art constantly, and art is the production of thought. I think that's what psychoanalysis should be interested in. It's not about the master signifier, it's not about the name of the father. It's about difference. It's about something new. It's about novelty, new worlds. Deleuze and Guattari propose that we should make concepts, we should be constantly producing new concepts.
There is this moment in 1997 that happens in Japan, that is the Pokémon episode, in which Porygon crosses the realm. A little more than 600 kids had epileptic shocks. So there's a confrontation between narrative, image and the body. And I'm pretty much interested in what comes there. This is an image from the Porygon episode. People are going to say that the flickering blue and red caused the convulsive attacks. We don’t really know. Thomas Lamarre is going to say that it’s a matter of Milieu, the Deleuzoguattarian term. I think it's a matter of the unconscious. I think there's something there that says about this Möbius strip between outside and inside of the body that we are constantly in struggle with. And we should operate with another concept from Deleuze & Guattari, that is the concept of Haecceity, that is a materiality of the things there: of the history of the episode, of the energy of the television that comes out of it, of the energy of the television that comes out of it, of the fabric of the clothes that the kids were wearing as well. This Haecceity is an episodic thing that's going to change the composition of the body. And we have this Porygon, and we have this meeting between image and body that provokes an effect of the body reacting to it. So we have this confrontation, this perspectivist crash.
Another elaboration of the book is this episode from Evangelion. And it's an episode where something similar to what happened to the kids in the Porygon attack happens to one of the pilots. It’s Asuka. She's in a very difficult state in her life there, being the pilot of Eva Unit 2, she's kind of losing synchronization, and that is something that the anime is even going to use the terms of psychoanalysis that is Cathexis, that is the Besetzung, so the occupation of the libido. It’s very interesting that the anime really uses the Freudian word. So she's losing her possibility of piloting the Eva because the Eva is connected to your unconscious. And then she goes to fight against this angel. Those angels are in a war against humanity. This particular attack is an attack of light against the body of Asuka that is inside of the robot. It's an attack on her mind, pretty much. But it is an attack that she refuses to withdraw from. So they are in a war. All the commanders tell Asuka “You should leave. You should eject.” And she refuses. And that is very important I think because it is a meeting between species, between the human pilot and the angel that is trying to understand the way that she thinks.
Evangelion is a very neurotic narrative. It's a narrative about being what is lacking to the Big Other, and then you have to pilot to effectively produce what science wants from humankind, that would be the Human Instrumentality Project. So, you get the main character that is very much attached to his mother and father and doesn't know what to do, and then you get this other character, that is Asuka, who you could even say is a more hysterical character than Shinji, who is very obsessive. And when she refuses to withdraw from the attack, and stays under the light of the angel, she's making a new alliance. It is an alliance that is going to make humankind lose the war. Because in the end the human scientific project is going to lose. The complementarity is not going to happen. What is going to happen is the rebuilding of the world. So the Evangelions are made to make everybody a god, in order for everybody to not have a lack anymore. Everybody is going to be one body; it's going to produce a one. I think it's because of Asuka that maybe they lose this war and then in the end, Shinji is going to accept to just rebuild the world and redo it again and again. So pretty much I see the concept of the war machine against the symbolic and the ultimate symbolic thing in Evangelion is science. It's the production of those robots that are capable of creating god pretty much.
Another thing that I wanted to show you is the third anime that I studied, which is Devilman Crybaby. It's an anime by Masaaki Yuasa. It is a very famous manga from the 70s in Japan. They already had an anime in the 80s, and they also had OVAs in the 90s of Devilman, but they never did something very artful as the manga is. It's a very beautiful manga that never had a very good anime adaptation. Those OVAs are very bloody, but they're never really good as the one from 2018. In the manga there's a different story than the story that was proposed in the anime, because in the anime Lucifer, who is the friend of the main character who becomes Devilman, and they are at war again, war against humanity and the demons. Lucifer was raised in an Amerindian tribe. Lucifer is going to say that humans build weapons to have their wars and the weapons that the demons build are fusions, that is bodies that are going to connect to one another, bodies are going to merge so you can set up the war and humankind can lose to demons. The problem of Devilman and I think it's very brutal, is that even though Lucifer can destroy that Devilman and that's a very troublesome thing, even for Lucifer, there's always God, and God is going to reset the world, so the demons are never going to be able to win.
When I was watching the anime, I was very disturbed by this connection with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. I was like “Really? Why is this director changing the manga and putting the demon to be raised by Amerindians? Is the director aware of Amerindian Perspectivism? Are we talking about Multinaturalism when we find bodies against bodies turning into something else? Are we really dealing with a kind of Chaosophy way of elaborating a narrative?” And then I was searching, and that's a very interesting part of being a researcher in Cinema and Philosophy. I was looking into the other films that Masaaki Yuasa did and he's always trying to elaborate on these possibilities of bodies, crazy worlds, people being several things at the same time. Libido and sex are very important the whole time.
If we think with Guattari, and especially the notion of ecology and thinking ecology instead of the symbolic, we should try to operate not exclusively with Freud but we should operate with Ferenczi. I think the concept of the Thalassa that Ferenczi proposes when he’s trying to think about the origins of genitality — so how you are going to be a being that is going to have sex in order to reproduce; I think there is a proposition of this unconscious that you cannot really locate, that is much more intriguing and interesting for us to elaborate with the clinic and how to listen to people and how to receive people in your practice or how to write with psychoanalysis, that is an unconscious that is not locatable but that is there.
I went to see the episode of Adventure Time that the director did, and it's an episode that is called Food Chain. I think it's the most important part of the book because it's the thesis of the book. Instead of elaborating on the Unconscious with the Signifier Chain, as we get with Lacan, how can we operate with another chain that is also capable of clinical treatment of the unconscious? Can we think of the unconscious that is not structured as language as Lacan proposes? So instead of the Signifier Chain, I think we should operate with the Food Chain that is fusions and… Thalassian? So the Ferenczian concept of this kept memory of the evolution of the species. So instead of us elaborating castration as alienation in language or in culture, I think we should elaborate on another type of castration, that means that we left the water to be walking beings.
Viveiros de Castro is going to say that we have to be precautious. That's why you have to learn with Amerindian Perspectivism. Changing bodies, therefore I am, much more than… I'm looking at the wax and understanding the possibilities of the wax as a Cartesian. I think we should understand that we are the subject that is the object that is in constant change. So the consistency is change. I mean, you have to be precautious the whole time because you can always be something else. You can always be the caterpillar or the bird or the flower in this struggle for life. Because I think in the end it is a struggle for life. It's a war that is constantly happening through the species. But it's a war that keeps the memory of this evolution. It's an unconscious that is constantly reminding you that you're not only human. That's why Viveiros de Castro is very important to elaborate on psychoanalysis and it's important to philosophical thinking.
And Thomas Lamarre is going to be here next month, and he proposes that we should think about the physicality of thought; that thoughts are produced in a body. And I don't think Thomas Lamarre says that out of nothing, I think this is Guattari’s, Deleuze’s project in What is Philosophy?, because they are going to say that the brain is the mind itself. I mean you think with a brain, it's not about AI. It's about a living body that thinks and that everything is constantly thinking, organic and inorganic. So Guattari is going to say that the future should be animistic. I mean, you have to operate in animistic ways of producing thought. And that's how we can say that a work of art is the production of thought.
There is a force in those images of anime that make these people that are dealing with anime wanting to become what they are seeing. When you think about cosplay, it's a resistance that is there. I mean, you're an adult and you're still playing, but it's not playing like it’s a childish thing.I think it's a transgressive act. I think it's a war machine against the symbolic. It's another possibility of production of life. And then I think, it's an animistic way, a perspectivistic way of dealing with images. What happens if these images are stronger than us? And then we have to, in a way, become what they are.
I’m just trying to have one image appearing here while I talk to you, that is the one from Kawakubo Rei. This came very late in the idea of the project, of the book, because I was always concerned with how we could invert the possibility of the relationship between language and body that Lacan proposes. So instead of thinking how language would compose bodies, I was very interested in how bodies could compose effects in the symbolic and change language.
And then I came across Kawakubo Rei, and this runaway from Comme des Garçons. It’s a collection that she made in 1997 called “Body meets Dress, Dress meets Body”. That is a collection that is only going to happen when the dress fits or not. By the way, Comme des Garçons, even though you have the name in French, is a Japanese brand.
I mean Rei Kawakubo is a Japanese designer and she put the name Comme des Garçons because she was very interested in elaborating with France, and this particular collection was presented in Paris, in the Paris Fashion Week. It's a collection from 1997 that is a very important year with the anime that we are elaborating with.
I think those clothes that she makes are clothes only because there is a meeting. I propose that we should elaborate on them as weapons. Weapons in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari that are manifestations of forces, manifestations of desires. If we get into the elaboration of the War Machine, the War Machine is what makes the striated space of the symbolic a smooth space again. So this smooth space is a space of potentialities, of new things to come.
Dana Dawud:
How do you reconcile your psychoanalytical point of view with the animistic / anthropological / anthropocene angle and also media theory? What do you think is the element that feeds your work? Is it media or does it come from this theoretical standpoint?
Lucas:
I don't know if I can really separate. When you are listening to a character in a book or when you are watching a film in the television at your home, you shouldn't separate this physicality here. It's part of the circle of life.
Claire Elise:
Would you be interested in elaborating on what you think is important about static imagery
and limited animation in terms of your work with the unconscious? You mentioned something about the gaps.
Lucas:
What is important about the compositions of anime, in regards to limited animation that is rich in the gaps in the in-betweens, is that because they are not going to appeal to a full illusory way of building a world.
If you see, especially old anime… Nowadays, they don't do that anymore. But old anime is a constant repetition. I mean, it's zoom in, zoom out, repetition, repetition, and it's brilliant. And people would say “oh, this is a lesser animation.” And then Lamarre said “no, this is what we should be looking at.”
Ana Mathilde Sousa:
Nowadays, people are less tolerant also with very limited animation, as there's a lot of backlash from fans when the studio doesn't have enough time and the limited animation becomes too limited. So there's also not complete acceptance from the part of the viewer, I think.
Susana Viegas:
When you mentioned Lucretius, it really reminded me of The Logic of Sense. He has one beautiful chapter on Lucretius and precisely the birth of Chronos, and this break between the aeon or the eternity and the eternal conception of time, with the birth of Chronos as the beginning of chronology, of this sense of a sequence, before and then after.
And what is interesting is when we kind of think of these two models of temporality and put them in moving images. The eternal idea of time and not chronology… Because it's precisely that paradox that you were trying to think and it's quite difficult to think of an image that has no movement but at the same time it condenses and… has everything inside it. Because it's all dimensions and that is very difficult to think about.