This week, in what is likely our penultimate session on Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, we read pages 145-160, covering the chapters “Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun I: Solar Rattle” and “Five Billion Years of Hell-Engineering.”
No written introduction from me. In fact, the best introduction to Negarestani’s tellurian insurgencies already exists in the form of Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share, Vol. 1. I can’t recommend that enough for further reading. Moreso even than A Thousand Plateaus, it allows much of Cyclonopedia to slot into place.
Thanks to Wassim, as ever, for coming up with this week’s punny title, following our discussion around capitalism and religion.
Unfortunately, the audio recording fucked up again. Why it does this remains wholly inexplicable to me. This is a huge shame as ever, and I’m genuinely really gutted when it happens, because I really enjoyed this discussion, which was focussed mainly on how we can understand capital as an “eerie entity” (in Mark Fisher’s sense) and also the various infra-capitalist sentiments that ground the world religions and their denominations.
I had attempted to reconstruct this session as I did in a previous week but it feels like too much is lost. Apologies for that.
In two weeks’ time, we’ll be reading pages 181-191; the chapters “Decay” and “Excursis XI”. Swing by for that and maybe we’ll have some holiday bevs to make it a drunken one to see out both the year and this bastard of a book.