Nicola Masciandaro

Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium Nicola Masciandaro

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? ? Öykü Tekten, ?Symposium Photographs? ? Reza Negarestani, ?Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone? punctumbooks.com