Flat Mountain reviewed Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani
desert demonologistics
3 stars
"Outright slaughter". (Dr. Hamid Parsani)
"The rigorous psychosis of experimental writing". (Reza Negarestani)
Delirious pulp collapsing "mad black Deleuzianism" into Weird Fiction cliche → distilling the result through an alchemical obsession with petrochemical politik and desert demonology.
Emerging from the CCRU-adjacent cyber-occulture, Cyclonopedia is a polytemporal artefact → a geopolitical period piece → a cybergothic Wasteland scatter-shot through with Middle Eastern theology\/mythology.
Negarestani's text unravels itself in a Chthonic fractal of theory-jargon and near-satirical neologisms, feverishly punctuated by sketchy esoteric diagrams. It's a textual blood-feast merging the external terror of the Lovecraftian abyss with the internal\/earthbound trauma of b-movie body-horror → a fringe archaeological manuscript documenting a solar conspiracy to "accelerate the Earth towards a union with the Sun in an apocalyptic and fiery conflagration".
Reading like a Solomonic grimoire extracted from an oil pipeline, this is an unholy hol(e)y text for post-structural Priests → a set of maddening rites …
"Outright slaughter". (Dr. Hamid Parsani)
"The rigorous psychosis of experimental writing". (Reza Negarestani)
Delirious pulp collapsing "mad black Deleuzianism" into Weird Fiction cliche → distilling the result through an alchemical obsession with petrochemical politik and desert demonology.
Emerging from the CCRU-adjacent cyber-occulture, Cyclonopedia is a polytemporal artefact → a geopolitical period piece → a cybergothic Wasteland scatter-shot through with Middle Eastern theology\/mythology.
Negarestani's text unravels itself in a Chthonic fractal of theory-jargon and near-satirical neologisms, feverishly punctuated by sketchy esoteric diagrams. It's a textual blood-feast merging the external terror of the Lovecraftian abyss with the internal\/earthbound trauma of b-movie body-horror → a fringe archaeological manuscript documenting a solar conspiracy to "accelerate the Earth towards a union with the Sun in an apocalyptic and fiery conflagration".
Reading like a Solomonic grimoire extracted from an oil pipeline, this is an unholy hol(e)y text for post-structural Priests → a set of maddening rites and observances drafted to aid in the ontological exorcism of tellurian sentience.
Some people have taken this book very seriously over the years, but I chose to approach it as something akin to avant-garde verse → a narrative of inchoate poetics in which all allusions to — and illusions of — theory unravel in the face of the Cosmic Other.
A post-internet dialectical epitaph for the deadening valve of post-modernism.
"I want to donate some blood, some philosophers' blood." (Reza Negarestani)