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.

Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular, unconventional, poetic mode of writing, 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), 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). 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.

“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)

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. His 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.

Softcover, published in 2025, 230 pages.

Many thanks to Good Press for the extra pictures!