Retrograde Prometheus: Subjectivity & Computation (2026) | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
Lecture by Christian Nirvana Damato
Transcription
Claire Elise:
I will also now try to make a kind of brief conceptual introduction to the first presentation, because the first presentation from Christian Nirvana Damato, relates to a book that they just released. And the book itself is very approachable, and there's so much you can get from it, but the actual premise of the book is slightly more complicated; the interrogation or the intervention that the book is making is not that simple. And even on the surface, it might even come as a strange statement to make.
So when we're talking about the idea of desire, maybe I don't need to introduce to anyone here that within critical theory and contemporary philosophy, we tend to treat desire as this chaotic emancipatory force. And we get this, of course, from writers like Deleuze and Guattari. But there is an interesting thing about this that we learned when we did our first book, three years ago, Technically Man Dwells upon this Earth, because we still lived in Cyprus back then. And so it was the first time in Cyprus that we were trying to sort of talk to people that we knew there about these books that we were producing. And I remember there was someone in Cyprus who was an extremely well read, extremely precise mathematician and philosopher, and they sort of... One time they picked up this book that we had released and they said to us, yeah, good stuff. I said, do you mind to elaborate? Because we are in a bit of an echo chamber here where we don't necessarily get much feedback. So I'd really love to know what you mean by good stuff. And he said the simplest way to put it is that as someone who was studying philosophy and teaching philosophy in London for many, many years and who was very, very devoted to the works of Deleuze and Guattari, he actually considered himself to be a recovering Deleuzian, and this idea has stuck in my mind since that day that we are all here aroused and excited by the idea of this emancipatory quality of desire. But I think at the same time, there is a certain drunkenness that can come with this and so it is up to us from the progressive, liberatory, emancipatory, leftist kind of perspective to keep ourselves in check.
So I think that when we introduce Retrograde Prometheus, which is the book that Christian has written as something that is making an intervention against this idea of desire as this wholly, chaotic and emancipatory thing, it's coming from a perspective that I think that we all share here. It's not so much a rejection of what we feel and what we relate to, but more an opportunity to just keep ourselves in check and understand what we are actually arguing for here.
So I think that should serve as some kind of introduction to Christian's work, which is titled Retrograde Prometheus: [Subjectivity and Computation]. So if I can introduce Christian to the floor, he will be talking about what is this relationship between computation, desire, subjectivity, and what can we as progressive people learn from this perspective. So, please.
Christian Nirvana Damato:
My latest work, which I'm presenting here today, is a book that I particularly care about, for the simple fact that it contains a conceptualization that changes the perspective regarding one of the main philosophical topics that I'm questioning in the last years: the theory of the subject, desire, technology and their political implications. Given this premise, let me introduce this work briefly, before we enter into it more deeply.
In Retrograde Prometheus I tried to build a theory of subjectivity and desire differently to any existent theories, which are always in some way — as Claire said before — Post-Lacanian or Post-Deleuzian. In general, the common place about desire is that it is an entropic, chaotic, creative and unpredictable force and because of this, it is potentially revolutionary or emancipatory. I tried to take an opposite direction. I adopted an approach that merges philosophy of technology, psychoanalysis and natural history, physics, anthropology, to develop this central thesis: the subject is substantially computational and human desire structurally tends towards stability, predictive anticipation and calculation — it has a negentropic basis. And from this desire emerges technology, civilization and capitalism. In some way, our computational desire — a defective and excessive version of the self-preservation instinct — brings us to extinction. For this reason, Prometheus, who is the titan of progress and in this book is the subject itself, as in all of us, is always Retrograde, because the advancement is illusory and it is an artifice produced by our common capitalist notion of progress. Each step forward brings us into a neo-primitive state of ethic and morality.
I'll be reductive in some scientific and historical aspects, because I don't have the time here, of course, for a scientific literature review, so I hope you will forgive me, but, of course, in the book you'll find all the aspects analyzed more deeply.
Having finished this introduction, I would now like to begin by starting from the origin of life itself. Life is said to have originated as an abiogenetic reaction of matter exposed to the Sun, which, by stressing it with its energy, caused it to undergo evolutionary contortions. Life does not emerge from equilibrium. It emerges from stress. Solar radiation strikes matter; matter is exposed to energetic disequilibrium. And from this exposure, organization arises. As thermodynamic reflections, life is a local negentropic configuration within a generally entropic and chaotic universe. And stress produces adaptation. This stress response function is common to all forms of life, from the simplest to the most complex.
In macroevolutionary terms, the brain is the organ that by nature operates on the basis of anticipation, since every form of adaptation must be understood as the ability to predict stress factors coming from the environment and from mutations within the organism itself and to act or react preventively. One example: in computational neurosciences, the concept of Active Inference mathematically demonstrates how every living organism reasons in order to reduce entropy, thus avoiding uncertainty and acquiring as much information as possible from the environment: we are "biologically computational" primarily as a matter of survival.
Another example: according to evolutionary theory, following the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, self-awareness emerges in human beings primarily thanks to lifting themselves off the ground. At a certain stage, upright posture enabled the brain to expand and develop a neural network that was dense enough to support the emergence of self-awareness, symbolic thought, abstraction and, of course, technical exteriorization. A striking example of the convergence between anthropogenesis, technogenesis and phantasmogenesis can be found in the oldest historically documented ritual of humanity, the Agnicayana (800 BC, India), the diagram of which combines a procedural, algorithmic and ritualistic aspect. The process conceives fantasy and technique, myth and calculation as something inseparable. Also, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reminds us how immanentist societies thought of rituals as a form of science of their time.
Another example — an etymological example. Derived from Latin, the term desire literally means without stars (de-siderio). Some priests, prophets and magicians of antiquity used to divine the stars. When the sky was overcast, however, predicting and anticipating the future became impossible and this burning expectation of the future created the temporal condition of de-siderio, the condition of absence of stars. So, even etymologically, desire is therefore essentially negentropic and statistical, Promethean. The priests of yesterday sought predictive data in the stars. In a deeper and more substantial sense, this drive did not tend to fill an original void that preceded the subject, but rather a posterior void, a void of the future to be filled — in this case, with the divination of the stars. And in short, since the dawn of humanity, there has never been a separation between the two parts: imagination and technique. Technology and related techniques have something magical about them at the level of belief and experience, just as every ritual, magic and superstition is often rooted in a procedural ritual that is, to a certain extent, calculated, algorithmic and computational. So the predictive practice itself — whether based on data or stars — is rooted in this union.
Why do I say this? Self-awareness, technique and imagination revolve around anticipation, which is developed through experience. If this capacity for anticipation is present in different ways in many organisms and living beings, and in our case combines the above aspects, the capacity for prediction becomes more complex. Human beings, as beings endowed with the Promethean fire of imagination and technology, go beyond need and begin to desire. Desire is the potential anticipation of something that is not present, has never been present, or is no longer present. It's the possibility of anticipation and calculation mixed with passions. Desire is a string stretched between the past, present and future; it is the way we move through time. Desire is also simultaneous with, or runs parallel with, an awareness of death. This awareness of finitude entails a fundamental desire for stability, an evolution of that basic instinct of self-preservation.
In the second chapter of the book, I turn to the historical dimension of the concept of stability. In other words, I try to understand civilization as the collective amplification of a desire for stability, with all its excessive consequences. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow question the two great narratives on the origins of civilization that we still find in various forms today: those of Rousseau and Hobbes. In short, according to Rousseau, early humans lived in a state of nature characterized by innocence and egalitarianism. The greatest mistake for Rousseau was the agricultural revolution, which triggered the process of civilization that led to private property, cities, wars, laws and so on. According to Rousseau, therefore, we are originally "good." The other great narrative, running in direct opposition to Rousseau, is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, where the original human being rather lived in a state of perpetual war, misery and brutality, a fate tied to a rigidly selfish nature. For Hobbes, it is precisely thanks to all the repressive apparatus and mechanisms that we have made progress. In their book, Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle this dichotomy and demonstrate the existence of different forms of society and political organization millennia before agriculture — they call it Paleolithic politics — raising the question of why we have become bound to a single model of agriculture.
From my perspective, it is here that technology and the desire for stability become progressively linked. We go on and we have Turgot's theory of social evolution that led to the normalization of the fact that, regardless of problems, technological progress is inherent in the continuous advancement towards higher stages of civilization. In the 19th century, the idea that technological progress was the engine of history and of human liberation was firmly established. In other words, technology converges with the desire for stability and does not care about the price to be paid. We can see how this universally accepted ideology is closely linked to a desire for real stability, which has been rendered scarce and exploited by those in power as a means of acceleration and domination, starting from a fundamental selfishness.
The desire for stability, hybridizing with violent, warmongering and repressive forms of government, also becomes a pretext for exercising pure domination, power and oppression. Power feeds on the masses' desire for stability, ensuring that the promise of achieving it will garner the high level of consent necessary to carry out any type of action. For example, today in political discourse and communication, we often hear not only the word "stability" but also a dangerous cluster of related terms — dangerous in their means, applications and consequences, especially in authoritarian governments: "security," "defence," "order," "stability." This constitutes a form of interpellation that mobilizes a primordial fear in humans that remains ultimately unattainable under late capitalist conditions: stability, peace, or quiet. Masses have often accepted the enslavement of others within their societies in exchange for a degree of stability and privilege. This speaks not only to history, but to a recurring attitude. We must therefore ask whether this form of acceptance is itself a form of slavery and interrogate our contemporary modes of voluntary servitude.
This fundamentally self-preservative tendency of desire follows a kind of mathematical–computational logic intertwined with the evolution of social organization, and it was already present in most ancient civilizations. The development of progress and technological advancement, in its current form, constitutes a condition in which the registers of capitalist reality reproduce the very functioning of human desire: stability, and its excessive part. They are both its product, and it's a perfect conjunction, which helps explain why capitalism has prevailed. Capitalist ideology channels the desire for stability into a form of excessive and infinite projection through accumulation of goods, stimuli, partners, knowledge, education, money and so on. Stability, in this case, can only be pursued alongside a gamified path of enjoyment and sacrifice.
Now, let's enter a more speculative, psychoanalytic and philosophical realm. In his famous essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud — starting from Fechner's Principle of Stability, which follows the Second Law of Thermodynamics — imagined a perpetual mutation of a system until it reaches complete stability. To this he adds the concepts of pleasure and displeasure, linking every mutation towards stability to a pleasant sensation or condition. Extreme stability, of course, is considered death. From an entropic and negentropic perspective, the concept of the death drive, as conceived by Freud, would be a negentropic desire for extreme stability: a desire to return to an inorganic state of "inert matter" devoid of stress factors. However, these basic drives are diverted and influenced by external factors, by "life drives." And from my perspective, as argued in the book, both drives respond to a desire for stability. More specifically, we desire stability, but in order to maintain it, it is necessary to introduce elements that question and endanger it. Stability is maintained precisely by these negative elements; it is constituted in relation to and in opposition to them, without which there would be no "principle of stability" in itself.
So entropy, disorder and chaos always respond to a desire for stability, less biological and more cultural, innervated by the conjunction of the external world and therefore under the aegis of all registers of reality. So, the negentropic desire for stability complements also Žižek's view of the death drive as an excess produced by stability and containment, an excess that can only explode entropically in a reasonably insane and self-destructive way. Every overload of this tension is met with an equally explosive dissipation; that self-destructive death drive, which is not actually dysfunctional, but always responds to the negentropic law of the desire for stability. The liberating and self-destructive act, apparently chaotic, of pure explosive energy is always a reaction to a lost stability — forgotten, to be rediscovered... or betrayed, idealized and non-existent. If we take popular films as example, we can find the same structure: sometimes the cycle is completed, sometimes it is not. It is not a linear path, but that's precisely the point. I don't have the time here to fully explain this theory through films, but I'll simply mention a few popular films that you probably know, so I can offer just some suggestions without going into a detailed explanation. Very casual movies.
This argument of a fundamental desire for stability does not eliminate our entropy, that Dionysian vision of the world of ecstasy that is believed to be our true nature outside of all the superstructures we have created. As one might imagine, nature and culture are not so separate, and often a certain "nature" is always already included within culture. So the Dionysian festival, with its forms of intoxication, psychotropic narcosis, orgiastic excesses, play and class dissolution, takes place precisely within a certain order, which through its temporary negation, leaves room for the maximum creative expression of human entropy so that it can be expelled from a certain order of things. This would therefore not be a more natural state than the one denied — the computational subjectivity — unfortunately. All disorder is also an order of things, and we always desire order even when we talk about dynamic or apparently disordered phenomena or experiences. In other words, for example, a party is not merely a way for power to restabilize order within a society or community through a small entropic explosion; it is also a way for the subject to recalibrate and restore inner stability.
Now, let's try to go a step further: real disorder is beautiful only when imagined, idealized, or realized in short and ephemeral durations. If this form of entropic desire for disorder leads to repetition, it enters the realm of the ordinary, becoming an obligation rather than a choice. And when desire loses its coordinates of stability, or when certainty in general collapses, it becomes entropic and sprawling. Desire is "infernal" when stability is lost. In a nutshell, disorder is desirable and desired only when it is our choice and not a passive tendency given by repetition, or by the impossibility of an alternative, by not knowing what one wants or by forces beyond one's control.
So, the negentropic processes of human beings can take many forms, sometimes explicit, sometimes masked by apparent entropy: but the desire for stability is the basic motive underlying everything. Capitalism and political propaganda today are reshaping and reconfiguring their powers by operating precisely on this desire for stability. The desire for stability is the fundamental aspect on which the capitalist structure and ideology leverage, mobilizing human beings as support for capitalist reproduction itself, as well as for the expression of its extractivist, colonialist, accumulative, classist, racist and genocidal logic. Technological evolution is pushing us ever closer to a form of desire, and therefore a drive to live, which in the wake of stability is reconfiguring itself with the capitalist apparatus, no longer in passive and victimizing terms, but in active ones. We are learning to enjoy this extreme externalized humanization.
The desire for stability takes on a new form, which I defined in a previous work as statistical desire — a form of desire that finds its driving force in becoming a number, gamification, the predictability and prediction of the actions we want to take, the rejection of error and adherence to calculation. Statistical desire, which as such occupies all the space and fields of life, also affects the promise of happiness, which, as I wrote, is culturally constructed as the ability to proceed with the mechanical heaviness of the continuous and anticipated programming of one's life. [Diagram: the shift from desire for stability to the excessive dimension — statistical design, computation, accumulation and negentropic desire for power.]
I believe there is an intrinsic element of enjoyment in this statistical desire, an element that shifts us from passive victims to active participants; statistical desire is an ideology that is internalized and externalized in everyday life. It can be seen everywhere, permeating all areas from work to universities to private life. The digitization of society, the mathematization of being as an opportunity, and the predictive and total control of the self — from biometric tracking to tarot cards, from online trading to the datafication of performativity, from long-term scheduling to potential dating, from the gamification of relationships to that of education and work, and the list goes on — are now dominant narratives that will become increasingly stronger because crises and uncertainties reinforce them, as tools of stability, giving them an aura of inevitable necessity. So, statistical desire is formed as a technological illusion of accessibility to being the editor and designer of one's own desires in a world dictated by contingencies; for this reason, technology responds to and challenges that fundamental desire for stability, transforming it into statistical desire and excessively toward increasingly incisive and neurotic forms of automation and mathematization of being. So, the dream, understood as the imaginative possibility and occurrence of the improbable, becomes perfectly integrated into a computational form: the statistically desiring subject dreams through statistical predictions that always show margins of unpredictability. The statistical desire actively synchronizes us with the entropic chaos of techno-capitalism, condemning us twice: to seek stability, quiet and peace through maximum acceleration, and to learn to enjoy the delirious circus of automatic gestures toward self-realization.
So is simulation our reality? Yes. Edward Castronova calls Digital Exodus the choice to take refuge in a digital world, preferring it because it opens up surrogate possibilities for personal fulfillment, relationships and stability that the physical world may not allow. This effect is essentially a negentropic drive captured by virtual worlds that provide a "simulation of stability" combined with the removal of the traumatic reality that we may find ourselves living in. Consider, for example, when one plays a video game for more than six consecutive hours in the evening. When one goes to sleep, one often continues to think or dream about playing that game. In addition to being a biological consequence of the brain, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we can imagine this activity as a continuation of the deeper reasons as to why the gaming was carried out in the first place — a sort of defense, so that we can continue to dream peacefully even while asleep, preventing traumatic reality from intruding into our sleep. Alenka Zupančič links this dream mechanism to the concept of disavowal, taken from Freud. Pushing this intuition even further: within what I would call a libidinal economy of gamification, this state of disavowal not only acts as a defense mechanism, but it also becomes a factor of enjoyment, as desire is reflexively reprogrammed in the form of excessive statistical desire.
The configuration of a statistical desire, and the structuring of a world totalized by a libidinal economy of total gamification, is affirmed by a digital exodus that has already taken place in our physical world and daily life. We have already escaped our world; we have already entered into "a better version" buried deep within it, a version in which reality itself becomes more bearable because everything is filtered through the form of the game: education, work, sex, relationships, career, politics, war and death itself. So, to paraphrase Bataille, today's libidinal economy is the affirmation of play even in death.
In a time when "progress" moves in this way, what can we do? Today, the theory of explosive and infernal desire as a potentially emancipatory force has flattened the possibilities for thinking alternative models and revealed its limits, above all because it is linked to forms that are less organized and strategic and more often tied to short-term satisfaction — often dopaminergic, passive, or performative — while at other times appearing as a genuine but naive and optimistic form that ultimately proves ineffective.
Perhaps we need to think through the mind and tools of computational subjectivity. We need to organize our lives and actions through a critical, anticipatory realism. This is what I call "Total Retrograde Prometheia" in the book: what if we were to redirect the statistical, anticipatory, predictive and computational dimensions of our subjectivity — in other words, that Promethean component more often mobilized for capitalist reproduction — in order to disrupt and gradually transform different levels of society through an agenda grounded in ethics, dignity, equality and freedom? Perhaps nothing would come of it, because we are, as humans, doomed to fail due to our excesses and selfishness. And yet, we are also doomed, as humans, to continue trying: our desire is always under tension, oriented toward the production of a better future condition, through anticipation.
Faced with this, our computational subjectivity can be a selfish, self-defensive, conservative and excessive mode of life in a collapsing world; but it can also become a new form of political subjectivation. This latter possibility will be the focus of my next research.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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