Perturbed Spirits: The Garish Power of Conspiracy Theory

This article explores the current popularity of conspiracy theories in terms of Peter Knight’s description of them as a “hermeneutic of suspicion” and Eve Sedgwick’s alignment of the same term with paranoid reading strategies. It situates this discussion in terms of Fredric Jameson’s argument that a major part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they offer a cartographic antidote to the disorienting effects of our current age whose vertiginous complexities can be understood in terms of Lyotard’s “postmodern sublime” or Althusser’s “absent cause.” David Frum’s reminder, both of the continued relevance of Richard Hofstadter’s argument about “the paranoid style” today and its applicability to both the political right and the left required Sedgwick’s and Rita Felski’s corrective argument that the real impact of the paranoid style on the left has been the stifling grip of “critique,” which is the academic version of a hermeneutics of suspicion.