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
