Lucas Ferraço Nassif is presenting is talk "Politics of Cyberpsychosis: Death-Images are Crises in Processes of Trans-individuation" at the 18th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference - DGS2026, dedicated to the theme "Transversality: Ethics and Politics" and taking place on July 10–12, 2026, at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, in collaboration with the Department of Communication, Media and Culture.
Abstract In his third seminar, Jacques Lacan analyzed the psychotic structure of Daniel Paul Schreber. Approached by Sigmund Freud after the reading of Schreber’s autobiography, the case is a fundamental narrative to the elaboration of an epistemology of psychosis. Yet, in the contemporary, Lacan’s seminar demands new vistas. After the influence of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis and the ontological shift of narrative affections and perceptions due to the electromagnetism of screen-based media, we must ask: Is it possible to analyze both Schreber’s hallucinations and body fragmentation as a new ordinary epistemology within the pathos of one’s own sensations?
This presentation aims to pragmatically articulate a new ordinary epistemology for psychoanalysis with the term cyberpsychosis. The term cyberpsychosis is taken from the anime show Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), created by Studio Trigger after the videogame Cyberpunk 2077. This new ordinary epistemology for psychoanalysis, conceptualized with anime, puts forth a contemporary conceptualization of the unconscious. Necessary to clinical work with younger generation users of screen-based media, our conceptualization of the unconscious in the contemporary proposes that the Sigmund Freud’s cause is the immanent infrastructure of animistic nature-culture assemblages. Via the hapticality of screen-based media, we must underscore that these assemblages are critical questions that pose problems about the literality of the body in both its refusal of representation and radical autopoiesis. Our hypothesis is that the contemporary unconscious is structured as screen-based media – over the neurotic paradigm of Jacques Lacan’s formulation that limits it to language mediations.
With a contemporary conceptualization of the unconscious, we can propose a new cosmology of sychoanalysis where, facing the entropy of the symbolic, images and body merge with no previous mediation. The entropy of the symbolic and the merging between the imaginary and the real will be called by the term death-image. The death-image is a crisis of representation, an alternative to the structuralist mirror-image of narcissism formulated by Jacques Lacan. On the strength of disruptive micro-perceptions, the death-image intersects desire with what is beyond the pleasure principle, disorganizing the transcendence of language as the structure of the unconscious.
Check the conference's full program here.
