Books
Books by Dawson Preethi
My books emerge from different periods of writing, but they share a recurring set of questions: How is meaning produced? What constitutes a subject? What happens when language, technology and intelligence become entangled? And what remains of authorship when machines can write?
My work moves between fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis, artificial intelligence and science. Rather than treating these as isolated territories, the books explore the points at which their questions begin to intersect.
Theoretical Works
The Return of the Dead Author
AI Writing, Language Models, and the Fourth Humiliation of Mankind
For centuries, we have tended to assume that language belongs to speakers, texts belong to authors, and meaning originates in conscious minds. Artificial intelligence has begun to unsettle all three assumptions.
The Return of the Dead Author brings together information theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy of language, literary criticism and artificial intelligence to investigate a deceptively simple question:
Who—or what—has ever been the true author of language?
Drawing on Claude Shannon, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others, the book follows the emergence of language and the unconscious into contemporary generative AI.
Rather than announcing the disappearance of the author, however, it argues for a different kind of return: the author as a singular point of attachment within language—a knot holding together meaning, desire and responsibility.
Amazon:
The Return of the Dead Author on Amazon
Left-AI: Against the Fantasy of Complete Intelligence
Structural Homologies Between Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Quantum Physics—and Their Implications for Artificial Intelligence
What connects Lacan's topology of the subject to the formal limits of the physical world—and what might that tell us about artificial intelligence?
Left-AI develops a theoretical framework based not on the claim that “the mind is quantum,” but on something considerably more demanding: that psychic life and physical reality may exhibit structural homologies organised around incompleteness, cuts, remainders, asymmetries and non-totalizable structures.
Among the correspondences investigated are:
- Object a as Renormalization Remainder
- Extimacy as PT-Symmetric Structure
- The Borromean Knot as GHZ-Type Entanglement
- The Sinthome as a Decoherence-Free Subspace
- Sexuation as Superselection Sectors
- Pas-tout (“not-all”) as Weak Measurement
- The Symbolic Cut as Quantum Zeno Stabilization
The central argument is ultimately about limits.
Against fantasies of complete intelligence—human or artificial—Left-AI treats lack, failure and non-knowledge not simply as defects awaiting technological elimination, but as potentially constitutive conditions of intelligence itself.
Amazon:
Left-AI on Amazon
Fiction
Thirty Orbits Later
Where Memory Orbits Longing
In a hotel-home beside the Nilwala River, a boy discovers the scent of memory hidden among paper masks and childhood ink. Decades later, memory returns through dreams of a Cinnamon Girl appearing in the frequencies of rain, lavender and starlight.
Moving from the sun-drenched lanes of Matara into the unstable territories of memory and desire, Thirty Orbits Later combines fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis and poetic prose.
It is a novel about memory, absence, longing and the strange persistence of what time supposedly leaves behind.
For those who ever loved without language.
For those who dream in spirals.
Amazon:
Thirty Orbits Later on Amazon
The Basis
String Theory & Buddhist Cosmology Merged in Revolutionary Mathematics
The Basis begins in a dystopian landscape where speculative physics, Buddhist cosmology, multidimensional existence and revolutionary mathematics collide with political power, corruption, journalism and human desire.
At its centre is Lady X, an investigative journalist caught within state and military intrigue after receiving a mysterious Pandora's box from Lulu, a colleague working on a space-related project.
From there, the novel moves between science, politics and speculative realities, asking what happens when the boundaries separating dimensions, time and human knowledge become unstable.
Written before my more recent theoretical works, The Basis represents an earlier attempt to explore through fiction many of the questions about science, reality and knowledge that would later reappear in different forms in my philosophical writing.
Amazon:
The Basis on Amazon
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