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 in 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 - 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 - Öykü Tekten, Symposium Photographs - Reza Negarestani, Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone