BECOMING PRESS

MATERIALS

                   

IMMATERIALS

SEMINARS

CINEMA

NODES

EVENTS

SHOP

153 — Christian Nirvana Damato, 16th April 2026


[Chapter 1] “The Unstable Animal” — Excerpts from Retrograde Prometheus (2026)




Retrograde Prometheus (2026) 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:

[§2] “No Origin: The Tragedy of Upright Posture”“Following the French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, self-awareness has been thought to emerge in human beings primarily thanks to their lifting themselves off the ground.7 At a certain point, upright posture allowed the brain to grow to such an extent that it created a neural network dense enough to allow the emergence of this complex form of self-awareness. 
           The tragedy of upright standing is nothing more, in essence, than the acknowledgement of what Blumenberg calls "the absolutism of reality,"8 an incomprehensible reality in which human beings realize they are immersed. The new stress factor, to this extent, is no longer the Sun but reality itself. Abiogenesis becomes artificiogenesis, triggering an unstoppable process that now seems to have gotten out of hand. 
           Could we contend that the tragedy of our upright posture is, ultimately, the felt obligation to rationally make sense of the world around us? A meaningless life or a socio-symbolic disintegration hurts.9 At this intersection between the abstract invention of meaning and the production of reality, anthropogenesis (the emergence of humans) is simultaneous with this artificiogenesis, this unleashing of a new evolutionary pressure, which tends towards two converging lines: technogenesis and phantagenesis.
           According to Sàndor Ferenczi, a psychoanalyst whose theory of thalassal regression10 is the starting point from which Freud drew inspiration to develop the concept of the death drive,11 in certain phases or moments at a psychological level, a symbolic tendency to return to a primordial aquatic state manifests itself—the state from which we originate in both evolutionary and embryonic terms—a quasi-inorganic state devoid of anxiety and responsibility, a condition of total annulment of that trauma which is the reason and the artificial purpose of human beings. The positions of this primordial retrograde movement all rest the spine; in water, as in the fetal position, tension is eliminated.”

[§] Endnotes

7  I refer here to Bernard Stiegler, who draws on the studies of Leroi–Gourhan, and to the exhaustive research of Thomas Moynihan (Stiegler, 2023; Moynihan, 2020).

8  (Blumenberg, 1985).

9  The text Spinal Catastrophism also provides an overview of countless theories and ideas on the subject, from the most widely accepted to the most unusual and peculiar. It is, in fact, a journey that is primarily philosophical, and therefore based on free interpretations and free deviations.

10  (Ferenczi, 2014).

11  (Freud, 1995a: 1099–1139).


This book is available from May 1st 2026.