Retrograde Prometheus: Subjectivity & Computation

Retrograde Prometheus challenges foundational assumptions in critical theory by reframing desire not as a creative, emancipatory force, but as negentropic—structured around stability, prediction, and calculation. Rather than disrupting technocapital, this desire reveals a troubling affinity with it, driving increasingly self-destructive trajectories.

Composed of 46 interconnected sections, this hybrid work blends poetic narrative with speculative treatise. Each module explores subjectivity, desire, and progress through concepts from natural history and science—psychocomputation, negentropy, sexuality, capitalism, and political agency—ranging from aphoristic reflections to extended essays and microfictions. 

Drawing on Lacan, Freud, Deleuze, Stiegler, and Žižek, the book reformulates psychoanalytic theory, philosophy of technology, and contemporary understandings of the human subject in a post-internet, post-COVID world. It traces psychoanalysis through the Ontological Turn, examining its encounter with computation, quantum theory, exocapitalism, and pluralism—asking what has fundamentally shifted in how we understand subjectivity, technology, language, and our relationship to progress itself.