Theory Conspiracy

Frida Beckman is Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden.Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is founder and editor of symplokē, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of 35 books.

• Theory Conspiracy: An Introduction PART 1: Backgrounds 1. Being Catiline: Sex, Lies, and Coup d’états in the Liberal Order 2. Unsettling History: How an Egyptian Conspiracy Theory Turns Time into Place 3. The Kristeva File 4. A Portrait of Baudelaire as a Conspiracy Theorist PART 2: Contemporary 5. Conspiracy and Ressentiment: The Vexed Politics of the Gilets Jaunes 6. Ugly Freedoms and Insurrectionary Conspiracies 7. Don’t Look Up, Birds Aren’t Real: Comedy and Conspiracy PART 3: Critical 8. Has Conspiracy Theory Run Out of Steam? 9. A Reparative Chronotope of Critique 10. Conspiring with Theory: Popper, Antitheory, and the Epistemology of Ignorance 11. A Sketch of Conspiratorial Reason

'Conspiracy theories are shallow but run deep—borne of antiquity, perfected in modernity, and ubiquitous today as virtual intellectualisms of the most paranoid kind. They are a perverse philosophy of history about who controls what, or what controls whom. They concern less the 'Other' than the 'They.' For all these reasons and more, this volume is ever so urgent. In their impressively erudite and lively essays, the authors convened here demonstrate that committed reading is the only means we have to understand conspiracy theory in all of its bewildering plurality. They show you how to think conspiracies from within in order to critique them from without. Essential reading is an understatement to describe Theory Conspiracy.'Andrew Cole, Princeton University, USA'This highly engaging, original and timely collection of essays confronts the problems of living in an era of theory overload, a world in which images and figures cohere into elaborate accounts of how we live now. Even if those accounts don’t match reality, they nevertheless expose something of the Real. The events explored in this book—from Trump to Gilets Jaunes—are more worthy of critique, more fascinating, and more illuminating than the banalities of actuality. Theory Conspiracy is as entertaining as it is significant.'Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USA