Unconscious/Television
by Lucas Ferraço Nassif
(2025)
This book is called Unconscious/Television; it is a book that is informed by my discontent with aspects of psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and theoretical dimensions, and the way Lacanian psychoanalysts deal with language. Also, this book aims at posing, because of psychoanalysis, philosophical problems—twisting concepts—that will entangle art and the production of thought. Within the Lacanian framework, practices are too attached to a notion of the unconscious that is structured as language; especially in relation to the Lacanian proposition that followed Sigmund Freud. With structuralism, which highlights and strengthens the division between nature and culture, Jacques Lacan thinks that Freudian concepts, and his positioning of the unconscious as the cause, should be elaborated or reconfigured as language, with language being the structure of the unconscious, representation operating with signifiers within this structure, and the signifier representing the subject to another signifier. Above all, what I have been concerned with is a certain relationship to the Other—that is the symbolic, alienation in language, the master signifier—and how stuck we are with this neurotic comprehension of the clinical and the theoretical, and how we need psychotic or perverse possibilities in order to invent new things, new lives, new bodies and worlds, new concepts and thoughts.
BIO
Lucas Ferraço Nassif holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He’s a researcher at the Cinema and Philosophy Laboratory, 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.
DETAILS
• Authored by Lucas Ferraço Nassif
• Edited by 0nty
• CAT #BECOMING008
• ISBN: 978-9925-8156-2-3 (Print)
• ISBN: 978-9925-8156-3-0 (Digital)
• ISBN: 978-9925-8156-3-0 (Digital)
• A5, 218 pages, Colour
• First edition: January 2025
Nassif, L. F. (2025) Unconscious/Television. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8156-2-3.
TO BE CITED AS
Nassif, L. F. (2025) Unconscious/Television. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8156-2-3.
Editorial Note
The book Unconscious/Television is not conventional, it is written with a certain poetic fluidity, undulating like ocean waves, delivering the message through a rhythm that is both gentle and rampant; you must walk into the ocean, and let the water engulf your oceanic body. There are a dozen axiomata, but they swerve into a spiral formation, becoming a field of molten relations. Comprised of six texts, the work folds in on itself through an experimental weaving of these parts. The six texts have then been cut up into parts, and these parts have been shuffled together to form a long, cinematic sequence of scenes that resembles a complex TV drama. Furthermore, we have cut a series of “intersections” into this sequence which, at first, appear like TV commercials interrupting the flow of the book; yet the idea goes beyond this. This experimental arrangement produces a number of interesting affects that add something significant to the overall experience of reading the book.
The book Unconscious/Television is not conventional, it is written with a certain poetic fluidity, undulating like ocean waves, delivering the message through a rhythm that is both gentle and rampant; you must walk into the ocean, and let the water engulf your oceanic body. There are a dozen axiomata, but they swerve into a spiral formation, becoming a field of molten relations. Comprised of six texts, the work folds in on itself through an experimental weaving of these parts. The six texts have then been cut up into parts, and these parts have been shuffled together to form a long, cinematic sequence of scenes that resembles a complex TV drama. Furthermore, we have cut a series of “intersections” into this sequence which, at first, appear like TV commercials interrupting the flow of the book; yet the idea goes beyond this. This experimental arrangement produces a number of interesting affects that add something significant to the overall experience of reading the book.
The book deals with things that are buried deep within the unconscious, things we barely saw or haven’t seen for years, cartoons that we watched as kids but never understood, ghostly characters that swim in the ether, people who we thought we knew. TV shows and anime references are woven into the theoretical work of Lacan, Freud, Deleuze & Guattari, as well as Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. This experimental, cinematic text is the most exciting book Becoming has been a part of to date, a white whale that was birthed in the Sea of Tethys (Η θάλασσα της Τηθύος).
“Language, according to Lacan, is an alienation that builds the unconscious within our bodies, and the body will be an effect of language. So we would always be in relation to some kind of language; it is not linguistic precisely but still pertaining to the idea of language as the medium of our relations. This is a discontentment I have, and reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Guattari especially, there are propositions that we should take into consideration on the strength of what they bring to the work with the unconscious. The unconscious is a tool, a compositional tool. Instead of thinking the unconscious in terms of structures, we should think molecularly – this is the ethical approach to the concept that focuses on its cosmic instead of public politics. How do atoms make connections? Instead of thinking that the body is an effect of language, we should try to elaborate on this fusion, where language is a secretion: it is what comes out of the cells in the body, or something produced by the body, by its cells and genetic codes. Isabel Ghirardi says in our conversations: “Language is a secretion”. Language is not structuring something unreachable—the barred Other, as Lacan calls it—language is a production occurring within an ecology.
“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.”