*provisional cover
Subjectivity & Computation
Author: Christian Nirvana Damato
Layout & Design: Becoming
Edition: 1st
Date: May 2026
CatNO: (Becoming)015A
ISBN: 978-9925-647-24-8 (Print)
Language: English
Format: Softcover
Binding: Sewn Binding
Dimensions: 11cm x 18cm
Pages: 250
Umschlag: 300g/m2 Munken Pure Rough
Innen: 70g/m2 Holmen Book Cream
Printed by: Tallinn Book Printers, Estonia
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“Ours is a time in which technology evolves faster than culture. Chasing the progress train of technology, humans have become parasites clinging to their own creations and suffering endless and repetitious loss to their subjectivity as they fail to keep up with the world. But humans - unlike other organisms - have something on their side: desire. Through desire - the fundamental human drive for stability, for personal and collective balance - we find an inevitable resistance to the patterns of our technocaptalist world. Through it, we can move away from death and toward meaning. In his brilliant intervention into the present, Retrograde Prometheus, Christian Nirvana Damato offers us this powerful reminder that desire is at the heart of subjectivity and that only this conception of the human can save us from the dystopian patterns in our world today.”
— Alfie Bown
"Retrograde Prometheus is a significant contribution to an emerging style of theory that combines natural history with philosophy of technology. In this new theory of subjectivity, desire is recast as a great balancing act, always intended to stabilize the organism against the inevitable. Through this singular move, Christian Nirvana Damato turns decades of theorizing about emancipation upside down, uncovering a computational subject operating according to a cold, selfish logic."
— Carl Olsson
"In Retrograde Prometheus, Christian Nirvana Damato offers an ambitious and compelling reading of the relationship between technology and subjectivity, articulated around the idea of a negentropic desire for stability. The book’s merit lies in bringing together anthropogenesis, technogenesis, and phantagenesis within a single process, showing how the mathematization of being and computational capitalism intercept and reorganize the anticipatory structure of desire. A work that stands out for its clarity and radicality, and that does not merely describe the present, but calls its fundamental coordinates into question."
— Pietro Bianchi
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.
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.
About the author
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).
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