⋙ Read Free Cyclonopedia Complicity with Anonymous Materials Anomaly Reza Negarestani 9780980544008 Books

Cyclonopedia Complicity with Anonymous Materials Anomaly Reza Negarestani 9780980544008 Books

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Cyclonopedia Complicity with Anonymous Materials Anomaly Reza Negarestani 9780980544008 Books

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 pinch of dust from an occulted grimoire, and a smattering of ethnological panic swim in a rich desert sea of Tiamateriaism crouched in complex, academic language and filtered through a damaged cinematic screen onto which E. Elias Merhige’s film Begotten was once projected. Readers without a background in rhetoric and theory will be confounded by the overly-dense language and will likely miss the twisted humor of the tome, not to mention the steady stripping-away of narrator/philosopher Dr. Hamid Parsani's mental facilities as the Old Ones--or stranger things--encroach upon his reality, though those accustomed to reading works of phenomenology, theology, or demonology will more-or-less easily grok Negarestani's points and purposes. Cyclonopedia succeeds as a formal exercise in philosophy-as-horror, and even more so as horror-of-philosophy, but as a two-hundred-plus-page expansion of an idea the Gent from Providence might have gotten across in thirty pages, Cyclonopedia comes up sprawling. And the Re.Press print edition (no ebook is available), with its tiny, sans-serif font and inconsistent formatting only serves to further complicate and obfuscate an already difficult work.


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Cyclonopedia Complicity with Anonymous Materials Anomaly Reza Negarestani 9780980544008 Books Reviews

Is oil an intelligent entity? Is the platform of technology upon which our civilization functions "scientific," or is it actually a kind of voodoo, controlled and constructed behind the scenes by ancient sorcerers? Is there a bizarre and esoteric shared goal that secretly unites Western global technocapitalism and Islamic militants?

Is "pink" an important philosophical concept? And where do rats fit into all of this?

After a few chapters into Cyclonopedia, even the most skeptic reader may begin to ponder these seemingly ridiculous questions. Negarestani takes fiction and theory, genius and madness, discovery and creation and builds an entire alternate universe that is so convincing and compelling, you'll never look at the Middle East in the same way again. And the horror fan will find thrill alongside theory. Ancient Babylonian demons lurk inside video games, and an unfathomable cosmic force known simply as "the Outside" hungrily waits to devour and butcher us open. Who's next?

There are too many fresh ideas to absorb in one reading. Cyclonopedia's madness is quite rigorous, reshaping concepts from Deleuze, poromechanics and military intelligence to occult numerology. It explores little-known Indo-Iranian linguistic archeology alongside fantastic folk tales of burning rain and sentient dust devils.

Throughout the book, we are gradually acclimated to see the world in the terms of a philosophical premise that Negarestani calls the "non-metaphorical" identity of concrete materials with supposedly abstract or mental phenomena. For example, the Middle East is a sentient being; thought is dust; and war itself is a Fog, an object more tangible than any Deleuzian warmachine. Somehow, this superficially inane/insane premise takes on a plausibility within these pages that rivals everyday, common-sense perceptions of reality as well as established philosophical dogmas.
Reza Negarestani has written a book so dense with concepts--oil as an evil entity, soldiers gone rogue ala "Apocalypse Now," disappearing authors who may or may not be terrorists, hapless tourists, French modern philosophy, ancient cults, gods who may be devils, decomposition, and sex, among hundreds of others--that it resembles nothing so much as a literary version of one of those massive desert sandstorms seen in the Middle East. It engulfs the reader, and that is both the novelty and the tragedy of the book. As another reviewer has pointed out, this is not a novel. It might be described as an experimental novel, with all the negative connotations of that phrase when a book is presented as "an experimental novel," it often means that the writer was either too arrogant, too lazy and/or too manic to write a genuine novel. It also usually means that someone--either the editor, or perhaps the more dignified parts of the author's own personality--should have grown a backbone sufficient for telling the writer to sit back down and finish writing. Mr. Negarestani is obviously a brilliant man, but this is really only a set of notes for a novel. What a novel it could and should have been! It could so easily have been a novel--or novels--that would have been bigger than Harry Potter and Twilight combined, and intelligent, literary and challenging besides. Perhaps Mr. Negarestani chose not to write that. I can respect that, but this book unfortunately is complex to the point of being a Very Hard Slog. Is it worth reading? Yes, but it isn't fun, folks, and horror ought to be fun even when it's packed with brilliant and challenging concepts. One caveat this is not a book for religious fundamentalists of any of the Abrahamic religions (Jews, Christian, Muslims) because the author not only makes these organized religions part of his evil mythos but also skewers their worst traits mercilessly. Update Feb. 2012 I found myself thinking about this book again recently--it's that type of book, that it will stick in your mind--and it occurred to me that what this book reminded me of was reading an encyclopedia. Entry after entry, full of information about a subject. It also occurred to me what that subject is a mythos. That's what the author has written, a vast and brilliant mythos that, like the Cthulhu mythos, will (or should be) popular for years into the future. I can only hope that the author, or other writers, will now flesh out this mythos with numberless stories.
Great book, but the edition is a laser print with a terrible quality, it has a lot of difficulties to read this blurred letters. i want my money back!
Existential horror for technological times.
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 pinch of dust from an occulted grimoire, and a smattering of ethnological panic swim in a rich desert sea of Tiamateriaism crouched in complex, academic language and filtered through a damaged cinematic screen onto which E. Elias Merhige’s film Begotten was once projected. Readers without a background in rhetoric and theory will be confounded by the overly-dense language and will likely miss the twisted humor of the tome, not to mention the steady stripping-away of narrator/philosopher Dr. Hamid Parsani's mental facilities as the Old Ones--or stranger things--encroach upon his reality, though those accustomed to reading works of phenomenology, theology, or demonology will more-or-less easily grok Negarestani's points and purposes. Cyclonopedia succeeds as a formal exercise in philosophy-as-horror, and even more so as horror-of-philosophy, but as a two-hundred-plus-page expansion of an idea the Gent from Providence might have gotten across in thirty pages, Cyclonopedia comes up sprawling. And the Re.Press print edition (no ebook is available), with its tiny, sans-serif font and inconsistent formatting only serves to further complicate and obfuscate an already difficult work.