Lucas Ferraço Nassif will be presenting at BAFTSS Conference 2025: Global Aesthetics, at the University of Warwick: “Multiplanar Unconsciouses of Japanese Television Animation”.
Abstract This presentation underlines the importance of the global phenomenon of Japanese television animation, anime, considering its productions of multiplanar images and animetism not as representations of what, in psychoanalysis, is defined as psychotic or perverse structures, but as other possibilities of aesthetic creation that subvert the relations Jacques Lacan builds between the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary. By the study of audiovisual processes found in Japanese television animation, I will present the hypothesis of my new book, Unconscious/Television (Becoming Press, 2025), working on the intersections between Jacques Lacan and Félix Guattari, and discussing the transversality of Thomas Lamarre’s studies in media ecology. I intend to work with Jacques Lacan, not against him, in both complexifying and breaking understandings of the notions of structure and Other — operating with the immanence of the concept of the unconscious, looking for several unconsciouses that run with multiplicity. For that, I will underline narratives made for television – and nowadays internet streaming – that do not operate on the divides of form and content, object and subject, and nature and culture: assembling new paths for clinical works with desire that are not oriented by the boundaries of symbolic castration. My main focus will be debating the compositions of the anime Serial Experiments Lain (1998), directed by Nakamura Ryutaro.
March 26-28, University of Warwick (Coventry)
📸 Serial Experiments Lain [1998], by Yasuyuki Ueda
