Abducting the Outside: Collected Writings 2003–2018

Abducting the Outside: Collected Writings 2003–2018

Reza Negarestani

Forthcoming 
Urbanomic/Sequence
Paperback 210x148mm, 592pp.
ISBN 978-0-9975674-8-9

A collection of Reza Negarestani’s writings from 2003–2018, Abducting the Outside begins with texts in which horror, decay, cruelty, and barbarism assail the solidity of thought. It goes on to chart the sustained development of a “geophilosophical realism” in which inquiry into the relation of human thought to the contingencies of its material origins goes beyond the localist obsession with the planet, descending to the core of the earth, only to expand according to other (physical, chemical, topological) modes of geotraumatic distribution.

Negarestani’s “universalism” refuses all allegiance to the planet or its solar hegemon, dissipates all parochial territories into an unbound realm loosely called “Outside,” and yields increasingly sophisticated formalisms to account for the universal’s self-differentiation via incomplete traumatic cuts. Pledged to the powers of reason and the universal, but never losing the disconcerting edge of its idiosyncratic strangeness, Abducting the Outside’s last dizzying acceleration takes us from a “true-to-the-universe thought” into the rationalist inhumanism developed in Negarestani’s recent major work Intelligence and Spirit.

As soon as a conclusion comes into view, Negarestani moves on to new gestures and more powerful models that render the line of thought unrecognizable once again. A collection that allows the reader to experience an entire trajectory of thought, Abducting the Outside presents an encyclopedic view of what it means to depart from the human, to descend into the abyss, and to see thinking as an infinite drift outside of our established habitats and perspectives.

Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher best known for pioneering the genre of ‘theory-fiction’ with his book Cyclonopedia. He has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. He is the author of Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic/Sequence).