Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

Jun 16, 2013 my name is corey irl rated it really liked it

so its super complex and you gotta know a bit of deleuze an guattari and theres a whole chapter on dust and i know what youre thinking: i could read like five or six animorphs books in the time it takes to read this. well the good news friend is that its worth at least that many animorphs if not more (and yes before you say it that includes the one where they all turn into dinosaurs). startling i know but there you have it

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May 05, 2011 Zach rated it did not like it

Shelves: cultural-studies-critical-theory, horror

Maeby: No, deep is good. People are going to say, “What the hell just happened? I better say I like it.” ’Cause nobody wants to seem stupid.
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 ...more

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Mar 13, 2010 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). This Outsider-Become-Insider is a venom of nullity that works its revolution in all manners and memes of decay: intoxicating politics, infecting religion, gutteralizing language into ululating mechanical barks and hisses; manifesting War as an entity that entices tactical War-Machines into strategic annihilation; extending the beginnings and terminations of the Hegemon by muddying the elements, mating Dust with Water to create bacterial oil, oil that will traverse from worm-gnawed vermicular tunnels to manufactured pipelines to be carried as hydrocarbonic Islamic insurgents into the heart of liberal democracy and ignite them to warlike, invading madness; Tellurian uprisings that furiously and stealthily drive the world towards meltdown, towards the goal of millennia of complicity with anonymous materials in erecting a bridge linking the molten core of the Earth with the thermonuclear gaze of the Sun in an effort to achieve immanence and enact the Xerodrome - the horizontal desert of monotheistic apocalypse. 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.

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Oct 28, 2018 Maxwell rated it it was amazing

In a recent interview Reza Negarestani basically disowned this book--along with the influence from occult philosophy, H.P. 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.P. 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 to roughly the same key as Richard Dawkins or Noam Chomsky complaining about Derrida. I guess Negarestani’s just going to write dry books about epistemology now. No more skynet battles or sentient oil. You can’t totally disagree with him about Cyclonopedia and the environment of its genesis, but it’s still kind of a bummer. There are so many academic philosophers writing careful and lucid books about Hegel & Sellars--isn’t there room for just a few who aren’t?

I feel a strong affinity with Cyclonopedia, even if its author doesn’t anymore. 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. She goes to visit this stranger in Istanbul but they are nowhere to be found and cannot be reached by any means, leading her dig up some information about her mysterious interlocutor; ultimately uncovering little besides the name “Reza Negarestani” in our first of many cute metatextual gestures, before anonymously receiving a cryptic grimoire called “Cyclonopedia” in her hotel room. 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-...preface is an anomalous cacophany of Islamic mysticism, Tellurian blasphemy ('demonogrammatical decoding of the earth's body'), petro-polytics, Druj literature and other hyperstitional lessons in the metaphysics of marauding civilizations across the dark age of oil. 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. I don’t want to be unfair to people who hated it, this book is a confusing mess. Unlike certain hellaciously difficult works of philosophy possessing an internal logic and consistency which can be made intelligible through a reader’s patience and discipline, I don’t know that reading & rereading, careful notetaking and consulting secondary literature (if any even exists) will confer clarity and understanding unto Cyclonopedia. A friend of mine called it a ‘failure’ the other week for this reason. It doesn’t reward studious reading but instead regards it with an acid wryness. 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. And despite the promiscuity of its style, the book is actually very focused--it is about oil, ‘the devil’s excrement’, the sacred object of the geopolitical libido, the chimera vision that machine empires famish themselves questing after, and about the esoteric catabasis of its removal from encasement in the antediluvian deserts of the Middle East. Oil becomes silicone and combustion engines and the superstitions of embodied life gestate into bloodless metadata & algorithms, meanwhile the arcane political & religious imbroglios of the Middle East vex & fever the last great empire in scraping the region’s oil down to the last vapours beneath a dying sun. 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. There are frequent references to the hyperstitional ‘Dr. Hamid Parsani’, a kind of Zarathustra figure for Negarestani, descendent from the CCRU’s Dr. Barker. We come back to Cyclonopedia as a horror novel--Dr. Parsani’s claim “The Middle East is a sentient entity--it is alive!” ingresses unto sand, oil, rats, bullets, corpses and malevolent monster gods from Lovecraft and Zoroastrianism which are networked into unified machines with a kind of autonomous will. Aside from a brief treatment of the Assyrian war machine, humans are generally absent from this schema. The human metabolism is not nearly so important as the metabolism of these complex assemblages; even if recognition of their being can only be enacted on the level of performativity and speculation, the potential for consciousness is theoretically embodied (for Negarestani; or Parsani, or whoever) on more significant strata than our anthopoid bias generally conceived and Cyclonopedia looks at the energy & fuel burned in the furnaces of these emergent systems of self awareness. 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. Oil is pressure-cooked in a vice grip between the Earth’s core and the rubble of civilization and Negarestani embeds one thing further in this sepulchre--self consciousness, free will and desire. This is the premier fictional conceit of the book; what if the oil wants something? In terms of the outlandish premises germinal to horror novels, I’ve certainly seen worse.

I don’t expect anyone to bareknuckle through the weirdness & bullshit of this book--the insular & self referential lexicon, the ornate references to references to references to fictional people and their fictional texts, the dubious science and mathematics (to put it generously), least of all the boldfaced lies--so be advised, a verso-recto examination of the nice glossy front-and-back covers is almost libelously misleading. 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. However if you can widen your purview of philosophy’s acceptable speculative conceits to include deranged lying then this may just be the book for you. If not, Reza Negarestani’s upcoming work about Hegel and Artificial Intelligence, ‘Intelligence and Spirit’, is due this Christmas and promises considerably fewer hyphenated neologisms. ...more

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Jan 19, 2014 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 ...more

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Nov 06, 2018 Nate D rated it really liked it

Shelves: iran, read-in-2018, mena, theory, horror, weird

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)? A bit like Chris Kraus and Borges collabing on Deleuze/Lovecraft slash fic. 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 ...more

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May 26, 2019 Anna rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction, theory, supernatural

‘Cyclonopedia’ is an experimental text consisting of both fiction and theory. I spotted it shelved under sci-fi at my local radical bookshop and would dispute that categorisation. It meshes literary fiction with postmodern political theory, with the unsurprising consequence that it’s very difficult to read. A great deal of effort was required and I’m not at all sure it was worth putting in. I persisted because the oddness appealed and I wanted to find some insight amid incomprehensibility. This ‘Cyclonopedia’ is an experimental text consisting of both fiction and theory. I spotted it shelved under sci-fi at my local radical bookshop and would dispute that categorisation. It meshes literary fiction with postmodern political theory, with the unsurprising consequence that it’s very difficult to read. A great deal of effort was required and I’m not at all sure it was worth putting in. I persisted because the oddness appealed and I wanted to find some insight amid incomprehensibility. This probably says as much about my shortcomings as the book’s; others might find it easier to follow if they’re well versed in Deleuze and Guattari. 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. That’s where the main text begins, in any event. I struggle to describe what the latter chapters were about. Worms, Zoroastrianism, and demons, amongst other things. Such was my confusion by that point that I genuinely couldn’t tell what was meant by ‘openness’, so bewildering was the context. 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). Negarestani has some magnificent ways to describe oil, among them Tellurian Lube, The Black Corpse of the Sun, and Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice. 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. Like In the Dust of This Planet, ‘Cyclonopedia’ struggled to hold my attention when it descended into mysticism and demonology. I don’t understand why some postmodern theorists are fascinated by horror fiction in general and Lovecraft in particular. Negarestani briefly discusses Lovecraft’s virulent racism and fear of the contaminating Other, but that was hardly unique among authors of the period! I suppose using occult horror as part of a philosophical framework isn’t to my taste. Lovecraft certainly seems too flimsy for such purposes.

While I do enjoy challenging reading matter, the latter half of ‘Cyclonopedia’ felt a bit too much like wading through crude oil while ancient demons sniggered at me. Rather than elucidating the world, it periodically made me doubt my ability to understand words. It is not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, though, I will give it that. ...more

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Nov 16, 2009 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. 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 American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ... "

Among the many topics considered, I was particularly interested by the idea of hyperstition- fiction that comes to be regarded as true. 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). It may be useful to watch these in tandem with reading this book.

I would suggest that Cyclonopedia, in its utterly unique way, is a game-changer. As it works its mad spell on the reader, she or he begins to feel shaken and possessed by its peculiar ideas. As hyperstition, it creates doubt and offers a radical new way of considering politics, religion, warfare and even cosmology. It will scar you and take its pound of flesh, too. It may not be possible to wake from the nightmare that Cyclonopedia induces. Proceed with caution! ...more

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Feb 24, 2016 Ronald Morton rated it it was amazing

I wanted to start this review with some sort of reasonable definition of just what Theory-Fiction really is. And yet, I can't really find anything concrete.

Reza (the author) describes it as such in a brief description of a talk he gave earlier this year:

theory-fiction as philosophy's simulation engine

I also came across this description (of another) work on CTheory.net which at least covers some of the concepts (Link):

By "theoretical fiction" I don't mean books which are merely informed by theory

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Jun 05, 2015 Adam rated it did not like it

Shelves: urbana-library, abandoned, pomo, metafiction, weird

TV Tropes calls it the "Tome of Eldritch Lore." It's a staple in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, where the original Necronomicon has been supplemented by the fictional Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or the fictive poems of historical writer Olaus Wormius (references from Eugene Thacker's review of this book). These are the works of scholars with lax compulsions about messing with extra-human arcana, scholars who are inevitably driven mad by the knowledge they accumulate.

Such books exist within stories g TV Tropes calls it the "Tome of Eldritch Lore." It's a staple in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, where the original Necronomicon has been supplemented by the fictional Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or the fictive poems of historical writer Olaus Wormius (references from Eugene Thacker's review of this book). These are the works of scholars with lax compulsions about messing with extra-human arcana, scholars who are inevitably driven mad by the knowledge they accumulate.

Such books exist within stories grounded with more prosaic protagonists, ways for the author to hint at deep and complex bodies of forbidden knowledge. They are generally not even quoted, and certainly never created entirely. To do so would betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how such works function - they are meant to evoke, and executing them in practice can only show that the unimaginable, inhuman secrets they contain are easily imagined in the cozy confines of the writing desk.

Cyclonopedia is the first attempt at such a project I've seen. It's audacious and impressive in its scope and commitment. But it soon becomes clear that, perhaps more disappointing than the inevitable disenchantment that comes with bringing such a book to the light of day, the rantings of mad scholars are just boring, dense, and illogical. They are painful to read. This is why most authors employ protagonists to do the dirty work, bringing to light important plot information and flavor tidbits without showing the tawdry face of madness directly.

I was actually a bit excited as I started reading Cyclonopedia. It references monster movies, video games, takes on the language of academia to describe, create, and play with fantasy ideas in the style Mieville dabbles in but never really indulges. There is a glossary for all the neologisms that compose Cyclonopedia’s mythology. Deleuze and Guattari, IRL postmodern theorists whose work is referenced frequently in the text, have an entry in the glossary. It reads “I want to donate some blood, some philosopher’s blood.” This sort of thing kept me going for 100 pages. I couldn’t believe an author with such a sense of humor would take his bullshit seriously enough to let it stand on its own, without providing any context for it. Apparently that was optimistic of me.

Negarestani and the cover artist, Kristen Alvanson, are both characters in the book by their own names. Alvanson’s character encounters the titular text and her journal constitutes the framing device for the book. This section was apparently written by Alvanson herself, not Negarestani. The framing narrative leads the reader to expect a House of Leaves sort of woven meta-text, with Alvanson as a protagonist who will be experiencing and processing the text alongside us, and presumably interacting with the realities it describes in some more immediate sense.

Including the prologue, there are at least three layers of authorship. One of these includes three authors, occasionally in direct dialogue. There are also allusions to yet another narrative, nested inside the innermost, a riff on Heart of Darkness that suggests it holds the real story. It all reads like a deliberate set-up for proper stories, characterization, payoff.
With the exception of Alvanson’s prologue, every character in the titular document (again, at least 4 distinct people, possibly 5) speaks with the same voice, personality, and concerns. Initials, colons, and quotational indents interrupt a seemingly unbroken stream of loopy bullshit.

The body of Cyclonopedia literally reads like a product of mental illness. The obsession with neologisms, words with meanings of intense, nearly spiritual, importance to the writer but no clear meaning to the reader. Taking items of pop culture as sources on par with primary archaeology work or geopolitics. The dense, unrelenting blast of conspiracy theory thinking, following “threads” of mythology, etymology, numerology, and pure free association (oil is under the earth like phlegm is under your face, cardamom is used to clear phlegm). It’s a nightmare to read, and it’s obnoxious because there are some moments of clarity, sections that are delightfully quotable and hold some provocative and creative ideas (Lamassu beings meant to exploit the destructive relationship between war and war machines; even the central conceits about oil, Old Ones, pestilence and demon particles, etc), things that make it seem worth persevering.

But damned if it just ain’t. There are occasionally perfunctory footnotes that maybe continue the thread of some character reading or editing the text. The mad American colonel never turns up again after about halfway through the book. The prologue narrator never appears again either. None of the potential is realized, except within the confines of the intentionally obtuse, deliberately nonsensical theory text itself. Maybe Negarestani intended the book to be grasped by only the most patient and indulging readers. I really hate calling things pretentious, but I have a lot of patience for these things, I’d like to think (I’m in grad school and I can say that it’s quite unfair to blame it for this book).

It really just seems like Negarestani decided not to produce a work that would actually be enjoyable because he frowned upon it, thought he was above it. Then again, maybe he just couldn't get comfortable writing fiction (which would explain why the only proper fiction in here was written by someone else). Like this pile of rubbish was more intelligent, rewarding, and groundbreaking. Maybe it is, but only for a few lucky and patient assholes who think like him.

I just can’t stop thinking of all the ways that this book could be improved with strokes that would not, to my mind, dilute any of its ideas. There are plenty of books out there that achieve this (Pynchon, probably Neal Stephenson). Editing down the bullshit would be a good start – a little goes a long way with that stuff. Allowing the editors (Negarestani’s fictional avatar) of Parsani’s story a bit more freedom to summarize and explain Parsani’s ideas. And of course including a proper story, providing some closure on Kristen’s story, illustrating whether Parsani’s ideas actually intrude into the real world at all.

Because without that last bit, it really is just the rantings of a mad scholar. The fact that Negarestani saw fit to publish this without any context suggests that he thought Parsani’s bullshit was worthwhile in itself. Like he buys into the idea that these concepts shed some light on the Middle East, on the War on Terror. That’s awfully damned arrogant.
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Dec 25, 2012 David Peak rated it it was amazing

Deleted my earlier review because it seemed short-sighted. Since initially reading this book a few months ago, I have almost completely reassessed my priorities as both a reader and a writer. Cynclonopedia has proven to be the beginning of a long, sometimes difficult enlightenment. Probably the single most significant text I've come across since being taught Bergson's Matter and Memory in college. ...more

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Oct 28, 2010 Carl rated it it was amazing

Cyclonopedia is indisputably one of the most challenging and impressive books of the 21st century. I am not sure how much familiarity with key texts like the works of Deleuze and Guattari or Middle Eastern references can be helpful in reading the book. The synthesis of ideas and the mechanism of analogies are quite different from anything out there. It is a book that requires the reader to think differently and become accomplice in the way it thinks and put things together. For reading cyclonope Cyclonopedia is indisputably one of the most challenging and impressive books of the 21st century. I am not sure how much familiarity with key texts like the works of Deleuze and Guattari or Middle Eastern references can be helpful in reading the book. The synthesis of ideas and the mechanism of analogies are quite different from anything out there. It is a book that requires the reader to think differently and become accomplice in the way it thinks and put things together. For reading cyclonopedia, background information is to a certain degree useless and to a certain degree misleading. The challenging aspect of the book is not only its topics and themes. Even the medium of presentation does not quite fit traditional literature, it's part a movie, part a video game, part a choreography of inorganic characters and part an art installation. For this reason, readers who read it as a novel or a purely philosophical text might be disappointed. Cyclonopedia's entertaining and inspiring drive cannot be restricted to the pleasure formulas of literature and novels. It is as much a work of postgenre literature as it is a work of postmedium creativity. It is a simultaneous breakthrough in genre and medium. But like any other sweeping breakthrough it has to pay a price. Cyclonopedia draws the worst reactions of those literate readers who take the authority of the literature over the written work for granted and leaves the disciples of the genre betrayed. Fans of science fiction realize that the conventions of their genre have been tainted by theology in cyclonopedia. Likewise fans of horror will find the elements of horror to be part of a speculative materialist critique and so on. China Mieville neatly sums up Negarastani's relation to genre fiction in his recent introduction to Cyclonopedia in World Literature Today.

" Produced and consumed by ideologized human brains--than which there are no more ruthless taxonomizing machines--all literature is genre (including that "litfic," the marketing campaign of which has convinced a section of the commentariat that it is, rather, the a-generic asymptote of literature). And genres have protocols, which can be honored or breached, but not (at least very rarely successfully) ignored. That need not hamstring: as the Oulipians long ago clarified, constraints can be self-administered cattle prods to creativity. That said, of course, (1) protocol-observance is less often surprising than flatly predictable; in part for which reason (2) we are tremendously excited (often perhaps exaggeratedly so) by works that chafe self-consciously at categorical edges. Some might gnaw from within at the (not-really-)"rules" of their genre-cauls; others, more confident, use their fidelity to such norms as fulcrums for sublation, to become something ineluctable from but irreducible to genre. This, to steal an invaluable term from Kim Newman, is "post-genre" horror--and fantasy, and science fiction. So Reza Negarestani." (CM)

I anticipate Cyclonopedia will slowly establish itself among avid readers of literary and genre fiction but before then it will find its place in artistic circles among those artists, musicians, designers and architects for whom neither the norms of the genre nor the authority of the medium are pregiven.

From a philosophical perspective cyclonopedia is a work of speculative cosmology and new metaphysics. It is cosmological because it frequently challenges and reformulates the connection between the local and the cosmic. What is religion, war or politics when the link between the cosmic and the local becomes labyrinthine and porous? It is metaphysical because it seeks to speculate the absolute outside, it is new because for Negarestani communication with the outside doesn't follow Nietzschean or Deleuzian variants of metaphysics and communication with the nonhuman. In cyclonopedia, Negarestani proposes that in order to speculate the absolute outside, we must first rethink ourselves and ask what it means to be human. This is a recurring theme in Negarestani's philosophical writings, one that allies him with the philosophy of speculative realism and the nonphilosophy of Francois Laruelle.

I think an appropriate blurb for cyclonopedia would be "after returning from its cosmic voyage, HAL is now rebooting itself with a formidable knowledge and this time its name is the Middle East". Negarestani's work reads like a spontaneous combustion of artificial intelligence that turns everything into alien quantities. The Middle East, the natural history of the Earth, life, the human species, literature, writing, the writer, the book and the reader are rethought as aliens. Super impressive and incredible.
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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins added it

Shelves: iranian

How Difficult it is to Escape from Academic Writing

This remains a very interesting book ten years after it was published. The back cover copy makes it sound like it's science fiction. One of the endorsements describes it as "an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical theology, aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology." That's a bit sloppy, because the book is only philosophical fiction in the sense that it is invented, a la Borges or Lem. And heresy isn't its point. "Cyclo How Difficult it is to Escape from Academic Writing

This remains a very interesting book ten years after it was published. The back cover copy makes it sound like it's science fiction. One of the endorsements describes it as "an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical theology, aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology." That's a bit sloppy, because the book is only philosophical fiction in the sense that it is invented, a la Borges or Lem. And heresy isn't its point. "Cyclonopedia" is a philosophic treatise framed as a fiction, and woven together with devices from literature.

The author, Negarestani, has been reading a lot of Deleuze and Guattari, and also a wide range of political theory ("Empire" has a similar rhetoric in places). Many chapters could almost be presented at philosophy conferences; there are analyses of oil, machinery, war, camouflage, and other subjects that are in line with some eccentric Deleuzian readings that have long been acceptable in academic contexts. The fictional part comes partly in the book's claim that "the Middle East [is] a sentient and living entity... in a very literal sense of the word," but more in the many poetic analyses of its leading concepts--analyses that draw on Deleuze but also on popular culture, from H.P. Lovecraft to John Carpenter's "The Thing." (Again, that's commensurate with contemporary Deleuzian and cultural studies, and, oddly, with Graham Harman's subsequent interest in Lovecraft in "Weird Realism.")

Since this book, Negarestani has become interested in a range of issues in contemporary philosophy of mind, computation, and science, and his writing has become much less experimental and closer to academic norms. (See the publications of Urbanomic, and the journal Collapse.) "Cyclonopedia" is not the clearest formulation of his interests, but it is by far the best writing.

The best passages of the book are imaginative analyses of particular concepts. There is a spectacular long footnote explaining the concept of the "inorganic demon," ranging from "The Exorcist" to "Doom III." (p. 223 ff) There is a very good page on the survival of pre-Islamic ways of writing "Allah." (p. 173). There is an excellent poetic analysis, reminiscent in its way of Bachelard's ruminations on elements, but also of Lautreamont, on the subject of the Babylonian demons Enkidu and Pazuzu (the latter familiar from "The Exorcist"). (p. 113 ff) That analysis includes a description of "Rammalie," "an Arabic word for communication with other worlds and aeons through patterns on pebbles and desert sand."

The book has a glossary, with well-developed theoretical concepts. In that regard it resembles Latour's book on nature, or Ranciere's book on politics. Negarestani has invented, and defined, an entire vocabulary for interpreting the socio-political, historical, and psychological state of the Middle East: Double Numbering, hypercamouflage, polytics, heresy-engineering, Druj literature, Tellurian blasphemy, schizostrategy... they could all be used in discussions outside the book.

The book's weaknesses have to do with Negarestani's shortcomings as a fiction writer and as a theoretician. The former become apparent when the reader moves from the brief introduction, which tells the story of the discovery of the manuscript, into the manuscript itself: at that point it is clear that the introduction is poorly, incompletely imagined fiction (it consists of brief vignettes, which are intended to be taken as sufficient fictional context). Before the reader makes the transition to the body of the book, it appears that the fragmented descriptions in the introduction are a deliberate strategy; but there are no other fictional strategies in the book.

Negarestani is in some ways a wonderfully prolific and inventive theorist, so it may seem odd to suggest that the book's other weakness is theory. I have in mind the fact that in a number of passages the theory is incrementally close to Deleuze and other poststructuralist theorists, and it risks reading like the sort of parody written by disaffected graduate students. An analysis of the semiotics of the rat (p. 229) is an example: it has a kind of grim humor, but it is a pastiche of any number of such analyses in authors as diverse as Barthes and Serres. In other passages, neologisms proliferate in the way that used to be called "Derridadrivel," for instance in this chapter opening: "In the mid-eighties, before succumbing to his petromantic nympholepsy..." (p. 195). There are also passages that read like pastiches of popular film and novels, as in this chapter opening: "By the time Colonel West turned into a renegade and deserted Delta Force's Special Tactics and Rescue Squad..." (p. 129). This is knowing, but it's not in control of the fact that as it continues it appears inadvertent or unreflective about its closeness to is sources.

These two weaknesses -- regarding fiction and theory -- are common, but usually they are found in different kinds of writing: the first occurs in novels everywhere, the second in academic philosophy. It is extremely unusual to have them together in one book, written by a person with an understanding of Middle Eastern languages, history, and archaeology. I read the book at first as an attempt at academic fiction (as in Borges), but again as an attempt to seriously theorize the Middle East, and especially the meanings of oil. In that respect, the book is spectacular.

The relative weakness of the overtly fictional moments in the book, as compared with the outlandish strength of the conceptualizations and the pleasure of the unexpected cultural juxtapositions, is the reason this book remains academic, tied to and reliant on academic philosophic knowledge. I also wish that Negarestani had written a book that did not rely so much on Deleuze, Foucault, and its other points of (Western, European, mainly French) reference: since "Cyclonopedia" Negarestani has developed strong critiques of many such positions, but this book was a chance to tip the balance of explanation from France to Iran and beyond. Instead he has joined the Anglophone and Francophone discussions of speculative realism and other subjects that are common in Western academia.

[2011, revised 2017] ...more

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Oct 19, 2010 Elatsoe Stan rated it it was ok

Shelves: trippy, gimmick

Allow me to get on my soapbox for bit: A book's difficulty is not directly proportional to its brilliance. Some difficult books are pure drivel, and some simple looking books are pure genius. This particular book requires a lot of work, and a great deal of patience. For this, it is to be both admired and alternately thrown against a wall.

Part of the unusual nature of the book is the way that it is written. It starts out as a somewhat typical story would - meaning that it contains characters and Allow me to get on my soapbox for bit: A book's difficulty is not directly proportional to its brilliance. Some difficult books are pure drivel, and some simple looking books are pure genius. This particular book requires a lot of work, and a great deal of patience. For this, it is to be both admired and alternately thrown against a wall.

Part of the unusual nature of the book is the way that it is written. It starts out as a somewhat typical story would - meaning that it contains characters and the semblance of a plot. But once it gets those things out of the way (and discards them almost completely), it proceeds in somewhat essay/manifesto form. There are people mentioned in the rest of the book ('novel' is not the correct word here), but these people are secondary to the elements and ideas the book feels is more important. It takes a kind of HP Lovecraft / Deleuze and Guattari view of communication, and if you aren't familiar with either, then you should take a look at them. Danielewski's House of Leaves (which I was optimistic this would evoke, but it didn't) starts with the dedication page saying "This is not for you." Still, Danielewski can be said to be a bit kinder to the reader (while scaring the wits out of them) than Negarestani is here.

To get an idea of where the author is going, look up stuff on Hyperstition. The book is clever, and it challenges the way we are to read books and regard the world, ideas of capitalism, Islam, monotheism and our dependence on oil (for starters). For these things it should be lauded. But that can only take us so far. This book is oddly immersive in a way I've experienced with other books (many which regarded story as more central than declarative treatise), and its presentation of ideas on oil, the Middle East, desertification, etc. are fascinating - sometimes funny, other times creepy (in the good way). There is amusing word play and a very densely packed set of esoteric ideas. But to suggest that this book is wholly enjoyable to read would be misleading.

One of my friends called this book a "glorified essay that goes on ad infinitum." This book hinges on strict non-fiction that may or may not be fiction, (which I should note is not completely a criticism). I do not want to call this a gimmick, but it is excruciating. If the need to communicate such unique ideas is so important, why do it in a way that alienates readers or makes them work so hard to comprehend them? Those who would revert to the argument that this is a different way of thinking (one that would privilege the Middle East way of thinking) are definitely on the right track, except that this book is written in English and thus his intended audience comes under question (if it hadn't already).

I would suggest that this would best be enjoyed by someone familiar with Deleuze and Guattari, Lovecraft, Koontz (yes, Koontz is thrown in there), Žižek, philosophy (Western philosophy in general would be helpful but Middle Eastern and Iranian philosophy would be better), general knowledge of ideas in Islam and Wahhabism, Middle East politics and history, and the general ideas and background of Western monotheism, not to mention the history of conquest as it relates to Western versus Eastern epistemologies and economies. A little Indo-Iranian linguistic archeology would be nice too if you'd like. That would all help. Well, it wouldn't hurt, anyway. Not that you have to know all these to get the gist of what is going on, but it seems like a lot of the winks that Negarestani makes at the reader - if we are to assume he acknowledges him or her - are done at the assumption of a backbone knowledge of these and other things.

The marketing of the book emphasizes its story elements in a way that the book doesn't deliver on. If the back cover interests you I would suggest you pick a random page in the middle of the book and start reading to see what the book is really like before forming your impressions. It could have had great potential for something else that just isn't quite here.
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Apr 12, 2014 Paul Roberts rated it really liked it

Brilliant and yet frustrating as hell.
Negarestani forgoes the exploits of man while offering his treatise on Naft. There's nary a reference to drilling, fracking and the like. Instead, we are like ants on the solid body, doomed to experience an impending openness we cannot conceive.
The bulk of this book will make you want to tear it to shreds, or burn it wholesale.
The best parts of Cyclonopedia's theory fiction (particularly the well-earned conclusion) will make you want to ink its insights int ...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Gnome Books rated it it was amazing

like some delightfully overblown prolegomenon to Pierce

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Mar 06, 2014 Robin rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2014

pretentious to the point of absurdity

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Jun 09, 2011 Dave rated it did not like it

Shelves: half-read

Man, this one is kind of hurting me to read it. It's a bit crazed. And the endnotes!§ If this ends up being a waste of my time I'm going to punch China Mieville and the guy from BLDGblog in the mouth.

****************

Yeah. I'm done with this.

§ ARGH! ENDNOTES! ...more

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Feb 18, 2019 Alex Obrigewitsch rated it it was amazing

This work is a pragmatic tool for corruption, producing ( )hole complexes, and for opening thought up to perverse possession by the forces of the outside, the Druj.

An auto-poetic invocation of the mytho-demonic forces of the outside, invoking or summoning what is to open up throught to the excess of which it cannot afford, cannot conceivably grasp and economize. It opens thought to a leprous creativity of necrotic elements which it cannot appropriate or lay claim to, forced into a complicity wit This work is a pragmatic tool for corruption, producing ( )hole complexes, and for opening thought up to perverse possession by the forces of the outside, the Druj.

An auto-poetic invocation of the mytho-demonic forces of the outside, invoking or summoning what is to open up throught to the excess of which it cannot afford, cannot conceivably grasp and economize. It opens thought to a leprous creativity of necrotic elements which it cannot appropriate or lay claim to, forced into a complicity with anonymous materials and their infectious forces.

Less a self-reflective work than a self-inflective work, it speaks of what it does at the same time that it enacts and does it through the machinic operations of a pestilential thought-infestation, a hyperstitional fiction in the extreme, which belies the ficticity undergirding all understanding-relations with the real, while rendering real a perverse history of heresy which never was yet from henceforth shall have been - the incognitum hactenus, unknown until now, yet still affecting the putrifying and subversive influence of its petrological tendrils through the tenebrious undercurrents of the subterranean, the unconscious, the sub-subjective body of telurean affectivity or passions.

The horror of this work is its bare and sublime reality, what had ever been lurking in the shadows, moving beneath the surface (of the earth and of thought) as an insurgent element of subversion or heresy - that reality has always already been fictionally inscribed, has been fictional, and that the hope of any future must take into account the blackened future which draws any present away from itself, decaying the purity of any present.

*

The corrupt creativity that this work opens up, spreading vermicular lines throughout thought, is a welcome experience for the stolid arridity that fills the air of most academic institutions, filtering into their writings. Personally, I have already employed some of the concepts developed in this work in some of my own thought and writings. This is no fictional read - it is a tool for thought, and its perversion. A maddening line of flight, directed towards the outside, but also downwards, inciting a much needed katabasis of thought. ...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Ross Lockhart rated it liked it

Cyclonopedia is a dense word salad smothered in a thick dressing of crude oil and bitter herbs. Taking the Lovecraftian conceit of a corrupting found manuscript to its logical, postmodern extreme, Cyclonopedia posits an accidentally-discovered philosophical treatise riddled with plot ( )holes and uncanny revelations, including sentient oil animating and inhabiting the Middle East, embroiled in an eternal conflict with solar hegemony. A touch of cosmic horror, an inkling of Apocalypse Now, a pinc ...more

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Nov 17, 2009 Michael rated it did not like it

Shelves: slipstream

I was excited to read this book once I heard the nutso title. Really excited, but I couldn't find a library that had it, so I sprung for my own copy. Woe be to me. I made it through the first 50 pages before stopping, and I wouldn't have read that much, except I was on a seven-hour flight to Honolulu and had nowhere else to be.

The first few pages are a hopeful kind of Gibsonesque new-century sprawl, as are the footnotes, but the rest is purpoted psychotic rambling. 99% of the book. Mostly incomp ...more

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Sep 24, 2016 James rated it it was amazing

This book is that most unlikely of hybrids, a highly experimental and postmodern text that is, at the same time, as captivating and page turning as a mainstream airport spy thriller novel. Really fascinating stuff, if only more Lovecraftian novels displayed this much originality and inventiveness: it's easy to see how this book was a big influence on Grant Morrison's Nameless comic book (what with its frequent references to the demon AZ and an Earth constantly being threatened by sadistic beings ...more

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Oct 08, 2010 Eric Phetteplace rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy

Cyclonopedia is an ambitious and extravagant work, pulling in archaeology, demonology, geopolitics, topology, kinesthetics, religious studies, philosophy, mystical numerology, war/military studies, culinary theory, and more into a helical, bitterly paranoid treatise on the Earth, the Sun, and oil. The premise, vaguely, is that the Middle East is a living entity and the oil underground/molten core of the Earth manipulates people and politics in its efforts to achieve a burning immanence with the Cyclonopedia is an ambitious and extravagant work, pulling in archaeology, demonology, geopolitics, topology, kinesthetics, religious studies, philosophy, mystical numerology, war/military studies, culinary theory, and more into a helical, bitterly paranoid treatise on the Earth, the Sun, and oil. The premise, vaguely, is that the Middle East is a living entity and the oil underground/molten core of the Earth manipulates people and politics in its efforts to achieve a burning immanence with the Sun. Negarestani leans heavily, but not uncritically, on Deleuze and Guattari, H.P. Lovecraft, and a fictional academic named Hamid Parsani to construct this theory. The form resembles D&G's A Thousand Plateaus—i.e. dense philosophy replete not only with multisyllabic neologisms (blobjectivity!) but also bursts of poetic fury (“'Isn't thought a gaseous rot?' … the question reverberates cancerously through the fetid air” p.188)—but the content owes more to horror literature, science fiction, and demonic mysticism. Don't be fooled by the blurb; this is a work of theory, not fiction, albeit an unusually creative and slightly parodic one.
Negarestani is an amazing writer and I find his impossibly bleak/nihilistic tone intriguing. I love dense and extreme theory, even if I cannot follow every allusion or argument, so this book was perfect for me. That said, the way the text tries to maintain a tenuous semblance of plot (the useless prologue, the lackluster footnotes) is a big weakness. Negarestani was either not committed enough or simply unable to write fiction; I would recommend ignoring those elements.
Lastly, some people have suggested reading Deleuze and Guattari in order to understand Cyclonopedia. That's like using a hydrogen bomb to weed your garden. If you have the time to peruse A Thousand Plateaus do so because it's an excellent book, not because you're not quite sure what “line of flight” or “war machine” means. Negarestani's engagements with D&G are mostly negative anyways, as he clearly abhors their vitalism and has a modified notion of war machines. ...more

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Feb 15, 2019 Duarte is currently reading it

Shelves: science-fiction, philosophy, occult, iranian-literature, horror, politics

The wokest book to ever be written.
You cannot tell what the fuck is going on at any given moment. Lovecraftian fanfiction mixed with Deleuzoguattarian word-salad philosophy mixed with the plot of Apocalypse Now mixed with Middle Eastern geopolitics (oil economy is here called "petropolitics", with Oil being a sentient entity and manipulating several players on the world stage of geopolitics) mixed with Occultist nonsense.

There is no real way to describe this novel. It's not pure word-salad as ...more

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Sep 25, 2013 Jesse rated it liked it

A mad pseudo-theoretical romp, a scaffolding of cryptic phrases and invented jargon, elaborately-constructed around a few genuinely interesting ideas.

There isn't much of a story here, though some of the summaries belie that fact. There's a very loose framing narrative, which gives a little historical/documentarian flavor to the prickly, abstract bulk of the book. However, it's more of a game being played with certain ideas: oil as a fundamental agent determining history, military and ideological ...more

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Aug 03, 2018 Wilfredo Rodríguez Dotti rated it really liked it

The synopsis of this book is complicated, in a very generalized way it implies that the Earth is a machine designed to secrete oil, a substance that becomes a sort of supreme "lubricant", a form of consciousness, "the black corpse of the Sun ", a vehicle for narratives that revolve around the Islamist militarization, the" war on terror" and war as a deity prior to the human being. Cyclonopedia has a hybrid nature that includes notions of Zoroastrian philosophy, sex, numerology, demonology, bacte ...more

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Feb 22, 2014 Andrew Oda rated it really liked it

very dense, tangled, twisty view of middle east politics and philosophy. . . has a sinister, creeping, house of leaves feeling to it. . .i'm sure a lot of it went over my head, but the stuff i could grasp was super interesting/weird/terrifying. i'm interested in reading more from the authors associated with the whole theory-fiction genre. . . : ) ...more

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Dec 29, 2010 David rated it it was amazing

Not ready to review yet... mind still blown.

UPDATE 5/14/2012: Fifteen months later, I'm still not capable of writing a coherent review, but I definitely recommend it if you like at least two of the following: cracked conspiracy theories, occult horror, Tristram Shandy. ...more

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Jun 01, 2021 Ingmar Weyland rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: эб

Hard to say something...

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Oct 13, 2019 Aung Sett Kyaw Min rated it it was ok

Every once in a while along comes a grimoire which leaves everyone convulsing in the wake of its promiscuous ambitions. As far as the plot goes Cyclonopedia owes much to the Lovecraftian tradition of horror fiction.

The story goes like this: “Oil” aka the Black Sun or the Tellurian Insider, the same ubiquitous wetness that fuels the US warmachines in the Middle East, turns out to be chief among the resident hyperstitional entities (fictions that make themselves real through crowd dynamics) insid ...more

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