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Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium
Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place on 11 March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. 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" (191) - 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. CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, "A Brief History of Geotrauma" - McKenzie Wark, "An Inhuman Fiction of Forces" - Benjamin H. Bratton, "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia" - Alisa Andrasek, "Dustism" - Zach Blas, "Queerness, Openness" - Melanie Doherty, "Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious" - Anthony Sciscione, "Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space'" - Kate Marshall, "Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)" - Alexander R. Galloway, "What is a Hermeneutic Light?" - Eugene Thacker, "Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness" - Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, "Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War" - Ben Woodard, "The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics" - Ed Keller, ." . .Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. . ." - Lionel Maunz, "Receipt of Malice" - Oyku Tekten, "Symposium Photographs" - Reza Negarestani, "Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone" punctumbooks.com"
308 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2012
8 people are currently reading
470 people want to read
About the author
Reza Negarestani
34 books349 followersReza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer, known for "pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book" Cyclonopedia which was published in 2008. it was listed in Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. Negarestani has been a regular contributor to Collapse (journal), as well as other print and web publications such as Ctheory. On March 11, 2011, faculty from Brooklyn College and The New School organized a symposium to discuss Cyclonopedia titled Leper Creativity. Later on in the year, Punctum books published a book with the same title that included essays, articles, artworks, and documents from or related to the symposium. In 2011, he co-edited Collapse's issue VII with Robin Mackay titled Culinary Materialism. In 2012, Negarestani collaborated with Florian Hecker on an artwork titled "Chimerization" that was included in the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition.
After being associated with the philosophical movement of Speculative Realism for several years, Negarestani is currently lecturing and writing about rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct.
(from Wikipedia)
After being associated with the philosophical movement of Speculative Realism for several years, Negarestani is currently lecturing and writing about rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 9, 2023
4.3 stars rounded up via chthonic self criticism
Robin Mackay: So where is’Negarestani’ supposed to go with this?
As if answering himself: Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them.
Matters because further eschatological: Earth’s monogamous relationship with the sun is just one chapter in a weird epic narrative that does not find its climax in annihilatory conflagration.
If you’re still following, this is a transcription of a symposium devoted to Cyclonopedia(wretched be its name).
McKenzie Wark went next and devoted their time to the sentience of petroleum, how it refracts the terrestrial relationship with the solar. The host reinvents the earth as an oil-shitting machine. Oil that is just masticated life, which is itself just sun-cum.
This continues, Nick Land, whose wonky erudition led to this notion of theory-fiction is himself interrogated in footnotes, almost a counterpoint to standard issue Deleuze and Guattari. This was terrific fun. Likely not for everyone.
Robin Mackay: So where is’Negarestani’ supposed to go with this?
As if answering himself: Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them.
Matters because further eschatological: Earth’s monogamous relationship with the sun is just one chapter in a weird epic narrative that does not find its climax in annihilatory conflagration.
If you’re still following, this is a transcription of a symposium devoted to Cyclonopedia(wretched be its name).
McKenzie Wark went next and devoted their time to the sentience of petroleum, how it refracts the terrestrial relationship with the solar. The host reinvents the earth as an oil-shitting machine. Oil that is just masticated life, which is itself just sun-cum.
This continues, Nick Land, whose wonky erudition led to this notion of theory-fiction is himself interrogated in footnotes, almost a counterpoint to standard issue Deleuze and Guattari. This was terrific fun. Likely not for everyone.
February 21, 2019
Quite a mixed bag of work, which is perhaps what is to be expected from pieces stemming from the complex and perverse decomposition of thought that is Cyclonodpedia. Some of the essays are enlightening and of value, others are superfluous and off-track.
Mackay's piece is helpful in tracing the passage of Reza's thought from his complicity with Nick Land and the CCRU, grounding the geophilosophic elements of the text. It also exhumes the psychoanalytic element that runs perversely and latently through it, especially influenced by Ferenczi.
I found Sciscione's essay to be interesting, though the application of cyclonopedian concepts to Lovecraft perhaps a bit too obvious or expectable. A corruptive deployment or exposure into other literature outside of the horror genre might be of greater intrigue, and slightly less kitch (to the recits of Maurice Blanchot, for example).
Counter to another reviewer, I personally found Doherty's piece to be absorbing, but of any real value for thought. More of an elaboration of the (hypo-)textual paranoic effects that the work of hyperstitions can produce than a thoughtful delving or explication of this affectation.
The Mellamphys' alchemical reading was a helpful examination of one of the more obscure facets of the text, though it suffers from an excessive use of bracketing. A restricted use of such parenthetical semiotic techniques can be well applied to highlight the play in signification and thought, though it can very quickly collapse into the realm of the annoying and hindersome (coming from one who is constantly working at the perfect employment of such a style).
Woodard also does well in explicating or excavating the concept of becoming from the text, evincing its parasitic, decompositional effect by grafting it onto Schellingian Naturphilosophie (as professed by Iain Hamilton Grant), and mapping its affective decay.
Reza's own contribution is, of course, of value (it certainly being the prime reason that I purchased the book). These brief notes are less of an explication of an element from Cyclonopedia (besides providing a very general overview of its overall structure, in a sense) than being a revelatory bridge between this period of his thinking and his contemporary tragectory into the rational universalism (see Intelligence and Spirit, for example). A useful passage for finding continuity-in-rupture in the evolution of his thought.
As to the other works that make up this text, I won't say much. I was disappointed by Thacker's piece, and Galloway's could have been good, and was certainly of interest, but it is founded upon a fundamental misreading of Heidegger which gravely mucks up the whole thing (perhaps in the sense of mess production, though I don't think Galloway was writing at this meta level here). His distinction between a hermeneutic reading and a immanent truth reading of Heidegger (which he claims is an open problem in the reception of Heidegger's thought, though I would only claim this to be true amongst the many who do not think through it carefully enough) is patently wrong, for truth and hermeneutics rendered broadly cannot be so easily distinguished, as Heidegger himself lays out in detail in Being and Time and which he maintains throughout his later thought. How Being is given or sent cannot be disentangled from the interpretive understanding of Dasein, for truth is only disclosed or unconcealed through understanding, which entails interpretation. Interpretation is not a process so much as the being of Dasein as the clearing of Being, and thus unfolds (as) the turning of immanence and transcendence. Galloway thus inscribes a reductive and retrograde reading of Heidegger which falls back into the very binary metaphysical thinking that Heidegger sought to work his way out of. On top of all of this, his mytho-poeic evocation of Hermes and Iris becomes troubled or disturbed as his text progresses, for how can the multiply epithetical Hermes stand for the "singular, never multiple" (170)? Why would there be any need for interpretation if it were singular? Wouldn't this be immanence? But this is applied to the share of thought devoted to the light of Iris. All in all this text displays the worst aspects of supposed "scholarship", miming the moves employed by thinkers such as Heidegger or Derrida without actually portraying the philosophical rigour of thinking that needs back it up. It is works like this that give philosophy a bad name...
Sorry for that extended diatribe, but that particular piece really struck a negative chord in me. Overall I would suggest this text to any looking to extend their thinking around Cyclonopedia, but with the provisional wariness concerning the varying value of the pieces. And it should go without saying that this work is obviously meant to be an elaborative companion to Reza's book, though not a supplement to it (what it adds could never replace or supersede what the book accomplishes or, perhaps better, incites).
Mackay's piece is helpful in tracing the passage of Reza's thought from his complicity with Nick Land and the CCRU, grounding the geophilosophic elements of the text. It also exhumes the psychoanalytic element that runs perversely and latently through it, especially influenced by Ferenczi.
I found Sciscione's essay to be interesting, though the application of cyclonopedian concepts to Lovecraft perhaps a bit too obvious or expectable. A corruptive deployment or exposure into other literature outside of the horror genre might be of greater intrigue, and slightly less kitch (to the recits of Maurice Blanchot, for example).
Counter to another reviewer, I personally found Doherty's piece to be absorbing, but of any real value for thought. More of an elaboration of the (hypo-)textual paranoic effects that the work of hyperstitions can produce than a thoughtful delving or explication of this affectation.
The Mellamphys' alchemical reading was a helpful examination of one of the more obscure facets of the text, though it suffers from an excessive use of bracketing. A restricted use of such parenthetical semiotic techniques can be well applied to highlight the play in signification and thought, though it can very quickly collapse into the realm of the annoying and hindersome (coming from one who is constantly working at the perfect employment of such a style).
Woodard also does well in explicating or excavating the concept of becoming from the text, evincing its parasitic, decompositional effect by grafting it onto Schellingian Naturphilosophie (as professed by Iain Hamilton Grant), and mapping its affective decay.
Reza's own contribution is, of course, of value (it certainly being the prime reason that I purchased the book). These brief notes are less of an explication of an element from Cyclonopedia (besides providing a very general overview of its overall structure, in a sense) than being a revelatory bridge between this period of his thinking and his contemporary tragectory into the rational universalism (see Intelligence and Spirit, for example). A useful passage for finding continuity-in-rupture in the evolution of his thought.
As to the other works that make up this text, I won't say much. I was disappointed by Thacker's piece, and Galloway's could have been good, and was certainly of interest, but it is founded upon a fundamental misreading of Heidegger which gravely mucks up the whole thing (perhaps in the sense of mess production, though I don't think Galloway was writing at this meta level here). His distinction between a hermeneutic reading and a immanent truth reading of Heidegger (which he claims is an open problem in the reception of Heidegger's thought, though I would only claim this to be true amongst the many who do not think through it carefully enough) is patently wrong, for truth and hermeneutics rendered broadly cannot be so easily distinguished, as Heidegger himself lays out in detail in Being and Time and which he maintains throughout his later thought. How Being is given or sent cannot be disentangled from the interpretive understanding of Dasein, for truth is only disclosed or unconcealed through understanding, which entails interpretation. Interpretation is not a process so much as the being of Dasein as the clearing of Being, and thus unfolds (as) the turning of immanence and transcendence. Galloway thus inscribes a reductive and retrograde reading of Heidegger which falls back into the very binary metaphysical thinking that Heidegger sought to work his way out of. On top of all of this, his mytho-poeic evocation of Hermes and Iris becomes troubled or disturbed as his text progresses, for how can the multiply epithetical Hermes stand for the "singular, never multiple" (170)? Why would there be any need for interpretation if it were singular? Wouldn't this be immanence? But this is applied to the share of thought devoted to the light of Iris. All in all this text displays the worst aspects of supposed "scholarship", miming the moves employed by thinkers such as Heidegger or Derrida without actually portraying the philosophical rigour of thinking that needs back it up. It is works like this that give philosophy a bad name...
Sorry for that extended diatribe, but that particular piece really struck a negative chord in me. Overall I would suggest this text to any looking to extend their thinking around Cyclonopedia, but with the provisional wariness concerning the varying value of the pieces. And it should go without saying that this work is obviously meant to be an elaborative companion to Reza's book, though not a supplement to it (what it adds could never replace or supersede what the book accomplishes or, perhaps better, incites).
October 17, 2022
For Reza’s readers Leper Creativity – a colloquium dedicated to the “exegesis” of Cyclonopedia – the claim that the misinterpretations and tangential drifts are the driving forces of the entire protocol should be taken by no surprise.
Whatever may be or have been the “intents” of Cyclonopedia’s manuscript, they are met with active unfidelity and the deficiency of hermeneutic rigor; what we get instead is a tacit following of Reza’s theory of (un)creation and its principles of narratological curvature (“Hidden Writing is not the object of layers and interpretation; it can only be exhumed by distorting the structure of the book or the surface plot”, Cyclonopedia, 60), voraciously stretching beyond figuration and representation, estimating the manifolds of chemophilosophies yet-to-come or buried-without-knowing.
The rundown premise is therefore minimal: decoding – we need more of it, more than ever. Perhaps this is what Land hinted towards upon claiming “Read Negarestani, and pray…”
Whatever may be or have been the “intents” of Cyclonopedia’s manuscript, they are met with active unfidelity and the deficiency of hermeneutic rigor; what we get instead is a tacit following of Reza’s theory of (un)creation and its principles of narratological curvature (“Hidden Writing is not the object of layers and interpretation; it can only be exhumed by distorting the structure of the book or the surface plot”, Cyclonopedia, 60), voraciously stretching beyond figuration and representation, estimating the manifolds of chemophilosophies yet-to-come or buried-without-knowing.
The rundown premise is therefore minimal: decoding – we need more of it, more than ever. Perhaps this is what Land hinted towards upon claiming “Read Negarestani, and pray…”
December 29, 2018
Mostly awful with only brief flashes of non-awful.
February 3, 2016
This book was full of sycophantic articles all trying to embody what seems to me to be a possibly interesting theoretical model of the cyclone. Rather than reading this book, I suggest going straight to Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia and reading straight from the source.
That is what I have decided. These articles were only half-interesting, as many of them were simply singing praises of Negarestani's theory-fiction. I'd rather read the theory-fiction then read twenty people trying to mimic its style.
Not really worth the read, if you ask me. I'll update you once I read Negarestani's original work which inspired this symposium. Hopefully it will prove much better.
That is what I have decided. These articles were only half-interesting, as many of them were simply singing praises of Negarestani's theory-fiction. I'd rather read the theory-fiction then read twenty people trying to mimic its style.
Not really worth the read, if you ask me. I'll update you once I read Negarestani's original work which inspired this symposium. Hopefully it will prove much better.
April 5, 2021
I thought it was a sequel to Cyclonopedia’s disgraced academic layer told as a fake symposium and was starting to think that Nagestrani was a pen name of Nick Land. Apparently neither statements are true. Basically mad fangirling about Cyclonopedia. What is this though? Post- humanism? Anti- humanism? Lovecraft ripoff? Idk.
April 13, 2022
Reading this to see further exploration of the cyclone as a theoretical framework. Three to four essays are good, the rest is lacking and disjunct. Negarestani follow-up essay is interesting though. Thinking of peak oil fiction after reading this.
March 26, 2023
Extremely variable in quality - some essays were extremely high quality and others were akin to poor fan fiction. In any case, the essays each suffered from a lack of proofreading - typos were a constant feature throughout the book. Altogether definitely worth the read if you liked Cyclonopedia.
November 23, 2012
Not all the articles were worthy, just two or three of them.
October 11, 2016
Of particular interest are the essays by Mackay, Doherty, Woodard and Negarestani.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews