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.
The book is dedicated as such because the author is responding to certain groundwork which is laid by Lamarre, who authored two books on Anime, and who inspired Lucas to break out of Western Psychoanalytical discourse by studying Japanese Animated Television. Television is different to Cinema, because it is in-the-middle of everything, it has a body, it emits warmth: the author reminds us of the image of Godard hugging the television. Like in Lamarre’s work, Unconscious/Television holds high value in the “limited-animation” found inAnimé which refers to multiplanar compositions, this technique of combining still and moving images. The author takes a special interest in the “in-between” of the layers when elaborating on concepts like the Unconscious, the Lamella, and the Thalassa.
The book is experimental in form, as the six-texts that is it composed of have been cut-up and re-ordered, and then split once again into four parts with three dynamic intersections. We have folded the form of the book back in on the text itself, to create a demonic fusion, which, as we see in Devilman CryBaby, can become weapons against the Symbolic.