Theory (And/Or) Fiction: Academic Writing, Inhuman Horror, and the New Weird in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia

Abstract

ABSTRACT H.P Lovecraft’s inhuman horror represents a site of both creativity and controversy, complicating his innovative depictions of the unknown by his racially problematic politics. This article presents Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as a dramatic reappraisal of Lovecraftian horror from a twenty-first century non-Western perspective. Negarestani’s academic prose – specifically concepts and footnotes – centralizes the inhumanity of oil to dramatize the limits of subjectivity. Initially, oil provides a means of conceptualizing gaps within the text, adding a theoretical form of coherence to textual expressions of the unknown and the inhuman. The counterintuitive return to a subjectivity, relegated to the margins and footnotes of the text, recalibrates rather than rejects human form. This disruption of a human/inhuman binary challenges Lovecraft’s formulation of white Western subjectivity, while retaining a Lovecraftian horror aesthetic. Furthermore, by presenting academic prose as an intensifier of textual horror, its aesthetic function also challenges an implied literary/theory hierarchy, whereby literature serves the needs of theory. Cylonopedia’s theory-fictional form presents an intersection between the New Weird and the inhuman turn of contemporary theory; one which radically challenges humanist, anti-humanist, and posthumanist notions of subjectivity.