Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials constructs theory-fiction as an unstable method where philosophy, horror, archaeology, geopolitics, and occult speculation converge. The book presents knowledge as contamination: manuscripts, notes, diagrams, travel fragments, missing persons, online traces, and anonymous materials form a labyrinth rather than a conventional argument. Its central force is oil, imagined as an intelligent, subterranean, and conspiratorial substance that shapes war, religion, territory, and modern political economy from below. In the opening pages, the framing narrative follows Kristen Alvanson through Istanbul, where she encounters a manuscript linked to Reza Negarestani, a mysterious figure, and a chain of clues that transform reading into infection. This case establishes the book’s method: the Middle East appears as a zone of dust, burial, extraction, and disappearance, where geology becomes political and matter acquires agency. The title itself, Cyclonopedia, evokes circular movement, desert storms, and encyclopaedic disorder, suggesting a world organised by vortices rather than stable systems. Its visual texture—faint pages, drawings, marginalia, occult diagrams, and archival fragments—reinforces the sense that the text is excavated rather than authored. Negarestani’s contribution lies in turning speculative writing into a philosophical machine: petropolitics becomes cosmic horror, and material substances become active participants in history.
