Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion

Abstract

T O CONSPIRE MEANS literally to breathe together. And usually it's about bad breath. The word conspiracy tends to be used pejoratively to designate a subversive kinship of others, an imagined community based on exclusion more than on affection. Conspiracy theory is a conspiracy against conspiracy; it does not oppose conspiratorial world view as such but doubly affirms it. Because conspiratorial thinking, whether based on facts or on fictions, produces vicious circles of analogy and paranoiac overdetermination, conspiracy theory can become a cause of violence, not merely its effect. How, then, can one produce a critical reflection on conspiracy that will not turn into a conspiracy theory? If conspiracy can be fictional, can fiction conspire to undo it? The terms of conspiracy and of narrative overlap: in both cases one speaks about plots and plotting. Although we might all be complicit in desire for a plot, in what Roland Barthes called the passion for making sense, ideally our plots exist in plural, not in singular. In contrast, conspiracy theory that will be discussed here relates everything to a single subterranean Plot, promising a comfortingly totalizing allegory that leaves nothing to chance. In this case narrative passion turns into paranoiac obsession. For a paranoiac-conspirator other is seen as anothermore or less successful-paranoiac. The whole world appears as a kind of global village or new international of double agents and conspirators, a secret society of those who are not with us but against