[Chapter 1] “The Unstable Animal” — Excerpts from Retrograde Prometheus (2026)
[§1] “Solar Abiogenesis”
We can therefore say that life itself has a germinal predictive capacity for programming, anticipation, and mathematization, which becomes more complex with the emergence of (living) beings. Progressively, in more evolved organisms, certain condemnations are accredited, such as the experience of pain, instincts, and finally self-awareness, with all its consequences...”
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.”
[§3] “Human Artificiality: Technogenesis and Phantagenesis”
Once the evolutionary phase of the cerebral cortex is complete, human beings develop through technical externalization. In a rather evocative manner, Ernst Kapp, in his Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (1877), interprets this externalization through his theory of organ projection: the axe copies and extends the hand, binoculars extend the eye, and the telegraph extends the nervous system.15, 16 This prosthetic and externalized process continues, and Kapp's more analog theory is updated and expanded by Marshall McLuhan, who integrates communication and modern media, leading to digital technologies and dreams of singularity.
In my previous work,17 I attempted to reverse McLuhan's reading of technology as an extension and enhancement in favor of understanding the Multiplication of Organs (MoO) as a form of loss—given by perceptual, receptive, and sensory multiplication—in which there would be an impoverishment of the original physical organ. Without drifting towards a reactionary technophobia, more and more studies report that digital and prosthetic technologies are atrophying and altering our sense organs, rather than expanding our senses. From a broader perspective, various theories hypothesize a progressive ‘loss of specialization’ that is already occurring in other organisms.18 A living being can ‘regress’ in terms of ‘specialization’ for evolutionary or survival purposes: in order to comply with the evolutionary imperative of technical externalization, we must necessarily accept the partial loss of the power of our abilities that we have always taken for granted.19 To this extent, in a system based on growth and whose technological means are in the hands of a powerful few, the risk is a progressive loss of the subversive power of the masses, who would increasingly retreat into a parasitic dimension.20 However, let us try to look at the whole issue from a broader, less biological and more socio-systemic perspective: do we really accept this regression, or is it an inevitable and involuntary race? Far from the fact that the prevailing ideology of progress and innovation makes the idea of actually being in a phase of ‘regression’ seem implausible, what we must admit is that human beings are becoming appendages of the technical system they have created, not because of some kind of biological or evolutionary determinism, but because of the impossibility of producing alternatives to the capitalist system, combined with laziness and the proletarianization of critical thinking. Human beings are becoming parasites of their own system. In a system of accelerated progress in which "the result is a divorce [...] between the rhythms of cultural evolution and the rhythms of technical evolution [and in which] technology evolves faster than cultures,"21 we are doing nothing but chasing a machine that we cannot stop, but which we also follow rather blindly.
This continuous diminution of humans, as slaves of the hyper-complex technical system they have created, is ultimately a socio-systemic issue that perhaps has its roots in the precarious condition of human beings and their need, transformed into desire and culturally integrated, for stability.
Let's return for a moment to technogenesis: alongside this, emerges what I would call phantagenesis, born of self-awareness: phantagenesis is first and foremost a question: 'why?' If technogenesis is instrumental and concerned with improving life in concrete and practical terms, phantagenesis is conceptual and concerned with understanding life in abstract and symbolic terms.22 In fact, Blumenberg's theory that awareness of the 'absolutism of reality' causes the artificialization of human beings is primarily a theory about the elaboration of myth. The drive of a cosmic semantic void, rich in stimuli, pushes us to create artificial levels of theories, stories, narratives, and inventions. This processual aspect leads us to consider artifice as an element common to both imagination and technology, so that phantagenesis and technogenesis are essentially two parallel directions that can be navigated simultaneously.23
A striking example of this convergence between anthropogenesis, technogenesis, and phantagenesis, can be found in the oldest historically documented ritual of humanity, the Agnicayana (800 BC, India), whose diagram combines a procedural, algorithmic, and ritual aspect.24 The process conceives fantasy and technique, myth and calculation as something inseparable. Marshall Sahlins reminds us how immanentist societies thought of rituals as a form of science of their time.25 In short, since the dawn of humanity, there has never been a separation between the two parts, and 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. The predictive practice itself—whether based on data or stars—is rooted in this union.26
The ability to predict and anticipate in humans is simultaneous with the generation of an artificial reality capable of following the coordinates provided by technology and imagination. In other words, civilization overwrites a time which was based on the chronobiological timeline of the planet. A second phase overlaps the first, ultimately modifying some aspects of the rhythms of the first.
This second phase, artificial and always ahead of the first, which coincides with anthropogenesis itself, which is already artificial, shows us how the complex articulation of the ability to anticipate, predict, and plan already stands as a process of mathematization of being: "the essence of reason reveals itself to be calculation,"29 but this would not be problematic if there were not that desire for stability...”
The emergence of the human being, Homo funambŭlus, is therefore a fall from the tense rope of desire, aware of the void that awaits him but ready to invent ever new muscular choreographies to continue moving forward. Desire is based on the need for stability as opposed to finitude.
While the landscape of the fall remains unchanged, desire co-evolves with technology; it is not without history or culture. Rather, it perpetuates itself through a continuous form of readjustment and reorganization, a continuous negotiation between desire, technology, and fantasy. Desire as anticipation and temporalization shifts from analog to digital to algorithmic. The programming of movement on the rope becomes increasingly neurotic, and the phase of relaxation from muscular tension becomes a moment of traction of the tension itself, ready to resume, projected into action even before the pause of release. We are not talking about the governmental organization of the relationship between work time and free time, we are talking about the very condition of existence as a social model. We have never left a state of nature, we are animals whose evolution is a continuous process of mathematization of being, which in its expropriation and environmental exteriorization loses itself and loses control, because in reality we have never had it as a single and collective consciousness.”
2 Abiogenesis is the spontaneous process of the generation of life from non-living matter.
3 "The Sun, appropriately, is the initial abiogenic stress factor of life and remains, to this day, the main 'zeitgeber' (its circadian 'time donor' in the language of chronobiologists). Provoked by such enveloping hostility, toxicity, and agitation, abiogenetic implosion in a functional relationship with itself allows the living system to better present its state to itself in order to obtain anticipatory control over impending disturbances. This predictive core, constitutive of every vital process—highlighted by Maturana and Rosen—is a testament to the fact that the organism exists and persists through its exposure and anticipatory responsiveness to risk" (my translation). (Moynihan, 2020: 24).
4 The term 'hormesis,' literally 'stimulation,' refers to a biological principle whereby a substance or stimulus can have a positive effect on an organism at low doses, while at high doses it can become harmful. This biological principle applies in many fields—think of pharmacology—but more generally indicates how stress—understood as a stimulus affecting an organism—can create adaptive, and therefore beneficial, responses. In these terms, the concept is taken up and mentioned in relation to abiogenesis in Spinal Catastrophism. (Moynihan, 2020: 24–25).
5 "Stressors cause compensatory, adaptive, and beneficial responses. Stress, while pushing the organism to retreat and close in on itself, fuels 'biological robustness,' This is true at both the cellular and macroevolutionary levels, so much so that the advent of the central nervous system (CNS) can be explained as the phylogenetic descent of this propulsive antagonism—since the CNS is nature's organ of anticipation." Ibid.
6 "A living system, due to its circular organization [...] always functions in a predictive manner" (Maturana, 1980); see also Rosen (2012).
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).
12 “The decisive archaeological element is the Zinjanthropus discovered in 1959, 'with his stone tools [...], a man with a very small brain and not a super-anthropoid with a large skull. [...]. This finding forces us to revise our notion of man because the conclusion that can be drawn is that he did not start from the brain, but from the feet, and that, in the general dynamic—anthropological, but also and inseparably technological—that is thus inaugurated, ‘brain development is in a sense secondary,' The upright position determines a new system of relations between these two poles of the anterior field: the liberation of the hand from its motor functions is also that of the face from its grasping functions. The hand will necessarily call for tools, removable organs, the tools of the hand that call for the language of the face. The brain obviously plays a role – but it is not the director: it is only a partial element of the whole, even if the evolution of this whole moves towards the unfolding of the cerebral cortex.” (Stiegler, 2023: 187).
13 “For Leroi-Gourhan, hominization is a break in the movement of liberation (or mobilization) that characterizes life, insofar as we suddenly find ourselves faced with a process of exteriorization such that, from a paleontological point of view, the appearance of man is the appearance of technology. And therefore of language, as Leroi-Gourhan specifies. The movement contained in the process of externalization is paradoxical insofar as Leroi-Gourhan says that it is the tool, i.e., techne, that invents man, and not man who invents technology." (Ibid. 223), and again, "if paleontology thus leads us to conclude that the hand frees speech, language becomes inseparable from technicality and prosthetics," (Ibid. 228).
14 Stiegler continues: "Man invents himself in technology by inventing the tool – by 'externalizing' himself technologically. Now, man is here the 'internal': there is no externalization that does not designate a movement from the inside to the outside. However, the internal is invented by this movement: it cannot therefore precede it. Internal and external are therefore constituted in a movement that invents them both: a movement in which they invent each other, as if there were a technological maieutics of what we call man.” (Ibid.)
15 (Kapp, 1887/2018: 103).
16 (McLuhan, 1964).
17 (Damato, 2025a).
18 (Gelao, 2022).
19 In reality, from the perspective in which cortical evolution ends and externalized evolution begins, there is already not only a halt, but a link of interdependence and new habits: The appearance of tools, which realize the indeterminacy specified by humans as a process of exteriorization, must be linked to a particular organization of the cortical areas of the brain that sheds light on the ‘dialectical’ relationship between the hand and the central nervous system: there is a direct link between non-specialization and the development of the cortical areas of the brain. Starting from externalization, the body of the living individual is no longer just the body: it functions only with its tools (Stiegler, 2023, 190).
20 Ultimately, as mentioned in the previous note, we can see that it is always a symbiosis, even if the risk of opening up to a parasitic dimension remains. While accepting a more optimistic, post-humanist view of cooperative symbiosis between humans and technologies, realistically speaking, in a capitalist context, it is easier for a parasitic dimension to arise, but not in a technophobic, science fiction sense: the progressive disparity between the technical means available to the people and those available to those in power, as well as the possession of the knowledge of those means, already constitutes an unprecedented—and increasingly unequal—basis for parasitism and social subjugation, which produces powerlessness and an inability to bring about practical change from below, since these technical means frame and manage every aspect of the life of every single individual. With regard to the aspect linked to the loss of specialization as part of a technoscientific epistemology, see §12, Notes on entropy and negentropy between cybernetics, cognitive sciences, computational neurosciences, mathematization of being, and capitalism.
21 (Ibid: 26).
22 In relation to this discussion, it is useful to cite Marshall Sahlins' latest work, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (see Sahlins, 2023), in which he analyzes immanentist societies. In summary, Sahlins reports how various immanentist peoples relied on rituals and spirits for everything; these divine beings were present everywhere, in every daily technical practice and fantasy, contributing to the success of something. According to the anthropologist, instead of thinking of these practices as the result of beliefs, we should understand them as technical and religious knowledge. The entire religious, animistic, and ritual system can be considered the science of the time, a 'Neolithic science' as Lévi-Strauss (2015) would say.
23 “Technological organization does nothing more than continue the work of zoology. The real departure is the emergence of reflective, ‘gratuitous’ intellectuality, of this ‘activity that goes beyond technical motor skills’ and emancipates itself from zoology, escaping the constraints of pure instinct for self-preservation. There is a technical reflexivity, completely subservient to survival behavior, and a symbolic reflexivity, pure, with an almost instinctive usefulness that guides technical development. It is clear that the spiritual comes only after the technical, just like burial. How is this great interval crossed? Here too, the leap corresponds to the acquisition of a new stage of cortical organization" (Ibid. 203–204). Although a non-simultaneous temporality is assumed, for Stiegler "reflective intellectuality is not added to technical intelligence. It was already its basis. Taking on new forms, forms that are familiar to us, it merely continues in new prosthetic configurations.” (Ibid. 204). It is therefore not a question of creating a consequential hierarchy, but of thinking that phantagenesis and technogenesis are linked to a broader form of artificiogenesis that emerges with the human and vice versa through cortical development. It is precisely for this reason that I prefer to reformulate Stiegler's vocabulary; technogenesis does not integrate the symbolic and 'spiritual' part, which can be summarized as phantagenesis. The latter is not so much positioned at the base of technogenesis, but rather emerges from the very core of artificiality, which develops both parts equally while allowing each its own time. If the ‘symbolic’ or spiritual part really emerges after the more rudimentary technical part (Ibid. 205), we must think that the symbolic or spiritual part was much more articulated and predictive than many technologies. We need to think of them as two aspects with different temporalities.
24 Matteo Pasquinelli (2025: 31) reports that “thanks to its combinatorial mechanism, [the diagram] can be defined as a primordial example of algorithmic culture,” insofar as this is defined as “a finite procedure of step-by-step instructions for transforming an input into an output, independently of the data, and optimising the available resources.”
25 (Sahlins, 2023; Lévì-Strauss, 2015).
26 See §45.
27 (Ibid. 251).
28 “It is therefore possible to formulate the hypothesis that, in apparent contradiction with the laws of molecular biology, epigenesis has a powerful feedback effect on the reproduction of the species, channeling or conditioning an essential part of the selection pressure. In this case, we would say that the individual develops from three memories: genetic memory; nervous memory (epigenetic); techno-logical memory (we confuse language and technique in the 'process of exteriorization'). [...] The stereotype is both the result and the condition of its production, at the same time supporting the memory of the operational chains that produce it, preserving the trace of past epigenetic events that accumulate as lessons of experience, and the result of the transmission of these operational chains through the very existence of the product as archetype. This is epiphylogenesis. […] Epiphylogenesis, the recapitulative, dynamic, and morphogenetic accumulation (phylogenesis) of individual experience (epi), designates the emergence of a new relationship between the organism and its environment, which is also a new state of matter.” (Ibid. 217-218).
29 (Ibid. 54).
30 “If the development of reason needs passions, the latter in turn presuppose it as a dynamic principle of the extension of needs, of imbalance and of distancing from oneself: a movement towards what is not immediately at hand. Since he has no reason, the only things the savage fears and desires are impulses of nature, inscribed in his equilibrium, and they are never the result of a passion. Passion as an extension beyond what is under our control is the development of reason as an anticipation of a possibility that, by nature, is not immediately present, but which can be feared and desired, which can happen, and this can only be, first and foremost, the development of a fear, which is not simply that of pain, but a knowledge that primitive man does not have: the knowledge of death, anguish, melancholy, and the misanthropy of the atrabilious” (Ibid. 165). It should be remembered that in the analysis reported here by Stiegler with regard to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (see Rousseau, 1972), Stiegler focuses on the theory that there is no 'original man,' this being due to the fact that, as we have seen, “it is technology that invents man.” Furthermore, as I will analyze below, this aspect, according to which the essence of desire is anticipation and calculation, is radically opposed to both the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) and anti-psychoanalytic (Deleuzian) views of desire as 'infernal' production, insofar as this predictive essence is based on and establishes a (negenthropic) desire for stability. Contrary to popular belief, therefore, the core of desire is rooted in reason and rationality. And it is precisely here that the possibility of it being instrumentalized, i.e., of being turned into a tool, and of merging the rational with belief, normality with normativity, and ideology with absolute truth, opens up.
31 See paragraph on deepfakes in §33. Sexuality as an emblem of total statistical desire.
32 “Since he has neither imagination nor future, neither memory nor past, primitive man is almost without love, almost without desire. Fixing itself (on an object) and not being extinguished (by need), desire is the memory of desire. Everything will therefore be accompanied by the feeling of death: death itself, work, education, language, society, love. Homo economicus, faber, laborans, sapiens: the logical, rational or speaking animal, the political-social animal, the desiring animal, everything that traditional philosophy has always used to describe the human race, from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Freud, was born only after this accident in which man surrenders to the disastrous feeling of death, to melancholy.” (Ibid. 173). For Stiegler, in his reflection on Rousseau, there has never been a 'state of nature' in which 'wild' human beings lived in a harmonious, pre-technical and instinctual world: in a certain sense, it is technology, as we have said—as well as fantasy—that invents the human: it is an already-here that presupposes avoiding basing ourselves on a pre-technological myth and which, therefore, seen from a certain perspective, leads us to reason in a direction that cannot be one of total demonization of technology as such, as an interruption of a harmonious state of nature, but as an integral part of an almost inevitable evolutionary externalization, if not in the ways and choices made throughout history, and here further discussions would open up that will be addressed later in this book.
33 We will look at this aspect in more detail in Chapter III on the death drive.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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