Retrograde Prometheus: Subjectivity & Computation

This book stems from the author’s discontents with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by drawing from psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari and Sándor Ferenczi, as well as authors like Viveiro DeCastro, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. 

As Lucas Ferraço Nassif elaborates on the possibility of a multiplicitous Unconscious, or rather, a mass of many Unconscious(es), he attempts here to fold the book itself into the text, to make the organisation of the physical book itself a part of the elaboration. 

This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White. 

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too. 

Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. Unconsciousness operates as the multiplanar compositions of Japanese Anime do, so this book has been organized accordingly—different texts, different temporalities, different voices—and like the Japanese concept of Ma (negative space), or even like CoreCore, something jumps out of the breaks, the gaps in between the layers, and therein lies, for this book, a departure point for elaborating on not just one, but many, Unconscious(es). 

A rigorous and mind-blowing account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

Introduction by Charles Mudede.
Afterword by Alex Quicho.

"A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults."
— 0nty

Meltdown Your Books, the author of Where Does A Body Begin? (2023), returns to Becoming Press for their second book, focusing not, this time, on the body itself, but what comes next. Whether in the sense of Dress, Clothing or Fashion, there is not much beyond the body itself that better signifies humanity than the act of adorning a body with garments, because we have no fur, or because of social codes, whether religious or class-oriented, because of beauty, or because of industrial capital; because, because, because. 

“The mounds of clothing that adorn my floor and the foot of my bed sometimes grow too large, and suddenly I am sinking into the matted mess of fabrics. On days like these I can’t help but feel that clothing, not just my clothing, but the very idea of clothing, is swallowing me up. Clothing is this immensity looming over me, yet somehow a microscopic itch in my brain, prodding me and twisting itself into knots–an irritation I accept for the temporary bliss of scratching it.”

To be human is to wake up, every morning, and to don the costume that completes your identity, for better or worse, by choice or by coercion. 

The task this book undertakes requires a particular kind of author, one who can recognise and sort through the contradictions on a theoretical level, but also someone who does not abstract the topic from their position as a subject—a critical book of fashion must be written by someone who lives it, someone who is passionate enough to write in good faith, because fashion isn’t just Gucci and Sweatshops—which themselves are rightly condemned for all kinds of reasons—because fashion itself is merely the tip of what may be one of the biggest, deepest ice bergs of all—Fashion is a philosophical black hole, one which drags everything into its infinite stomach, from semiotics to psychoanalysis, to art, design and craftsmanship, to economics and production chains, to speculation and historicising, to algebra, journalism and so on. 

Yet, this isn’t a philosophy book because it is simply too down-to-earth and relatable; it is just as celebratory and excited as it is critical. M.Y.B. begins by simply looking down, and beginning to describe the shoes upon their feet—it unravels dialectically and uncovers long chains of connections that stretch back through time.  

Meltdown Your Books (M.Y.B.), the pen name, was made as a portmanteau of the seminal essay Meltdown by Nick Land, and the landmark film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets by Shuji Terayama. I chose the name, almost 3 years ago now, to reflect the political and digital black hole I saw hovering at the edge of contemporary media experience, and to present my work without the muddy veneer of personal identity. It has remained, since its inception, an anonymous project in only the loosest terms. The dedicated could always find my real identity, and some have, and so its anonymous character existed primarily as an element of presentation. Its anonymity existed to emphasize its deindividuated character. The things I discuss and emphasize under the M.Y.B. label are not items with definitive characteristics, they are collective experiences. M.Y.B. is something I cherish beyond self.

The apocalypse as such will not take place, as it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avenger’s Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital. 

In contrast with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Semiotics of the End is a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher put it, it is only because we have not imagined anything yet. The end is just the beginning.

With an Afterword by Matt Bluemink 

A queering of psychoanalysis put together by the forerunner of Inactual Magazine. 

Organ Multiplication Manifesto is an essay that delves into the transformations of sociality and sexuality in the context of digital technologies. Using an interdisciplinary approach that blends philosophy, erotic literature, media theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and neuroscience, the text explores how devices, platforms, and technologies shape and produce normative systems that influence our perceptions, desires, and relationships with others. By examining the interplay between desire and digital mediation and drawing comparisons with authors such as Deleuze, Ballard, Žižek, Butler, Preciado, Bataille, and others, this book aims to present a new theoretical, critical, and philosophical perspective in the contemporary discourse on the relationship between humans, technology, and society.

This book begins with an analysis of three iconic erotic texts from Masoch, Ballard and Bataille, and uses this analysis as the departure point for its main theoretical work on the four topics listed in the subtitle. The book passes through a lot of interesting phases, including an analysis of Phenomenology and Gucci, class struggle and OnlyFans and much more, until eventually arriving at the actual manifesto for Organ Multiplication and the beautifully named notion of the "Caged Sun". 

Foreword by Vincenzo Estremo.
Afterword by Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

"One may think that the history of the human culture is going to be enormously impoverished by the disappearance of the body, one may think that, on the contrary, human culture has been enriched by the renounce to presence and physical contact. It is not the intention of Damato to save this dilemma, His intention is rather to open a new field of investigation, and possibly to start a reflection on a more advanced dilemma: will the change of perception make possible the emergence of a new ontology, or is the disappearance of the body going to mark the final dissolution of human life itself?" — Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Christian Nirvana Damato is a writer, curator, and independent researcher working in the fields of philosophy, technology, psychoanalysis, and visual culture. He teaches media theory at the IED in Turin and runs various workshops on publishing and writing. He writes for and collaborates with various magazines and publishing houses. He is the founder and editorial director of Inactual. He has also published Medial Disorders. Interpretive and Non-statistical Compendium of Technological Disorders. Vol I, with contributions by Geert Lovink, Alfie Bown, Isabel Millar, Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) et al. (ed. by, Inactual, 2024), Wearable Statistical Desires. Re-programming the performativity of the body through digisexuality (Mimesis 2025; Everyday Analysis, 2025) and Medial Disorders Vol II.

Like Freud’s prototypical baby, we struggle over whether to keep our body together or to give it away. We all live these scenes of bodily loss. Freud and Marx both sing harmoniously: what we give up, we give under duress. We are not easy with what we’ve been tasked with, but the task has been the same since birth, doubled in the name of emancipation: first, there’s nothing less than to survive alienation and exploitation, then there’s staying alive for one another’s sake. Perhaps the storied antagonism between Freud and Marx turns on the difficulty of holding these tasks together, balanced on the knife’s edge that separates self-interest from collective liberation.

Capitalism does not produce itself all alone, no matter its disciplines and political-economic constraints on the reproduction of society. If Marx taught us anything, it’s that capitalism produces its own gravediggers, the proletariat—“the unreason of reason,” he quipped, where the dominant social order encounters its unconscious element. Through the bad exchange of capitalism comes a gothic reversal, from preconscious life to premature death, where workers end up burying themselves instead of the system that provides the grave plot. That exchange is felt internally, in a rift that cleaves open the self. Freud, for his part, helps us describe how political economy hammers our lives into unreasonable and reasonable shapes, imaginary and real, as countless and heterogeneous as the individual faces in a collective mass. For each and for all, we bring psychoanalysis to bear on the political-economic problems we suffer in common.

King Ketamine. Beyond the vibecession. Austere Mothers. Sick at Work. Money, Feces, Babies, Gifts. Essays by Juliana Spahr, Peter Coviello, Nicolás Medina Mora, Jyoti Rao, and Hannah Proctor. Images of Red Vienna from Wilhelm Reich’s camera, dispatches from Lebanon, and more.

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.