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Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium

  • Edited by Edward Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, Eugene Thacker

Published on December 22, 2012 by punctum books

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Pages
310 pages
Languages
English
Dimensions
5⤫8 in.
ISBN (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-615-60046-8 (Paperback)
DOI
DOI: 10.21983/P3.0017.1.00(opens in new tab)
BISAC subject codes
BISAC: PHI040000
Thema subject codes
THEMA: DNL, DSA

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

  1. Frontmatter (i–xi)

    Edward Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, Eugene Thacker

  2. A Brief History of Geotrauma (1–37)

    Robin Mackay

  3. An Inhuman Fiction of Forces (39–43)

    McKenzie Wark

  4. Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia (45–57)

    Benjamin H. Bratton

  5. Dustism (59–99)

    Alisa Andrasek

  6. Queerness, Openness (101–113)

    Zach Blas

  7. Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious (115–129)

    Melanie Doherty

  8. Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's "The Colour out of Space" (131–146)

    Anthony Sciscione

  9. Cyclonopedia as Novel (A Meditation on Complicity as Inauthenticity) (147–157)

    Kate Marshall

  10. What is a Hermeneutic Light? (159–172)

    Alexander R. Galloway

  11. Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans (173–180)

    Eugene Thacker

  12. Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness (181–191)

    Nicola Masciandaro

  13. Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: on the Alchemical Elements of War (193–211)

    Dan Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

  14. The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics (213–223)

    Ben Woodard

  15. ...Or Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain... (225–253)

    Edward Keller

  16. Receipt of Malice (255–277)

    Lionel Maunz

  17. Symposium Photographs (279–285)

    Öykü Tekten

  18. Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone (287–297)

    Reza Negarestani

Biographies

  • Edward Keller

    (Editor)

    Parsons School of Design

    Ed Keller is a transdisciplinary designer, writer, and musician. He is Associate Dean of Distributed Learning and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design, and Associate Professor in Parsons’ School of Design Strategies. Prior to joining Parsons, he taught at the Columbia GSAPP [1998-2010] and SCIArc [2004-09]. With Carla Leitao, Ed co-founded AUM Studio(opens in new tab) [2003-present], an architecture and new media firm that has produced residential projects in Europe, award winning competitions, expanded cinema and locative media projects. AUM Studio’s work has been exhibited and published internationally. He has spoken at conferences, including Humanity+@Parsons [2011], Cyclonopedia [The New School 2011], Design and Existential Risk [Parsons 2010], Research Practice [Cal Poly Pomona 2009], Temporalism [Cornell 2007], Ineffable [CCNY 2007], Action Cut Micro Cut [Columbia GSAPP 2007], and Becoming Architect: XXI Century [La Sapienza, Rome 2005]. Ed has been an avid rock climber for over 30 years.

  • Nicola Masciandaro

    (Editor)

    Brooklyn College

    Nicola Masciandaro teaches at Brooklyn College, is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2006), and is also founder and co-editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary(opens in new tab). He has published widely on medieval philosophy, mysticism, individuation, geophilosophy, beheading, sorrow, spontaneity, and metal music, among other subjects.

  • Eugene Thacker

    (Editor)

    New School

    Eugene Thacker is the author of After Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Horror of Philosophy (Zero Books, 2011). Thacker teaches at The New School in New York.

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Genres

  • Cultural Studies+Critical Theory
  • Literary Studies
  • Posthumanism

Keywords

  • Cyclonopedia
  • petropolitics
  • Reza Negarestani
  • speculative realism
  • theory-fiction