The American magazine The Fifth Estate has published a short and kind review on Cyclonopedia by the anarcho-theorist Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) who has described the book as ‘partly genius, partly quite mad’, whilst concluding his review: ‘To sum up: a weirdly compelling read.’

Also for other readers who have not seen this already. It is an introduction to an early draft of Cyclonopedia (circa 2004) written by Nick Land. The introduction was not included in the final publication for a few reasons, one of them was to leave the book without a seat belt, making the dive more vertiginous.

There will be more discussions on the technical / philosophical aspects of the book in the next issue of Collapse. However, a few remarks before then:

In his review, Peter Lamborn Wilson has expressed doubt as whether the book is a treatise on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Nomadic War Machine or not. Since some other readers have also questioned this, it will be probably more helpful to say that the book develops a geophilosophical reinscription of energetic models of psychology, a conjectural philosophical line with monstrous interpolated singularities: Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Sabina Spielrein, Sandor Ferenczi and then culminating in Freud’s dazzling energetic model of the unconscious and nervous system and then to Reich and so on. It is in giving the energetic models of the psyche a geophilosophical twist that Cyclonopedia departs from Deleuze-Guattarian geophilosophy and consequently speculates on a different model of the war machine, earth, Capitalism, monotheism, the human and the cosmic.

Also as an additional note, Ben Woodard and Michael Austin have written two very intriguing posts in reply to ‘memento tabere’, one on the dark vitalist connotations of decay or what Robin called ‘pestilential vitalism’ in his note on the 2007 Goldsmiths event on the politics and architecture of decay, and the other piece a stimulating spectral challenge to the politics of decay (more discussions will follow soon!).