Cyclonopedia PDF Download

Author: Reza Negarestani
Publisher: Anomaly
ISBN: 9780980544008
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is a theory-fiction on the Middle East as a living entity. Negarestani bridges contemporary politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth."--Provided by publisher.

Author: Ed Keller
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 9780615600468
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
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: 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"

Author: Reza Negarestani
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0997567406
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 591

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Book Description
A critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism that formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things. In Intelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things, a real movement capable of overcoming any state of affairs that, from the perspective of the present, may appear to be the complete totality of history. Intelligence pierces through what seems to be the totality or the inevitable outcome of its history, be it the manifest portrait of the human or technocapitalism as the alleged pilot of history. Building on Hegel's account of Geist as a multiagent conception of mind and on Kant's transcendental psychology as a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of mind, Negarestani provides a critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism. The assumptions of the former are exposed by way of a critique of the transcendental structure of experience as a tissue of subjective or psychological dogmas; the claims of the latter regarding the ubiquity of mind or the inevitable advent of an unconstrained superintelligence are challenged as no more than ideological fixations which do not stand the test of systematic scrutiny. This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions of German Idealism and analytic philosophy in the form of extended thought-experiments and a philosophy of artificial languages opens up new perspectives on the meaning of human intelligence and explores the real potential of posthuman intelligence and what it means for us to live in its prehistory.

Author: Kai Merten
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786613972
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading’s intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

Author: Ross Barrett
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452943958
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.

Author: Stephen Shapiro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350271136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Looking beyond Euro-Anglo-US centric zombie narratives, Decolonizing the Undead reconsiders representations and allegories constructed around this figure of the undead, probing its cultural and historical weight across different nations and its significance to postcolonial, decolonial, and neoliberal discourses. Taking stock of zombies as they appear in literature, film, and television from the Caribbean, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, India, Japan, and Iraq, this book explores how the undead reflect a plethora of experiences previously obscured by western preoccupations and anxieties. These include embodiment and dismemberment in Haitian revolutionary contexts; resistance and subversion to social realities in the Caribbean and Latin America; symbiosis of cultural, historical traditions with Western popular culture; the undead as feminist figures; as an allegory for migrant workers; as a critique to reconfigure socio-ecological relations between humans and nature; and as a means of voicing the plurality of stories from destroyed cities and war-zones. Interspersed with contextual explorations of the zombie narrative in American culture (such as zombie walks and the television series The Santa Clarita Diet) contributors examine such writers as Lowell R. Torres, Diego Velázquez Betancourt, Hemendra Kumar Roy, and Manabendra Pal; works like China Mieville's Covehithe, Reza Negarestani's Cycolonopedia, Julio Ortega's novel Adiós, Ayacucho, Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad; and films by Alejandro Brugués, Michael James Rowland, Steve McQueen, and many others. Far from just another zombie project, this is a vital study that teases out the important conversations among numerous cultures and nations embodied in this universally recognized figure of the undead.

Author: Gruppo di Nun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029832
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music. The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love. Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.

Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 095752952X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy. Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. #Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike. On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own “Prometheanism,” and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century. At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of “reasonable” contemporary political alternatives.

Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: re.press
ISBN: 0980666570
Category : Critical theory
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In "The Concept of Model" Alain Badiou establishes a new logical 'concept of model'. Translated for the first time into English, the work is accompanied by an exclusive interview with Badiou in which he elaborates on the connections between his early and most recent work--for which the concept of model remains seminal.

Author: Graham Harman
Publisher: Open Court
ISBN: 0812697723
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In Guerrilla Metaphysics, Graham Harman develops further the object-oriented philosophy first proposed in Tool-Being. Today’s fashionable philosophies often treat metaphysics as a petrified relic of the past, and hold that future progress requires an ever further abandonment of all claims to discuss reality in itself. Guerrilla Metaphysics makes the opposite assertion, challenging the dominant "philosophy of access" (both continental and analytic) that remains quarantined in discussions of language, perception, or literary texts. Philosophy needs a fresh resurgence of the things themselves—not merely the words or appearances themselves. Once these themes are adapted to the needs of an object-oriented philosophy, what emerges is a brand new type of metaphysics—a "guerrilla metaphysics."