zach blas
The papers and artworks presented at the Cyclonopedia Symposium at the New School in the Spring 2011 have been gathered together as a book, titled Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, edited by Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker and published by Punctum Books. The release date has been set for Winter / Spring 2012.
I am honored to be apart of this collection with my essay “Queerness, Openness.”
A collection of essays, articles, and artwork related to the 2011 symposium at Parsons The New School for Design on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which brought together a lively international debate exploring the inter-relations between Lovecraftian fear/horror/terror, Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad A Thousand Plateaus, and the Mille-feuilles/leafs/lepe(r)s* of contemporary media studies as articulated in Negarestani’s manuscript. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, and cinematographers, Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials is a key work in an emerging continental movement in philosophy, “speculative realism.” Cyclonopedia has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking a vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and the art world. Negarestani’s book details a unique philosophy coming from and written on the Middle East. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, it is a middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods.
Contents: Alisa Andrasek, “Dustism” – Juan Azulay, “Pardoxia Redux” – Zach Blas, “Queerness, Openness” – Benjamin Bratton, “Peak Oil Apophenia” – Melanie Doherty, “Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious” – Alexander Galloway, “What is a Hermeneutic Light?” – Ed Keller, “. . . Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain . . .” – Lionel Maunz, “Receipt of Malice” – Robin Mackay, “A Brief History of Geotrauma” – Kate Marshall, “Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)” – 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” – E. Elias Merhige – Michael O’Rourke – Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans” – McKenzie Wark, “An Inhuman Fiction of Forces” – Ben Woodard, “The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity.” Supplementary annotations by Kristen Alvanson and Reza Negarestani. Photography by Oyku Tekten.
