Title: Unconscious/Television (2025)

Authors: Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Editor: Onty

Published by Becoming Press

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines.

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.

This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White.

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too.

Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. 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), or even like CoreCore, 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). 


Peer  Reviews
“Unconscious/Television is an essay by Lucas Ferraço Nassif that I discovered on the recommendation of my friend Arca, and which I immediately found absolutely brilliant: brilliant in its ambition to defend the hypothesis of multiple unconsciouses by confronting psychoanalytic tradition with references as varied as Pokemon, David Lynch and Rei Kawakubo; brilliant in the freedom with which the author explores cultural phenomena and resists the abundance of content; brilliant, finally, in its bold and cinematic form, which reinvents academic standards to make them as appealing as a television program.”

— Théo Casciani,
Writer

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Published by Becoming Press.

Paperback

Author: Lucas Ferraço Nassif

Editor: 0nty

Layout & Design: Becoming

Edition: 2nd

Date: November 2025

ISBN: 978-9925-647-07-1 (Print)

Language: English

Format: Softcover

Binding: Perfect Bound

Dimensions: 14.8cm x 21cm

Pages: 230

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