Start with paragraph 513.
Why this work matters
That matters because the outside is not only a theme but also a publication problem: how inhuman material is made legible without domesticating it.
How to read this
For Leper Creativity (Cyclonopedia Symposium) (2012), read the framing choices carefully. Editorial mediation is what makes this page belong in the section.
For Leper Creativity (Cyclonopedia Symposium) (2012), track how public circulation changes, but does not erase, the infernal and geological pressure of the materials being introduced.
Argument map
Primary claim
The page matters because geotrauma survives through editors, translators, and symposia as well as through primary statements. Transmission is part of the concept's afterlife.
The work's mechanism
Framing documents work by organizing access and circulation. They turn difficult earth-writing into a relay rather than a sealed monolith.
What this work claims
That matters because the outside is not only a theme but also a publication problem: how inhuman material is made legible without domesticating it.
Style and mode
Essay / text work
Leper Creativity (Cyclonopedia Symposium) (2012) works best when read as compressed scene-writing: argument, terminology, and style arrive together rather than in separate academic stages.
Publication context
Issued by punctum books in 2012, Leper Creativity formalized discussion around Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia in a symposium format [w11]. Archive copies describe a "multidimensional collection" that interprets the book while producing "fresh heresies" [w9]. Internet Archive also lists the volume in the Reza Negarestani archive [w8]. The file credits the individual contributors and punctum books, and carries a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence [w11][c1].
Key concepts and people
Key passage
Best entry extract · paragraph 513
11 Cyclonopedia, 239: “Ungrounding is involved with discovering or unearthing a chemically-degenerating underside to the ground.” As I take it, ungrounding describes immanent forces of decay that would seem to conspire with the outside by degrading the consistency of solid bodies.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 513
11 Cyclonopedia, 239: “Ungrounding is involved with discovering or unearthing a chemically-degenerating underside to the ground.” As I take it, ungrounding describes immanent forces of decay that would seem to conspire with the outside by degrading the consistency of solid bodies.
Definition · paragraph 209
51 on blackened blood, its depth and longevity are constrained by the life of organisms . . . In order to deepen . . . and broaden . . . the potencies of Earth’s futurities, the avatar of petroleum as the Blob or the Thing must also be extended outside of what the astrophysicist Thomas Gold calls the ‘myth of fossil fuels’.
Definition · paragraph 209
In order to deepen . . . and broaden . . . the potencies of Earth’s futurities, the avatar of petroleum as the Blob or the Thing must also be extended outside of what the astrophysicist Thomas Gold calls the ‘myth of fossil fuels’. For Gold, petroleum has its origin in alien hydrocarbons of deep space, which have been trapped in the bowels of the earth.
Definition · paragraph 91
Abandoning the circumspection with which Freud handles what he still supposes to be ‘metaphorical’ stratal imagery, Dr Daniel Barker’s Cosmic Theory of Geotrauma, or Plutonics, flattens the theory of psychic trauma onto geophysics, with psychic experience becoming an encrypted geological report, the repercussion of a primal Hadean trauma in the material unconscious of Planet Earth.
History · paragraph 8
LEPER CREATIVITY: CYCLONOPEDIA SYMPOSIUM © The individual contributors and punctum books, 2012.