Retrograde Prometheus (2026) – Release Notes
Officially out May 1st 2026,
Launches: Ljubljana [28th April], Vienna [30th April] & Berlin [4th May]
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 towards 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.
The first edition of this book is limited to 600 copies, printed using offset with the incredible Book Printer in Tallinn. It is hard to say at this time if we will be able to reprint this first edition, as it really depends upon demand. As such, we are treating these first editions as special editions, engraved with metalic foiling. A large amount of this run will be available to the 30–40 bookstores we work with around the world, so the pre-order period, which runs from now until the book’s release in late April, is a way for you to reserve your copy. Once this limited run is finished, we will start to prepare a digitally-printed second edition that will remain available indefinitely.
[§1] “Life is said to have originated as an abiogenetic reaction of matter exposed to the Sun, which, by stressing it with its energy, causes it to undergo evolutionary contortions. From nothingness, the living rise and never rest. The biological principle of hormesis determines how environmental stress causes an adaptive capacity in the organism. This stress response function is common to all forms of life, from the simplest to the most complex...”
[§2] “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. 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...”
[§17] “There’s no death drive.”
[§Ψ] "Embracing this condition of failure does not mean giving up on the revolution of computational desire. It means perhaps starting to calculate in a new way, engaging in a technique of mnemonic overlap in which discarded potential states do not vanish but remain visible and reignitable, and the present-future is something that can be constantly rethought and remodeled. The collapse of reality is never singular. Every plan is fallible, every day can be fatal, but programming continues, projects, calculates, enjoys, exceeds because it is an embodied and physical process, trembling, not mechanistic or deterministic."