In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined.
But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption.
Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction.
At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity - "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created - original inauthenticity" - this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies.
The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone. Galloway, "What is a Hermeneutic Light? Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. In opposing the standard interpretations of McCarthy's novels as critical either of persisting American ideologies - such as manifest destiny and imperialism - or of the ways in which humanity has laid waste to planet Earth, Greve instead emphasizes the author's interest both in the history of science and in the mythographical developments of religious discourse.
Greve aims to counter traditional interpretations of McCarthy's work and at the same time acknowledge their partial truth, taking into account the work of Friedrich W. Schelling and Lorenz Oken, contemporary speculative realism, and Bertrand Westphal's geocriticism.
Further, newly discovered archival material sheds light on McCarthy's immersion in the metaphysical question par excellence: What is nature? See 1 question about Cyclonopedia…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters.
Sort order. Start your review of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Jun 16, my name is corey irl rated it really liked it. View all 4 comments. May 05, Zach rated it did not like it Shelves: horror , cultural-studies-critical-theory.
Maeby: No, deep is good. I better say I like it. Rita: I like it! Somewhere, in some beautiful alternate universe, some years ago the young Iranian student Reza Negarestani was denied entry to the graduate school of the University of Warwick and, crushed, never received any academic training in the field of philosophy. After wallowing in disappointment for a few years, he channeled his despondency into Cycl Maeby: No, deep is good.
After wallowing in disappointment for a few years, he channeled his despondency into Cyclonopedia , a beautiful and despairing horror novel that densely wove together critical theory and the story of an American artist stranded in Istanbul to re-imagine the geopolitics of oil in the Middle East as an occult attack by ancient Lovecraftian horrors out to turn the entire Earth into a desert.
In our humdrum reality, though, Negarestani did go to grad school and did become impressed with how many ridiculous theoretical neologisms he could create and so just tricked someone into publishing his notes for said novel. I don't know. This would be a good joke if Negarestani and apparently everyone else on goodreads?
Seriously, this is the most unreadably pretentious nonsense I have ever encountered and man, I can usually get into some embarrassingly pretentious nonsense. Not to mention the fact that it's also flatly and awkwardly written. There is no art to any of it. For such a paranoia - saturated by parasitic survivalism and persistence in its own integrity - the course of activity coincides with that of schizo-singularities. Paranoia, in the Cthulhu Mythos and in Drujite-infested Zoroastriansim, manifests itself as a sophisticated hygiene-Complex associated with the demented Aryanistic obsession with purity and the structure of monotheism.
This arch-sabotaged paranoia, in which the destination of purity overlaps with the emerging zone of the outside, is called schizotrategy. If, both for Lovecraft and the Aryans, purity must be safeguarded by an excessive paranoia, it is because only such paranoia and rigorous closure can attract the forces of the Outside and effectuate cosmic akienage in the form of radical openness - that is, being butchered and cracked open. Drujite cults fully developed this schizotrategic line through the fusion of Aryanistic purity with Zoroastrian monotheism.
The Zoroastrian heresiarchs such as Akht soon discovered the immense potential of schyzotrategy for xeno-calls, subversion and sabotage. As a sorcerous line, schizotrategy opens the entire monotheistic culture to cosmodromic openness and its epidemic meshworks. As the nervous system of Lovecraftian strategic paranoia, openness is identified as 'being laid, cracked, butchered open' through a schizotrategic participation with the Outside.
In terms of the xeno-call and schizitrategy, the non-localizable outside emerges as the xeno-chemical inside or the Insider. This is a book that uses the word "schizotrategy" seriously. This would work as a brief essay satirizing the absurdity of the field, but as a serious book-length meditation This is meta-fiction with the fiction removed, an exegesis without an actual foundational work I found a book.
It was the Necronomicon. It's like if Dictionary of the Khazars was just an actual dictionary. It's like if House of Leaves was an actual architectural treatise or, even better, just a blueprint rolled up inside a book cover. It's like if The difference is that White Noise is a better read because there's an actual novel in there, and that's saying something because I hated White Noise and thought that the novel in there was crap.
I'm still grasping at straws about how to categorize this, which I suppose is the point, but if so then it was a point that no one needed to tackle. Theory fiction? Fictional theory? I am leaning now towards "fiction in theory" because 1 this book's whole M. I almost respect the fact that this book does kind of reflect Negarestani's approach to philosophy.
I think it's trivial nonsense, but the man has clearly devoted himself to it and most people are buying it hook, line, and sinker. It's kind of impossible to know where the fiction ends and reality begins with this work: Kristen, the American artist of the introduction whose discovery of the metafictive Cyclonopedia sets the "plot" in motion, is a real person who actually wrote the introduction for Negarestani.
Hamid Parsani, the Iranian academic author of the metafiction within the novel, is fictional, but there really is a "Hyperstition Laboratory" at the University of Warwick that Negarestani was a part of. Did the online discussions about the false author attributed to academics "X" and "Z" of said laboratory actually take place? Who knows. View all 21 comments. Korbinian Hey Zach! First of all, I quite liked your review!
I thought it was well-written, laid down your bona fides nicely and I quite liked the works you drew Hey Zach! I thought it was well-written, laid down your bona fides nicely and I quite liked the works you drew up for comparison.
I personally haven't read the book yet, though I intend to based solely on a positive blurb by China Mieville. The writing you sampled actually quite appealed to me. I even liked the list of philosophical interest. English being my second language made me second guess my understanding of the terms and made my thoughts revolved trying to conjure up the concrete ideas for the words.
I can't possibly know whether that is what the author intended, but benefit of the doubt: he's also a second language speaker. I'll report back once I've read the whole thing. I generally like reading differing opinions from people who have similar taste but think contrary on a specific book.
And as I said, I thought you illuminated quite nicely. Really, there's no point in me writing this now, except for one. Though I feel your reviews would guide me well generally, I will likely disagree here. And I wanted to express that in an appreciative and friendly way, I felt other answers were quite aggressive.
Sorry about that. Have a good day, man! Mar 13, Szplug rated it it was amazing. Sui generis , confounding, disturbing, difficult, absorbing, and ingenious: all of these adjectives are fitting labels to describe Cyclonopedia , a work of theoretical fiction by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani that falls about halfway between theory and fiction - a nebulous netherpoint with blurred edges that is so utterly appropriate to the contents that lie within.
Posit an Earth that, in its submissive wholeness, is an ordered and orderly component of the Solar Empire, the hegemonic domain Sui generis , confounding, disturbing, difficult, absorbing, and ingenious: all of these adjectives are fitting labels to describe Cyclonopedia , a work of theoretical fiction by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani that falls about halfway between theory and fiction - a nebulous netherpoint with blurred edges that is so utterly appropriate to the contents that lie within.
Posit an Earth that, in its submissive wholeness, is an ordered and orderly component of the Solar Empire, the hegemonic domain - structured within Life and Chronic Time - of the creative god. Posit furthermore that the more constrained and hierarchical this wholeness of the Earth strives to be, the more closed its economic, religious, political, and philosophic systems, the more it attracts and opens itself - to be torn and inseminated and polluted with disease - to the void, the Outside, the UnLife of Abyssal Time which can be known and yet completely unknowable, which hungers for the solid whole in equal measure to the desire of the latter for its alien nothingness.
Posit yet further that certain forces exist that have found in radical opposition to hegemonic creation the power of Polytics and Schizotrategy, a power that lures the Outside Void to the Inside Solid. Describe this warped, perverted, and all-encompassing construct through philosophy, theosophy, petrology, philology, mathematics, alchemy, archeology, and demonology - yet weaving this theoretical and heretical edifice around gaping plot holes through which the radical outside forces can corkscrew their cyclonic alterations as required - and you have the numbing, fascinating, and flat-out-mindfucking genius of Cyclonopedia.
Now, this book is labour-intensive - its two-hundred and twenty-one pages will take hours to be read, re-read, puzzled over and then read again just to try and follow the madcap whirlwind of Negarestani's imposing thought process. There are two chapters in particular that, in expounding upon the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, are written in the impenetrable manner that I presume the aforementioned pair sadistically indulge in and which left my eyes bleeding. Yet the glimpses into the world of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran, its sorcerers and mythologies and demons and oil-soaked lunacies - wickedly expounded upon by the decrepit and obsessive Iranian scholar-apostate Hamid Parsani - combined with filmic and literary exegesis, realtime War on Terror, pulp-horror dissertations upon gnostic origin and its pervasive flesh-abhorring rebellion, are enthralling and mysterious and evil.
Different avenues of approach, from Lovecraftian Cthonic and ancient Aryan Fallen Sun Gods to Al Qaeda terrorism and French cinema, are used to link and merge the startlingly workable, interconnected theories that the author s has have cooked up; and by the time the book has been finished, its implausible weirdness has wormed itself into the reader's brain to the point that its very implausibility has made the entire expostulation plausible.
There are many sicknesses and calamities in the world that suddenly seem startlingly and starkly understandable - and you may very well find yourself never looking at religion or the military without a questioning, furrowed brow, never watching an archeological documentary on television without a shudder; never again filling your car without a queasy glance at the noisome liquid that drives its engine, drives the country, drives the world.
View all 12 comments. Jan 19, Jonfaith rated it really liked it. To understand the militarization of oil and the dynamism of war machines in War on Terror, one must grasp oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or a vehicle for epic narratives. I kept thinking of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries while plowing through this book. Sure the prose as such was the epitome of opaque and dense: thus a sheer alternative to the smooth spaces of the Warmachine and the Lines of Immanence.
I read somewhere recently that the Israeli Defense Force has begun incorporatin To understand the militarization of oil and the dynamism of war machines in War on Terror, one must grasp oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or a vehicle for epic narratives.
I read somewhere recently that the Israeli Defense Force has begun incorporating Deleuze and Guattari into their combat manuals. This could only be a pregnant coincidence with respect to this narrative -- one where petroleum is a sentient evil, at war with the Sun and hoping for an inevitable Lovercraftian return of Lost Gods or some such.
Along the way we are guided by a Col. The glossary of theory-ese at the end is great fun as well. Despite the heavy lifting and a wonky Farsi perspective, this was great fun, though hardly for the uninitiated. View 2 comments. Oct 28, Maxwell rated it it was amazing. In a recent interview Reza Negarestani basically disowned this book--along with the influence from occult philosophy, H. Lovecraft, Nick Land and the daemonological prolix of the Outside in its many hues, trading up for the utilitarian calculus of rigor and clarity, the moth-eaten abacus of academic-left orthodoxies.
He went so far as to scold the breakneck vulcanism of accelerationist philosophy as purple prose disguising a scientifically-illiterate avant garde, a renunciation which is tuned In a recent interview Reza Negarestani basically disowned this book--along with the influence from occult philosophy, H. He went so far as to scold the breakneck vulcanism of accelerationist philosophy as purple prose disguising a scientifically-illiterate avant garde, a renunciation which is tuned to roughly the same key as Richard Dawkins or Noam Chomsky complaining about Derrida.
No more skynet battles or sentient oil. I hope I can go a short way toward explaining my interest in this odd book. Many negative reviews refer to wasted potential, that there is an excellent New Weird horror story or an eccentric treatise on Middle Eastern politics at the petrol-black heart of Cyclonopedia, one which is overwhelmed by the annoying Deleuzo-Guattarian coinages and incomprehensible graphs.
This is one of the first bloody-lips readers encounter--do you read Cyclonopedia as a novel or as a work of philosophy? It begins squarely as the former but ends as neither ; a young woman named Kristen Alvanson becomes fascinated by the strange theories of an anonymous crackpot she meets online. If you were hoping for House of Leaves then I dunno, go and read House of Leaves, because what lies beyond the book-within-a We never hear about Kristen Alvanson in Istanbul again.
Instead we get a book that is very unique, even among the post CCRU canon. This seems to be the complaint some people have about Cyclonopedia--it tantalizes you with the first footsteps of familiar genres and then instead clambers headfirst into bloodshot pandemonium. The further you sink into this book the less you understand about it. So what can you get out of Cyclonopedia?
Why do I like it so much? Although it's not quite the Weird Horror tale people misled by the blurbs on the back cover seem to have wanted, I think that complaint mostly arises from a petulant frustration at anything but the mechanical reproduction of genre tropes--this can still be read as a horror novel, and a rather vigorous one. The capture of oil, we learn, is the affair of transcendental philosophy.
This is explained in the most confounding way possible--there are at least four meta fictive levels and as many echelons of authorship. We come back to Cyclonopedia as a horror novel--Dr. Aside from a brief treatment of the Assyrian war machine, humans are generally absent from this schema. We are constantly reminded that fossil fuels, the most immense surplus of pure energy in terrestrial history, are the residue of corpses.
Fossil fuels are the remains of carbon life forms, their discreet molecular identities melted into a primordial swamp which burns hot enough to have supercharged a civilization of upright-apes into the space age. This is the premier fictional conceit of the book; what if the oil wants something?
The endorsement from China Mieville alone promises a SF-Horror book that will never come; and philosophy grad students weaned on Urbanomic may bite down their nails to black-varnished stubs over some of the batty digressions. Nov 06, Nate D rated it really liked it Shelves: horror , theory , iran , read-in , weird , mena. I can practically feel this rewiring my brain. What is the zone of neuronal interconnection but a vast Nemat-Space the increasingly fractal cavities the writing often explores?
Borderline parody of academic theoritical writing as paranoid conspiracy, except that many of the conclusions Negarestani draws as he constructs his wild, strange connections MENA archeological history, oil economics petro-polytics , radical I I can practically feel this rewiring my brain.
Borderline parody of academic theoritical writing as paranoid conspiracy, except that many of the conclusions Negarestani draws as he constructs his wild, strange connections MENA archeological history, oil economics petro-polytics , radical Islamic splinter groups, the war on terror in the just-pre-ISIS days actually ring awfully true, metaphorically and actually.
It's a strange sort of reading experience -- often I read through stretches without feeling like I'm taking in the dense prose, only to find my thoughts reshaped by things I didn't realize I'd understood in the coming days.
Oddly subversive and highly unique. May 26, Anna rated it liked it Shelves: fiction , theory , supernatural. I spotted it shelved under sci-fi at my local radical bookshop and would dispute that categorisation. I persisted because the oddness appealed and I wanted to find some insight amid incomprehensibility.
The fictional elements seem curiously Victorian: a framing mechanism whereby the main text is a mysterious manuscript found by a first person narrator. In addition to this person, I presume that Dr Hamid Parsani and Colonel West, both frequently quoted, are also fictional.
The theme of the book, as far as I could tell, was the theoretical and mystical influence of oil on the contemporary Middle East. I struggle to describe what the latter chapters were about. Worms, Zoroastrianism, and demons, amongst other things. I carried on reading in part due to a pleasant quasi-poetic quality in the writing and in part due to the sunk cost fallacy. Nothing became clear at the end. Nonetheless, in the first half there were some intriguing comments on the War on Terror as a figurative clash of machines: Since western warmachines have already stealthily been programmed and contaminated by Islamic warmachines smuggled through oil, they militantly rush towards Islamic warmachines, or, in other words and more precisely, they are attracted to Islamic warmachines by an internal force which has already mutated them from within through their oily nervous system and petromania.
For western warmachines, the addiction to oil is not limited to oil as fuel, but extends to Islamic Apocalytpticism, in a twisted enthusiasm for interlocking and clashing with Islamic warmachines.
By intriguing, I mean that I was able to grasp something there but felt it could have been explained more clearly. I had a similar experience with the material on guerrilla warfare eliding the distinction between soldier and citizen. I found the beginning easier to understand, as there is evidently a thesis about oil a substance I am very interested in the sociopolitical role of.
My favourite was this: An autonomous chemical weapon belonging to earth as both a sentient entity and an event. Petroleum poisons Capital with absolute madness, a planetary plague bleeding into economies mobilised by the technological singularities of advanced civilisations. In the wake of oil as an autonomous terrestrial conspirator, capitalism is not a human symptom but rather a planetary inevitability. In other words, Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host.
I enjoyed the list of oil descriptions so much that they merit adding a star to the two I originally intended. Lovecraft certainly seems too flimsy for such purposes. Rather than elucidating the world, it periodically made me doubt my ability to understand words. Nov 16, Steve rated it it was amazing.
Cyclonopedia is a work of philosophy embedded in a horror novel which is wrapped in a literary hoax involving the written legacy of Dr. Hamid Parsani, recently disappeared. While comparisons to House of Leaves are apt, Cyclonopedia offers more theory than plot and leaves a thick, oily residue in your brainpan.
Is the Middle East an intelligent entity? Does the earth yearn for solar immolation? What is the esoteric role of oil in the "war on terror"? The book's blurb rounds it all out nicely: "An Cyclonopedia is a work of philosophy embedded in a horror novel which is wrapped in a literary hoax involving the written legacy of Dr. The book's blurb rounds it all out nicely: "An American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives.
Cyclonopedia seeks to open such a space and widly succeeds on the merit of the ideas it presents. Much of the book seems to build upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari, whose work I haven't read. This can make for some very heavy going, but ultimately one is rewarded, again and again, with fascinating ideas about the "polytics" of decay, the insurgency of dust, the nature of desert demons or Djnun female Djinn and how they lay their victims open, and a model of post-modern warfare based on the nature of war-machines and the flow of oil.
Sometimes the academic style masks the sheer weirdness of the text, which becomes increasingly Lovecraftian until it focuses on the nature of Lovecraft himself. It's useful to consider the external media cited in this work, specifically two films: Claire Denis's 'Trouble Every Day' and E.
Elias Merhige's ghastly 'Begotten' Merhige also gives the book a glowing review. But site-specific work has become increasingly assimilated into the capitalist logic of regeneration and value creation.
How can we do justice to the particularity of local sites while unearthing their material conditions? Can we develop methods for the controlled unpacking of the local into the global, avoiding trivial reconciliations between local sites and their global conditions? Alongside artists discussing their practice and their approach to site and plot, contributors from various disciplines introduce concepts from cartography, mathematics, film, fiction, design, and philosophy.
An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy. Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s rave, acid house, SF cinema and back to its sources in delirious post ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. Is there an enduring bond between philosophical thought and the earth, or is philosophy's task to escape the planetary horizon? Real and imaginary geographies and cartographies have played a dual role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as ultimate grounding for philosophical thought; but urgent contemporary concerns introduce new problems for geophilosophy: planetary political, technological, military, and financial mutations have scrambled territorial formations, and scientific predictions now present us with the apocalyptic scenario of a planet without human thought.
Investigations into the existential, aesthetic, theological, and political dimensions of horror, its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and what lies in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. The fourth volume of Collapse features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror.
Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse 's pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections.
In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought. The first published work to explore the new philosophy of speculative realism through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and an openness to its outside.
The first published work to explore the new philosophical field of speculative realism, the second volume of Collapse features a selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and filmmakers, and searching interviews with leading scientists.
Comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, it involves them in unforeseen and productive syntheses. The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.
The first volume of Collapse investigates the nature and philosophical uses of number. The volume includes an interview with Alain Badiou on the relation between philosophy, mathematics, and science, an in-depth interview with mathematician Matthew Watkins on the strange connections between physics and the distribution of prime numbers, and contributions that demonstrate the many ways in which number intersects with philosophical thought—from the mathematics of intensity to terrorism, from occultism to information theory, and graphical works of multiplicity.
Search Search. Search Advanced Search close Close. Breadcrumb Home contributors Reza Negarestani. Abducting the Outside Collected Writings — Reza Negarestani From decay to geotrauma to universalism to rationalist inhumanism, a collection that charts the evolution of a uniquely radical thinker. Chronosis Reza Negarestani , Keith Tilford , and Robin Mackay A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation takes readers on a ride through time, space, and thought.
Intelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani A critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism that formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things.
Collapse, Volume 7 Culinary Materialism Reza Negarestani and Robin Mackay Examination of the cultural, industrial, physiological, alchemical, and even cosmic dimensions of cookery, drawing anthropology, chemistry, hermetic alchemy and contemporary mathematics.
Contributor Wonderflux A Decade of e-flux Journal e-flux journal Illustrated essays that consider emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.
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