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Unconscious/Television (2025)


by Lucas Ferraço Nassif

A5218 pagesColour€18

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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.
            The book is dedicated as such because the author is responding to certain groundwork which is laid by Lamarre, who authored two books on Anime, and who inspired Lucas to break out of Western Psychoanalytical discourse by studying Japanese Animated Television. Television is different to Cinema, because it is in-the-middle of everything, it has a body, it emits warmth: the author reminds us of the image of Godard hugging the television. Like in Lamarre’s work, Unconscious/Television holds high value in the “limited-animation” found in Animé which refers to multiplanar compositions, this technique of combining still and moving images. The author takes a special interest in the “in-between” of the layers when elaborating on concepts like the Unconscious, the Lamella, and the Thalassa. 
            The book is experimental in form, as the six-texts that is it composed of have been cut-up and re-ordered, and then split once again into four parts with three dynamic intersections. We have folded the form of the book back in on the text itself, to create a demonic fusion, which, as we see in Devilman CryBaby, can become weapons against the Symbolic.










Specifications:


Dimensions: A5 
Binding: Perfect Bound 
Pages: 218pp.
ISBN: 978-9925-8156-2-3
Paper: 300g/m2 Bilderdruck Matt &  80g/m2 Munken White
Fonts: Fira Sans Condensed & Hiragino Sans
Language: English
Released: 20th January 2025


Credits:


Author: Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Editor: ‘0nty’
Art & Design: Palais Sinclaire
Layout & Typography: Polymnia Tsinti
“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 “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”



 










Endorsements:



Christine Greiner:


Chair of the Department of Art
São Paolo Pontifical Catholic University
“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.”

Bernd Herzogenrath:


Professor at Goethe University of Frankfurt
“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!”









Related materials:


Casa do Comum Lecture (coming soon)
Ifilnova Discussion (coming soon)
Book Launch @ Linha de Sombra: Unconscious/Television