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Framed as a revisitation of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008), a book in which the logic of petroleum extraction serves as a theoretical and fictional device to connect the socio-political dynamics of the Middle East, the War on Terror, Capitalism, and modern and archaic myths of creation, this presentation focuses on a different angle concerning the cryptic tales of petromodernity or modernity at large. Petroleum or Napht (from the Avestan word naftah, meaning a blackened moisture that suddenly conflagrates) will be introduced within the tradition of alchemical works (L'Œuvre au noir, Marguerite Yourcenar), their influence on painting practices, and the early psychoanalytic tradition as advanced by the likes of Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank. The origin of the (petro-)modern subject of planet Earth will be traced back to deep origins, where the nested concatenations of cosmological traumas shape the figure of the contemporary human.
