Unconscious/Television by Lucas Ferraço Nassif (2025)

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).

“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
at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo 

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)
A5, 218 pages, colour
First edition: January 2025 

TO BE CITED AS:
Nassif, L. F. (2025) Unconscious/Television. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8156-2-3. 978-9925-8156-2-3.