This book proposes a reversal of a common convention within contemporary critical theory: the idea that
desire is an entropic, creative and potentially emancipatory force. Against this view, the author figures desire as negentropic,
structured around stability, prediction, and calculation. Far from being disrupted by technocapital, this desire finds there
a troubling affinity, and is seemingly propelled toward increasingly self-destructive forms. Retrograde Prometheus, part a
poetic narrative, and part speculative treatise, seeks to reformulate these categories through which we understand desire,
along with all the existential, ethical, and political implications that such a radical change in perspective may entail.
This book is composed of 46 subheadings (§), each addressing subjectivity, desire, and progress in
relation to concepts drawn from natural history and the sciences, including topics such as psychocomputation, negentropy/entropy,
sexuality, capitalism, and political agency. These parts are concatenated and recursive, ranging from miniatures to longer
essays, as well as aphoristic reflections and microfictions. These modules are conceived as a concatenation of concepts that
together build a unified theory that responds not only to thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard
Stiegler, or Slavoj Žižek, but also to the broader amalgamation of what we call psycho-analytic theory, the philosophy of
technology, and contemporary theories concerning the human subject, technology, and progress.
So much has changed
since Anti-Oedipus (or even since Anti-Narcissus!), let alone since the Seminars of Lacan—the amount that has changed since
Freud, therefore, is unimaginable. Where is psychoanalysis today, post-internet, post-COVID? What has changed for the subject
(as well as how we understand the subject) due to these advancements in technology and science, with these changes in how
we understand our history and genesis, and with how we understand the relationship between technology, language and worlds?
Retrograde Prometheus tells a story of psychoanalysis today—two decades into the Ontological Turn—and its
encounter with computation, advancements in quantum theory, with Exocapitalism, with pluralism, and so on.
Christian Nirvana Damato is a philosopher, writer, and curator. He is the founder of Inactual, a research,
editorial, and curatorial space dedicated to visual studies, contemporary art, and new technologies. He has published
Multiplication
of Organs Manifesto: Body, Identity, Technology, Desire (Becoming Press, 2025) and
Digisexuality (Everyday Analysis,
2025). He also edited
Medial Disorders: Interpretive and Non-Statistical Compendium of Technological Disorders, Vol. I
& II (Inactual, 2024–2025), and
Artificiofilia (Inactual, 2026).
BOOK PRESENTATION
Thursday, April 30, 2026 - 6 pmUniversity of Applied Arts Vienna
Weibel Institute
for Digital Cultures
HP (Room 009)
Georg-Coch-Platz 2
1010 Vienna
An event organised by the
Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
Retrograde Prometheus: Subjectivity & ComputationChristian Nirvana Damato
Becoming Press, 2026
ISBN: 978-9925-647-24-8
To
the Book
