Manifeste conspirationniste, Parti imaginaire, Comité invisible: a genealogy of radical critique in twenty-first-century France

Abstract

ABSTRACT When the Manifeste conspirationniste was published in January 2022 it was widely assumed in France that the manifesto was the work of the same anonymous authors responsible for the radical leftist (or, for some, ‘terrorist’) pamphlets attributed variously to Tiqqun, the Parti imaginaire or the Comité invisible. This article explores this authorial hypothesis through a comparative close reading of the Manifeste conspirationniste and key works by the radical collective. The manifesto interprets the Covid pandemic as marking the logical culmination of a biopolitical apparatus that has weaponised everything from consumer electronics to the pharmaceutical industry in paranoid pursuit of the indefinite reproduction of capitalist oligarchy. Likewise, the essays of Tiqqun diagnose the thorough imbrication of military technologies, police and surveillance powers, as well as the entertainment and consumer industries in the development of what they call ‘cybernetic capitalism’. Tiqqun and the Comité invisible argue that, in a system that is dedicated to ever greater transparency (in the interests of the biopolitical disciplining of citizens), any resistance must deliberately seek out ‘zones of opacity’ by cultivating the kind of noise that won’t be recuperated as carnival, or the kind of slowness that can’t simply be rebranded as luxury. This looks forward to the Manifeste conspirationniste’s strategy of conspiracy, subterfuge and insubordination as the necessary response to an ideological apparatus that is unavoidably conspiratorial in its effects, however theoretically benign it may be in intention.