2  Desire

The impossible knowledge claims made by conspiracy theorists cannot be explained only by suffering because they have a deeper layer which cannot be reduced either to harmful social conditions or to defense mechanisms.¹

The chapter argues that this deeper layer can be problematized as desire. But, in order to do that, we need to conceive of desire not as a fire burning inside but as a discursive economy (Foucault, 1978, 68–9; Deleuze 2006, 124–6).

Reasonably insane

To desire means to work.

Conspiratorial desire, for example, involves reading, looking, questioning, reasoning, interpreting, investigating, explaining, writing, and communicating, all brought together in a personal effort to reorder the world. Perhaps that work is often tacit, as the everyday practices we consider common sense (Garfinkel 1967, 173).

In the first half of the 19th century, the work which we now usually associate with conspiracy theories became a problem for the emerging science of psychiatry.² On one hand, it seemed indistinguishable from normal reasoning. On the other hand, it seemed unreasonable because it contradicted the social order and the subject’s part in it.³

Psychiatrists defined such work as intellectual monomania and hoped to explain it by a lesion in the brain (Esquirol 1845, 320) or by an incompletely cured melancholia or mania (Griesinger 1867, 262). However, the causes of intellectual monomania were difficult to prove, and it rarely deteriorated into complete insanity. So, in the second half of the 19th century, the concept was decomposed into series of lines of problematization. One of them focused on an important distinguishing feature of such disturbed work of reason – the lack of product. It seemed that the reasoning of intellectual monomaniacs did not give positive knowledge and therefore led to nothing, even to less than nothing, because it brought forth claims to knowledge unassimilable to the social order; for example, that one’s relatives were spies or that one was persecuted by the Freemasons (Griesinger 1867, 328). In the late 19th century, psychiatrists tried to capture such counterproductive reasoning by the concept of delusion of persecution (Lasègue and Falret 2008).⁴

At the turn of the 20th century, delusion of persecution was integrated into the concept of paranoia (Kraepelin 2012, 425–6). In consequence, it was linked with another line of problematization that emerged from the dissolution of the older concept of intellectual monomania, which associated delusional reasoning with the melancholic idea that everything was lost or that the world was out of joint (Griesinger 1867, 262). The concept of paranoia now enabled psychiatrists to interpret that idea as a delusional attempt to shift the responsibility for one’s suffering onto the world (Kraepelin 2012, 425–6, 432–3).

However, the approach of classical psychiatry to the counterproductive work of reason was limited because psychiatric concepts were intended to capture pathologies (Knight 2000, 20–1). But conspiracy theories could also entice normal subjects, and in that case, the intensity of counterproductive reasoning could not be explained by the severity of the mental disorder.

Social mourning

What drives counterproductive reasoning?

Rickey lives a life with no future, in one of the poorest black neighborhoods of Chicago. In this interview, he hints at a popular conspiracy theory, that the authorities conspired to drown black neighborhoods in drugs:

An’ I feel like from 1980 before the drug scene really, really hit – don’t git me wrong! Drugs was out there, but there was [very insistent] nothin’ near like it was now. An’ I feel man, it was like a master plan, ya know. We as people – ya know, black people – we couldn’t do nothin’ but excel and continue to move forward, ya know what I’m sayin’, but when this drug hit us, man! It was like “BOOM!”: tha’ set us back 50 years, ya know. It’s simple as that: it’s brother agains’ brother. I don’t care abou’ ya’s long as I git mine.

(Wacquant 1999, 165)

What is the function of this conspiracy theory?

If it is a cognitive map, then it shows no way out. If it is intended to represent the real that lurks behind the reality created by the state, then the real is once again the state. If it is a defense mechanism, then it makes the frustration deeper.

It seems that the function of Rickey’s conspiracy theory is to articulate what has never been but nevertheless feels lost – his own prosperity lost together with his boxing career and the prosperity of his community and that of all black people in the United States.

Yet how is it possible to feel as a loss what has never been?

This is a work of social mourning, writes Loïc Wacquant (1999, 156). But is it not also a counterproductive work of reason? Where does the work of social mourning take its energy from? Is mourning reducible to suffering?

Ressentiment

The problem of the counterproductive work of reason can be approached if it is reconceptualized as work of desire.

Then the intensity of a delirium of interpretation or a delusion of persecution can be explained by the concept that even though they do not produce any positive knowledge or effect, the subject still derives from them gratification of her desire.

In the early stages of the research on conspiracy theories, the desire that puts conspiratorial minds to work was explained by relative deprivation:

In every society that is composed of antagonistic groups there is a nascent and descent of groups… . The intensification of anxiety into persecutory anxiety is successful when a group (class, religion, race) is threatened by loss of status, without understanding the process which leads to its degradation… . Generally, this leads to political alienation, i.e., the conscious rejection of the rules of the game of a political system.

(Neumann 1957, 290, 293)

Yet conspiracy theories do not compensate for relative deprivation; they just represent it as a result of injustice. So, conspiracy theorists desire not so much the betterment of their situation but rather the condemnation of injustice.

But how can condemnation be an object of desire?

One of the influential phenomenologists of the first half of the 20th century, Max Scheler, tried to solve that question by the concept of ressentiment.

The concept was introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche to describe a reaction that was foreclosed from becoming an act and in consequence turned into a feeling, into a desire of imaginary revenge (Nietzsche 1998, 19–24, Deleuze 2005, 104–9). Scheler tried to rework ressentiment into a sociological concept which can be outlined as follows (Scheler 2007, 2–15; Boltanski 2014, 178–80; Angenot 2013, 8):

• If the status of a social group is considerably lower than its power, as for example in democracy, where formal equality is undermined by social inequalities, then the group feels entitled to more but powerless to change its condition.
• Frustrated by its impotence, the group tries to relieve it by negating the value of the superior groups.
• If the devaluation of others is not acted out as an open conflict, then the group members can develop a value delusion, i.e. a deviant system of values intended to compensate for their inferiority.
• However, the group members cannot detach themselves from the social order without receding into psychosis, so they articulate the delusional values as a hidden order transpiring behind the social order, or vice versa.
• In effect, the group feels the social order irrational and incomprehensible and develops aversion from power and a desire for vengeance that can be fulfilled only in the imagination.
• Since the unfulfillable desire for vengeance makes the group feel even more powerless, this desire is repressed, and if the repression is not strong enough to erase it, it turns into a constantly recurring reaction that forecloses any act and that could not be appeased even by an improvement of the situation.
• Moreover, the improvement would be felt as a further repression because it would contradict the desire for vengeance and deny the compensations provided by ressentiment – the intellectual pleasure to know how the group was wronged and the moral pleasure to know who was responsible.
• However, since ressentiment cannot be appeased by any improvement, it lacks positive content, which distinguishes it from anger, envy, or vindictiveness.⁵

In sum, desire turns into ressentiment if it crosses the threshold of pure repression, beyond which it represses even itself.⁶ But if desire involves work, which is supposed to bring gratification, as we have assumed, then the subject of ressentiment derives her gratification from repression.

How is it possible to enjoy repression?

Value ambivalence

Ressentiment is the sentiment of another. Quite like fetishism, it implies a subject of knowledge able to discern the value delusions of others. In practical circumstances, however, it is often difficult to tell perception from misconception.

Rickey’s conspiracy theory is intended to explain the powerless condition of his community, which makes civil or political rights seem nothing but a facade hiding the real war of everyone against everyone (Wacquant 1999, 152).

But Mattie, a former friend of Rickey’s from a neighboring project, is a success. After a fortunate boxing career, Mattie has managed to move out of the neighborhood to a middle-class area and works as a sheriff and athletic instructor (Wacquant 1999, 155–6).

If the conspiracy theory that the authorities intentionally supported the drug economy is motivated by ressentiment, then it should be grounded on value delusion, and in order to affirm his delusional values, Rickey should be expected to devalue the accomplishments of those who have moved up the social ladder, like Mattie (Scheler 2007, 9–10; Boltanski 2014, 179).

Indeed, the friends who managed to move out of the neighborhood seem to be an object of Rickey’s disparagement (Wacquant 1999, 162). But if Rickey is trying to devalue Mattie’s accomplishments as well, then why is he indulging in the fantasy that Mattie is running a secret drug ring and living in a high-class building beside the city park (Wacquant 1999, 156)?

Of course, the phantasm can be interpreted as a cognitive map which shows that the only way out of the ghetto is the way of the ghetto, the hustling economy (Wacquant 1999, 143), or that a black man can legitimize his life only if he manipulates the authorities’ expectations about reality and hides his illegal activities in a posh apartment.

Still, is not this a phantasm of positive value? Does it not affirm rather than negate the value of Mattie’s accomplishments? Does the phantasm not even hyperbolize their value so as to make them translatable in the positive categories of the ghetto?

Or is the phantasm ambivalent, and any attempt to differentiate between its positive and negative contents is misleading? In that case, we need to rework the concept of ressentiment to make it able to capture the ambivalence of desire.

Repression

If conspiratorial desire is grounded on repression, then repression cannot be described in conventional psychoanalytic terms, at least for the following reasons:

• 1 Psychoanalysis is focused on apparently irrational phenomena like hysteric symptoms or paranoid delusions, which manifest content hides a latent content. For example, the manifest content of the paranoid delusion that one is secretly persecuted by his doctor can be explained by the latent content of a repressed desire. In contrast, conspiracy theories are apparently rational because their manifest contents consist of reasoning, but the reasoning nevertheless brings a latent gratification (Adorno 1994, 53–54, 2000, 54).
• 2 In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is structured by the Oedipal complex. In contrast, the latent content of conspiracy theories, like the unconscious of popular culture in general, recognizes taboos only partially, and often only in order to transgress them (Adorno 1994, 54). Because of that, rather than stemming from an originary trauma, the latent content is more like a tree of trees grafted onto each other without a central root or a stalk (Freud 1962, 195), and in that sense, it is rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7–13).
• 3 The work of the unconscious consists of the representation of latent content through processes like condensation and displacement. But in the case of conspiracy theories, as with other seemingly irrational phenomena of popular culture, the latent content is represented on the level of manifest content by innuendos, phrases with floating significance like ‘you know what I mean,’ suspension of the pragmatic conventions of serious speech acts, and blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction (Adorno 1994, 53–54, 68, 2000, 19).
• 4 The unconscious of popular culture is sanitized because popular culture tries to avoid the dangers of fulfillment of latent desires by endless deferral. In that sense, the consumers of popular culture, including conspiracy theorists, are like customers who, instead of dining in a restaurant, are trying to derive pleasure from reading the menu in order to contain anxiety about not being unreasonable (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 111).
• 5 The psychoanalytic unconscious is individual. Since the unconscious of popular culture is sanitized, it consists of series of socially acceptable transgressions that can be developed into merchandise, sold and consumed at a mass scale as any other product of the dream factories of late capitalism (Adorno 1994, 67–8).

Theodor Adorno hoped to capture the specific features of repression in popular culture by the concept of bi-phasic syndrome, briefly discussed in the previous chapter in the context of social suffering (Adorno 1994, 89–96).

The concept was introduced to psychoanalysis by Otto Fenichel to describe a type of compulsive behavior composed of two acts (2014, 270–2). The first component is an act of transgression, and it is often imaginary. The second act represents a negation of the first. Imagine for example a subject who misbehaves and then punishes herself for her misbehavior. Fenichel believed that the symptom functioned as a defense mechanism which allowed the subject both to enjoy her transgression and to evade the guilt of it.

In order to make Fenichel’s concept applicable to popular culture, Adorno reformulated it along the following lines:

• 1 The defense mechanism described by Fenichel can be employed in any situation in which one needs to dissolve a contradiction, and because of that, the syndrome has spread in late modern societies as irresistibly as bureaucratic rationality (Adorno 1994, 105).
• 2 The functions of the syndrome are not limited to assuaging guilt, and they often include evasion of responsibility or mitigation of an unbearable situation (Adorno 1994, 154).
• 3 The behavior of the subject can be only mildly compulsive, such as the impulse to check your daily horoscope (Adorno 1994, 87).
• 4 The sequence of the act is reversible, as for example when, after suffering through another day of work, one would compensate for it by indulging in some reasonable luxury or some modest transgression (Adorno 1994, 100–1).

The reformulated concept of bi-phasic syndrome seemed able to describe the distinguishing features of many apparently irrational phenomena of popular culture, including conspiracy theories (Adorno 1994, 154). However, if such phenomena differed from the phenomena studied by psychoanalysis not only in their severity but also in their mechanism, then conspiracy theorists should not be identified with paranoiacs. Therefore, Adorno tried to distinguish between them by his concept of paranoid personality.⁷

In order to understand the difference made by the concept of paranoid personality, let us briefly compare its mechanism with the delirium of persecution discussed by Freud in the context of the case of President Schreber (Freud 1958, 40). From a psychoanalytic perspective, delirium of persecution is a product of at least the following operations. In principle, desire works by being invested in objects. The latent content of a delirium of persecution is produced by investment of desire in a significant other, like Schreber’s brother. The desire is repressed because the subject experiences it as a threat. The manifest content of the delirium is generated by the operations of projection and inversion; the first projects the threatening desire as an external threat, and the second inverts the value of the other from positive to negative. Of course, the manifest content of the delirium can be also shaped by other unconscious operations, for instance by a metaphoric substitution of another person associated by some resemblance with the originary object of desire, like the substitution of Dr. Flechsig for Schreber’s brother. The delirium can also involve metonymic displacement of desire from one object to another on the basis of some contiguity.

In contrast, in the case of conspiracy theories, the latent content is not fully repressed. As we have already said, it is both represented and neutralized at the level of the manifest content by gestures or common-sense phrases which mark it off as non-serious. And because of the implosion of the latent in the manifest content, in the case of conspiracy theories, the unconscious projections, inversions, or substitutions do not bring about a transition from positive to negative value and from internal to external threat; rather, they bring forth a constant oscillation. In effect, the disjunctive logic of the unconscious operations characteristic of the delirium of persecution is transformed into conjunctive logic. In other words, the ‘either … or … ’ characteristic of the psychoanalytic unconscious turns into ‘and … and then … ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 5), as if popular conspiracy theories short-circuit the mechanism of paranoia in order to make it produce a pulsation rather than a condition.

The concept developed by Adorno provided the ground for the diagnostics of paranoid personality in the next decades – it was introduced in DSM-I (1952, 34) and retained in the next editions of the canonical manual (DSM-II 1968, 42; DSM-III 1980, 307–9).

More importantly, the concept of paranoid personality provided the ground for the concept of paranoid style introduced by Richard Hofstadter (1996), which shaped research on conspiracy theories until the 1980s, of course, together with the very concept of conspiracy theory proposed by Karl Popper (1966, 1962; Knight and Butter 2016).

However, the concept of paranoid personality is grounded on the work of desire, which does not hide inside the subject. As we have already said, conspiratorial desire has been reified as a product of industry, sold as entertainment, and consumed as the subliminal messages that shape our free time, and if it is unconscious, it is an externalized and socialized unconscious (Adorno 1994, 51–4).⁸

How is an externalized and socialized unconscious possible? Let us take messages like ‘you have a chance’ or ‘you have a choice’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 117–18). Such messages operate like advertising, the floating signifiers of which work even if we are distracted. Indeed, is not any story of a felicitous success against all odds also a message that we have a chance, and does not any TV guide communicate to us that we have a choice? The unconscious of popular culture is triangulated by latent messages of that type, by seen but unnoticed messages which constitute us as subjects of chance and choice, and therefore as subjects responsible for their past choices and their lost chances.

Perhaps, in order to distinguish this type of socially produced and consumed latent messages from the repressed content in psychoanalysis, we should call them subliminal (Adorno 1994, 169). But if the work of desire in popular culture depends on the articulation of subliminal messages, then it is an effect of communication.

Subliminal messages

What subliminal messages organize conspiratorial desire?

In the fall of 2002, the lower house of the Russian parliament discussed a motion for resolution which appealed to President Vladimir Putin to take measures against the geophysical weapon supposedly developed by the United States (Duma 2002).

The bill claimed that the High-Frequency Active Aurorial Research Program (HAARP), funded by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States, had reached the stage at which it could turn the Earth itself into a weapon, triggering a revolution in military technology comparable to the weaponization of powder.

The motion for resolution was introduced by the deputy chair of the parliamentary committee on information policy, Tatyana Astrakhankina. The first question asked after her introductory speech was about the nature of her sources. Astrakhankina explained that the relevant information was collected from open American sources because there were not any closed American or Russian sources relevant to the topic.

It seems that one of the sources was a paper by Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa (2001). Chossudovsky had already acquired some reputation as an anti-establishment intellectual, and the local newspaper even compared him to Chomsky on account of his studies on the globalization of poverty (O’Neill 1998). In 2001, he established a Centre for Research on Globalization based in Montreal whose mission was to provide information about the new world order (Global Research 2018), to support social justice and world peace, and to continue in the footsteps of his father (Chossudovsky 2006). The Center is currently supporting a website with mirrors in seven languages, online videos and a YouTube channel, and a radio show; the site is currently among the top 6,000 in the United States and among the top 14,000 websites globally (Global Research 2018).⁹

Chossudovsky accused the United States government of intentionally concealing the potential military applications of HAARP, which could use “induced ionospheric modifications” to manipulate the climate, water resources, tectonic processes, and the agriculture of the targeted countries, as well as the mental functioning of their populations. Chossudovsky believed that HAARP signaled the coming of a new type of war based on weaponizing the economy, and in effect his paper reproduced the latent message that we were exposed to risks that we would be soon unable to control, but we still had a chance as long as we acted now (Chossudovsky 2001).¹⁰

To support the claim, Chossudovsky referred to an allegedly prophetic phrase about weather modification by Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as to scattered statements by scientists, politicians, and military officers. He also cited the Motion for Resolution A4–0005/99 on the dangers of HAARP at the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament in 1999, which did not attract much public attention. Still, Chossudovsky’s claim was not better justified than the papers about a vaccine conspiracy published by his research center (Child Health Safety 2012). Russian mainstream scientists often cited vaccine conspiracy theories as an illustration of the dangers of pseudo-science (Aleksandrov 2017), and yet the 2002 motion for resolution was drafted by a working group which included three renowned mainstream scientists. Why did they find Chossudovsky’s theory about HAARP plausible?

After answering the question about her sources, Astrakhankina gave the floor to Yuri Perunov, a leading figure in the Central Research Institute of Engineering and an author of numerous patents of invention, to explain in more detail the reliability of the information. Perunov, a doctor of technical sciences, immediately voiced his reservations about the media sources on the program. But then, papers like the one by Chossudovsky did not claim full or reliable knowledge. They claimed only limited and uncertain knowledge enough to ask the question ‘what if.’

‘What if the environment could be weaponized?’ was a counterfactual question, so it could not be answered by facts. Moreover, it was a question about risks, and to claim that the weaponization of the environment was beyond question meant to claim that it was impossible. Yet such a counterclaim would be untenable itself because, even if the risks were infinitesimally small, they could never reach the zero of pure impossibility, and even a remote probability of transforming the Earth into a weapon could be disastrous. If one started to question academic credentials instead of addressing such a threatening question, would not it seem that one was just trying to evade it?

Perunov stated before the parliament that if such a weapon had been successfully developed, then it could not be locked onto a specific target; therefore, it could not be controlled, and even its testing could have unpredictable and potentially ruinous consequences which he could explain in more detail to the members of parliament. However, he said, if such a weapon had been really developed, it would soon be too late. Of course, the members of parliament did not want to hear more details, as they got the politically irresistible subliminal message that it was time to take measures.

In the coming months, the debate in the Russian parliament enjoyed intensive coverage on websites like Chossudovsky’s Centre for Research on Globalization or in the entertainment sections of less alternative media. The next year, it was cited as a justification for a research project on the potential health effects of HAARP, funded by the Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge¹¹ (Miller and Miller 2003). Later on, the research project was cited as a sign of academic recognition by a thinker, digital artist, and healer who hoped to counter the detrimental psychobiological effects of HAARP through meditation and art therapy (Miller 2018).

In the context of the endless reverberations of the debate on geophysical weapons in popular culture, its manifest content was washed away. But one can still hear in its echo at least two subliminal messages: an inarticulate need to escape vulnerability and an insatiable demand for security.

Object-cause of desire

Although conspiratorial desire is an effect of communication and resists classical psychoanalysis, it can be described by concepts introduced by Jacques Lacan.

From a Lacanian perspective, the work of desire involves an impossible object-cause. In this section, I will outline it on the basis of the graph of desire (Lacan 2002, 1959, 1958). However, the account will simplify many Lacanian concepts, it will leave out others, and it will not cover the whole graph, let alone the whole Lacanian theory of desire.

As a starting point, let us assume that desire grows from need.

Need often depends on others, and in order to fulfill a need, one has to communicate it. Communicating the need means articulating it by signifiers, but signifiers make sense if they are put in order; for example, the symbolic order of language, but also computer code, tarot cards, or road signs. Yet, notwithstanding their diversity, the different forms of symbolic order share the following features:¹²

• 1 Any symbolic order is constituted by at least two series of discrete elements. If we take the example of traffic lights, then the first series will consist of the colors red, yellow, and green, and the second series will consist of commands that could be phrased like ‘stop,’ ‘look out,’ and ‘go.’
• 2 The symbolic order is composed of signs, but signs are relationships, not entities. For our purposes, the sign can be defined as a relationship of equivalence between elements of the two series which constitute the symbolic order. For example, the red traffic light is a sign as far as it implies an equivalence between the red color and ‘stop.’
• 3 The value of a sign, the space of its possible meanings, is circumscribed by its difference from other signs. For example, the value of ‘yellow’ is defined by its difference from the other signs in the symbolic order of traffic lights, and it can take different meanings depending on the circumstances, like ‘start the engine,’ ‘slow down,’ or even ‘speed up because the light will turn red in a moment.’
• 4 The differences that circumscribe the value of the sign stand out against the background of two other types of relationships. The first type can be called metaphoric relationships, if we conceive of metaphor as a substitution of one sign for another founded on resemblance (for example, when one says that a project has been given a green light, she is substituting the sign ‘green’ taken from the code of traffic lights for a sign that belongs to the administrative code like ‘permission’ or ‘approval’).
• 5 In general, we use signs to compose sequences like phrases, narratives, and formulas. The value of the sign stands out as well against the background of its relationships with the preceding or the succeeding signs in the sequence. Since that type of relationship is based on the contiguity between the signs in the sequence, we can call it metonymic if we define metonymy as association of signs based on contiguity (as, for example, the yellow traffic light means ‘start the engine’ because of its contiguity with the preceding red light and the subsequent green light).
• 6 In order to take into account that signs have a dual composition, let us call their two components signifier and signified, for example a green light and ‘go,’ and let us assume that the signified functions as the meaning of the signifier. As we have already said, the signifier and the signified are equivalent, and because of that, the relation between the signifier and the signified is reversible. Imagine for example a picture of green traffic light with the caption ‘go.’ In that case, ‘go’ would function as a signifier and the green light as a signified. However, since the relation between the signifier and the signified is reversible, they differ in function rather than in substance.
• 7 The signifieds and the signifiers are not perfectly superimposed. Take for example the phrase ‘I would rather… . ’ Its meaning depends on what comes next. And since the meaning of a sequence of signifiers is its signified, the signified is sliding beneath the signifier toward what comes next. In order to stop this sliding away, one has to fix the signified. But this is possible only if the sequence of signifiers comes to a stop, if some form of punctuation marks its end (we can call such punctuation anchoring points; Lacan 1993, 268). Now, imagine that our phrase stops at a negation: ‘I would rather not.’ The negation will reverse the meaning of the sequence of signifiers ‘I would rather,’ but the reversal will come after some delay, so the signified will be fixed retroactively. However, the signified is also what the speaking subject wants or needs to say. So, the anchoring point will inscribe retroactively in the chain of signifiers the intention of the speaking subject by associating it with a signified. If we take into account that signifieds differ from signifiers only in function, then the anchoring point will fix the meaning of the sequence by ascribing to some signifiers the function of signifieds, i.e. the function to represent the subject to other signifiers (Lacan 2002, 693–4).

Let us turn back to desire. As it was already said, to communicate a need, one needs to inscribe it in the symbolic order. But the symbolic order is not the subject of need; it is another. Of course, it is not a real other like the people with whom we communicate in our daily lives. But it is still the necessary condition without which we cannot communicate with any real others. Since it is important to distinguish the otherness of the symbolic other from the real others, let us call it the Other.

Now, need can be inscribed in the symbolic order if it is articulated as a demand. Demands are normally addressed to real others, but they can be communicated to those real others only through the symbolic order, so the demands are also addressed to the Other. And since the Other is abstract, any demand has an abstract dimension in which it is essentially a demand for love, a demand for the desire of the Other. Lacan claimed that the abstract dimension of demands can be captured by the question ‘che vuoi,’ ‘What do you want?’

The question ‘What do you want?’ cannot be answered by need because questions are articulated in the symbolic order and need belongs to the order of the real. It cannot be reduced to demand, either, because it is not a question of the type ‘What do I want?’ It is a question about the desire of the Other. So, it can be answered only from the position of the Other, which is inaccessible to the subject. Since the question ‘What do you want?’ cannot be reduced to demand or need, it opens up a space beyond them that can be easily discerned in cases in which one demands what one does not need, or one feels need despite one’s demands being met (Lacan 1958, 79). That gap between demand and need is the space of desire.

So, desire is constituted by the question of the desire of the Other. But the Other of the symbolic order is silent, just as language does not speak itself, although it enables us to speak. Because of that, the question ‘What do you want?’ is enigmatic; it is inherently open. Since what is desired by the subject depends on that question, the object that causes her desire is open as well. Therefore, it is constituted by a void, and it is precisely this lack that causes desire. In consequence, the object-cause of desire cannot be reduced to a real or symbolic object, and it cannot be attained even if the relevant demands are fulfilled. In that sense, it is the difference between the real need and its symbolic articulation as a demand.¹³ Because of that, the object which causes desire can be described as a remainder of the real within the symbolic order. And since such a remainder is real, it can be represented only by signifiers associated with it on the basis of some contiguity. Of course, any isolated signifier would unavoidably misrepresent desire because it would fail to signify the lacking object-cause. To capture this lack, the signifiers are composed in a metonymic chain in which the endless displacement of one signifier of desire by another will signify the incessant sliding away of its object-cause.

Now, since the object-cause of desire is lacking, then the desire of the Other should also be caused by a lack. But if the symbolic order is punctuated by a lack, then it would be inconsistent, which would threaten the very possibility of recognition of desire. So, in order not to give way as to her desire, i.e., in order to maintain desire, the subject has to cover up the double lack of the object-cause of her desire and of the object-cause of the desire of the Other. At the same time, the subject should sustain the double lack because the lack of this constitutive lack would transform desire into anxiety (Lacan 1963, 35).

The subject usually tries to follow the self-contradictory imperative of both sustaining and covering up the lacking object which causes desire by articulating a fantasy, an imaginary scene that answers the question what the Other wants through staging the impossible relation of the subject to the object-cause of desire (Žižek 1992, 6).

The fantasy of saving the world

To speak before the Russian parliament about geophysical weapons certainly involved desire. But what was the object which caused that desire?

Astrakhankina demanded that the Russian president work for an internationally imposed ban on experiments with geophysical weapons, initiate a global convention limiting the number, localization, and power of systems similar to HAARP, and demand the development of relevant international legislation under the auspices of the United Nations.

But was that really necessary, particularly in view of the fact that the threat of geophysical weapons seemed somewhat speculative and the Defense Minister just addressed the parliament about the countless vulnerabilities and inadequacies of the Russian military forces? Should we really ask the president to concern himself with that, asked one of the members of the parliament, as if he had nothing to do?

Astrakhankina justified her demand not only by reference to risks or information sources. In response to one of the questions, she described the following scenario: the Russian president would call the president of the United States to let him know that he knows about HAARP, and then Russia would put the issue on the agenda of the UN Security Council; all the world’s presidents or prime ministers, shocked by the potential risks, would then start nationally funded independent research projects, and on the basis of the findings, the UN General Assembly would then make the Security Council develop appropriate international legislation. That was certainly a fantastic scenario: the Russian president would fill in the lack suffered by humanity – perhaps the lack of sustainable global order, or the lack of global equality, or the lack of responsible leadership – and Astrakhankina would fill in the lack of awareness in the president.

But then, what was actually lacking?

Astrakhankina’s scenario did not articulate the lack of an object which could be defined or even identified. The object of her demand would lack only if the geophysical weapon started to unmake the world; it would become an object only after the loss of the symbolic order itself. So, in trying to make sense of the demand, her parliamentary colleagues, those laic analysts, started to search for the hidden object, which caused her demand, the real object of her desire.

One of the speakers claimed that Astrakhankina was involved in a secret plan of the Communist Party to destroy the great country of the United States by hindering scientific progress, just like it destroyed the great country of the Soviet Union after 1989. Another speaker speculated that the actual cause of Astrakhankina’s demand was that she wanted to use the media coverage to insinuate that the president lacked the knowledge necessary to protect the country, that the government was impotent, and hence that the communists could run the country better. Yet another speaker referred to her overambitious character and to her declining political career (indeed, she had recently left the Communist Party to join an even more marginal group in the parliament, the agricultural faction).

But any attempt to define Astrakhankina’s desire substituted other signifiers for the impossible object of her fantasy. Of course, the substitutions were not just acts of discursive violence; they were motivated by some contiguity between her demand and the substituted signifiers, for example her former affiliation or political positions. Because of that, the substituted signifiers functioned as metonymies of the object of desire that caused her demand and invited other substitutions.

Although the object which caused the debate – the ultimate power over the real, the real power that escaped the symbolic order – was lacking, it brought forth a chain of metonymies, indeed a web of metonymies rapidly developing beyond any intention, an overflow of desire.

Symbolic power

How does conspiratorial desire work?

In order to understand this, we need to take into account that the symbolic order is an instance of power.

Let us turn once more to the example of Gelb-Goldstein color sorting test, discussed in the first chapter. The subject of the test is asked to sort out a heap of colored wool skeins. For the sake of this argument, let us assume that the skeins form a layer of visible matter.¹⁴ To order it, the subject has to differentiate the matter into individual elements and put the elements in their places, which are organized as a web of distances and proximities associated with functions and developed in open series. In other words, the subject needs to impose on the layer of visible matter a layer of visible forms and in that sense to compose the plane of the visible.

Again, this is a test for color anomia. The anomic subject shows herself because she constantly reorders the skeins, but the constant reordering does not mean that she is unable to order. On the contrary; she is relentlessly covering the visible matter of the skeins with layers of forms. The subject is anomic not because she cannot put the skeins in order but because she cannot stop, because the order she produces is fluid and the forms she invents are incessantly becoming other. In order to stop her work, she needs an order that is detached from the fluidity of the visible matter, an abstract order that remains stable even if things change. She can do that by superimposing over the plane of the visible the plane of the sayable, the abstract grid of symbolic order.

Imagine that the psychologist asks the subject why she has ordered the skeins like this. A normal subject would explain the order by phrases composed of signifiers that would make sense because they were organized in a symbolic order, i.e. in a plane of the sayable. The anomic subject, on the other hand, will be unable to make sense of the visible order because she will fail to attach the visible to the sayable, and in effect she will not be able to answer the question ‘why’ asked by the psychologist, as well as the questions ‘why’ she asks herself, so she will keep reordering the skeins in a desperate effort to capture the fluidity of matter.

In seeing that she is unable to answer the question, the psychologist will probably diagnose her with color anomia. The diagnosis will reinscribe in the symbolic order her inability to make sense of the visible, although under the sign of a disorder. In consequence, she will be involved not only in a play of signifiers but also in a play of forces, which will trigger an intervention of healthcare institutions, insurance companies, governmental agencies, and non-governmental organizations that will produce a flow of capital and knowledge, although perhaps a small amount, an intervention in the plane of the visible.

The layers of the visible and the sayable are not isolated; they form a complex geology of intermediary strata which are not perfectly superimposed on each other but unavoidably produce tension (Deleuze 1988, 38–9). That tension will thrust the subject into her place, and if she does not interiorize it as an intention of recognizing and healing her disorder, if she resists it, then she will have to fight the powerful apparatuses that enforce symbolic order, apparatuses of power intended to subject her to her own good. And, of course, if she will not learn how to make sense of her resistance to the symbolic order, the resistance will be once again reinscribed in the symbolic order by means of an appropriate category, for example delirium of protest.

However, the power of symbolic order is not reducible to power apparatuses like the clinic or the school. Such apparatuses enforce its power because it is powerful. The power of symbolic order rather depends on its efficiency (Žižek 1999, 330–1, 2007, 329–30). Devoid of symbolic efficiency, it would be unable to act; it would be nothing but words; it would be impotent (Žižek 1997).

Yet, in order to be efficient, the symbolic order should transgress the plane of the sayable; it has to become more than words. But how is that possible, if it is composed of words?

Imagine a young girl involved in an embarrassing relationship.¹⁵ In one of her days of passion, while she is walking together with her unlikely knight, she suddenly realizes that her father is looking at her. In her younger days, her desire was staged as a fantasy to be what the father was lacking, and the father is still so significant to her that in the context of this example, we can assume that he performs the function of the Other. Now, the look of the father says ‘no.’ The father denies his recognition of a relationship that is unassimilable to her place in the symbolic order, inconsistent neither with the part of a good daughter prescribed to her by her place nor with her future share as a good bourgeois wife. But, since the father looks at her through the grid of the social order, he does not see the object of her desire.

We have already assumed that the object-cause of desire is constituted by a lack, but that does not mean just that something is lacking. The object-cause of desire is a lack of being (Lacan 1988, 223), and in that sense it is lost from the origin. Yet what is the originary loss constitutive of that object? Let us assume that it is a loss of jouissance, i.e. enjoyment that is so intense that it is impossible to bear, and because of that it is associated with death and grounded on one of the principles of organization of the psychic apparatus, the death drive.¹⁶ That impossible enjoyment is lost because it is associated with the infantile experience of imaginary unity with the Other foreclosed by the symbolic order, a remnant of which is the object-cause of desire, discussed in a previous section (although the object-cause of desire constitutes as an object the loss of enjoyment rather than being the enjoyment itself ).

In the context of our example, the concept of jouissance is important because it explains why the girl cannot just give way to her desire. From a psychoanalytic perspective, desire is a vital power and its depletion would amount to subjective destitution, a life of poverty from the inside, the subject of which does not merely have nothing; she even has nothing to desire (Lacan 1967, 6; Žižek 1992, 198).

So the girl is caught in a double bind. On one hand, she cannot give way to the object-cause of her desire. On the other hand, the eyes of the father are saying ‘no’ to her enjoyment. How can she resolve this double bind?

Imagine that in response she says ‘no’ to the father. In that case, she would claim that the father is blind to her. But the father performs the function of the symbolic order, and if the symbolic order was unable to capture something, if it lacked something, if it was fractured by a lack, then it would be inconsistent. As we have already seen, that would threaten the very possibility of communication with others. Of course, she could evade this threat by dissociating the father from the symbolic order, perhaps as an imposter or a deceiver. But as far as the symbolic order is an instance of desire, it is constituted by a lack, and her fantasy of being the object of her father’s desire has covered the lack in the symbolic order as a screen on which she imagined the scene of her desire, as if it was a film scene frozen just before a traumatic event. Because of that, to relegate the father from his symbolic function, to erase him from her fantasy, would mean to slide into the trauma from which she protected herself by the frozen scenario of her desire, to open the lack in the symbolic order covered by the screen of her fantasy.

But now imagine that in response, the girl is suddenly passing into act; for example, that she falls on a nearby railway track. That is certainly an act, and it is an act of significance. Yet it does not refer to other signifiers in the symbolic order. Its significance consists of what caused the girl to pass into act; it signifies its cause, but since the cause is not integrated in the symbolic order, it is unknown and cannot be known. So, passing into act signifies an unknown cause which lies beyond the symbolic order. But then the act on one hand belongs to the symbolic order, as any signification, and on the other hand it passes beyond the symbolic order. In that sense, it is a transgressive act.

Such a transgressive act has at least two important effects. Firstly, it has the significance of saying ‘no’ to the situation, which threatens to fracture the screen of fantasy. Yet saying ‘no’ to the threat means saying ‘yes’ to the fantasy and the symbolic order in which it is inscribed. Therefore, it also means saying ‘yes’ to her place in the symbolic order, to her part as a good daughter, to her share of a future as a good wife, to her image in the eyes of the father. But, secondly, saying ‘yes’ to her place in the symbolic order means saying ‘no’ to the object-cause of her desire, and not as if in her suicidal act she has finally come to her senses and decided to choose a more appropriate object of desire. It is rather as if the object-cause of her desire has always been nothing, as if she is now facing the question of how she could ever desire such nothingness – an impossible question about an impossible object that has always already been lacking, the very threshold of melancholia (Butler 1997, 170–4). In that sense, saying ‘no’ to the object which caused her desire means excluding it from the symbolic order as a meaningless remnant. But an object excluded from the symbolic order does not disappear. Since there is nothing sayable about it, it is relegated to the plane of the visible. Therefore, passing into act articulates the object which caused her desire as a real residue, as flesh, which is cut off from the symbolic order and falls down as her body.

The double effect of such passage into act can be illustrated by the following story:

Take the angry response of Groucho Marx when caught in a lie: ‘Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-mandate matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask and/or assumes this mandate.

(Žižek 2007, 328)

Passing into act splits the visible from the sayable in order to uphold the symbolic efficiency of the sayable, in order to guarantee the power of the symbolic order. It cuts off the visible as a meaningless remnant which in effect takes the function of the real cause, which makes one fall from her place in the symbolic order or, to put it otherwise, draws one in the fall.

In sum, symbolic order is efficient if it produces such passages into act, if it is able to effect transgressive acts that affirm it and at the same time articulate real remnants from the sayable which are meaningless yet cause desire.

But what if the symbolic order becomes inefficient, if its power is depleted?

Slavoj Žižek has claimed that this is one of the characteristic features of late modernity:

A wide scope of phenomena the resurgent ethico/religious “fundamentalisms” which advocate a return to the Christian or Islamic patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern, pagan, sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of “conspiracy theories” as a form of popular “cognitive mapping” seem to counter the retreat of the big Other. These phenomena cannot be simply dismissed as “regressive” … . Rather, these disturbing phenomena compel us to elaborate the contours of the big Other’s retreat: The paradoxical result of this mutation in the “inexistence of the Other” (of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency) is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively, in the Real, and not merely as symbolic fiction.

(Žižek 1997)

Conspiratorial desire can be explained as one of the popular mechanisms that are supposed to repair the depleting power of symbolic order (Žižek 1997, 1992, 250). Conspiracy theorists do that by positing a latent order beneath the manifest symbolic order, an Other of the Other that escapes its impotence. But it is impossible to articulate an Other of the Other, because then the second-order Other would be lacking in the symbolic order; the symbolic order would be inconsistent, and it could signify nothing but a disorder (Lacan 2002, 688). Therefore, this second-order Other can be posited only in the real, as the unknown cause of an act of transgression (Žižek 1997).¹⁷

But then conspiracy theories are not just counterproductive reasoning, they are passage déraisonnable à l’acte, the passing of reason into an unreasonable act.

The real of politics

If conspiracy theories are a form of passing into act, then they should produce a material remnant from the symbolic order, like the body falling on the railway track in the example discussed in the previous section. But conspiracy theories rarely lead to such a downfall. What, then, is their material remnant?

The parliamentary debate on geophysical weapons unfolded before the eyes of a silent majority – the president’s party, which never went so far as to doubt the social order.

The motion for resolution failed because, although there were almost no votes against it, the silent majority of those who identified themselves with the established order prevailed, as usual (55.6% did not vote, 41.8% voted in favor of the motion, 2% voted against; Duma 2002).

In effect, the debate on the potential weaponization of the environment unfolding before their silent eyes produced mostly sound and fury. The reactions brought forth by Astrakhankina’s speech were recorded in the minutes as “noise,” and the voices kept on getting louder. “I deeply respect you, but you do not know what you are talking about,” said one of the parliament members. “You should apologize to the lady,” responded a loyal colleague from the faction of the parliamentary agriculturalists. Then came the question of who owed apology to whom, which soon overshadowed the question of geophysical warfare, a far more abstract problem. But there was also the question who had the right to speak and when, and what was the relevant parliamentary procedure. Noise.

And although that noise was a meaningless remnant cut off from the symbolic order of the parliamentary proceedings, although it was marked as a loss of sense even in the parliamentary minutes, it articulated an incomprehensible desire to speak indicating causes which seemed unknown even to the speakers themselves. “Idiots do not disappear, they only evolve,” explained one speaker to another. Indeed, what could have caused a response like that?

But if passing into act covers the lack in the symbolic order through meaningless remnants in the real, was the noise such a remnant?¹⁸ Was the act of speaking amid the parliamentary noise, before the silent eyes of the party that was going to govern for the future decade, passing into act? Or was it just acting out, an ostentatious behavior oriented at the Other (Lacan 1963, 109)?

If acting out differs from passing into act because the latter articulates a cause of desire unknown to the subject, how could one expect the speakers to know what desire drove their countless ‘you must’ or ‘you should not have’ statements, or the endless pleas of excuses, or the always-relevant arguments about technicalities?

On the other hand, what if parliamentary democracy, faced with the incalculable risks of late modernity, has become a mode of passing into act?

Social order

Conspiracy theories also respond to the impossible imperative of desire by staging a fantasy.¹⁹ However, the conspiratorial fantasy is different from the structure of fantasies described in the previous sections.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, fantasy is defined by its function rather than by its content (Glynos 2001, 202). For example, in the previously discussed case of Sidonie, the young girl in an embarrassing relationship, the fantasy has the function of a screen on which she stages the impossible object of her desire and which covers the lack in the symbolic order.

Conspiratorial fantasies are also screens covering the lack in the symbolic order, but they stage impossibly undesirable objects. In order to explain how, we need at least two more concepts: the concepts of empty signifier and hegemony.

Empty signifier

An empty signifier is a signifier lacking a signified (Laclau 1996, 37). A signifier is a relational concept, and it is meaningless if it is detached from the relationship of asymmetric equivalence between signifier and signified. Therefore, the concept of empty signifier is meaningful only if we assume that it signifies a lack.

Yet lacks can be different. Take for example indexical expressions. The meaning of ‘I,’ ‘here,’ or ‘now’ is contingent on the subject of the statement, and if it is abstracted from any particular subject, then it signifies a lack that any speaking body can fill. Let us call that type of signifier a floating signifier (Laclau 1996, 36, 2002, 131).²⁰

However, we should distinguish another type of signifier that signifies a lack in the symbolic order. To explain that, let us turn once again to the Gelb-Goldstein color sorting test. Imagine that the frustrated subject of the test finally bursts out and asks the psychologist, ‘What do you want from me?’ The psychologist coldly responds, ‘I want you to order the wool skeins by color.’ Now, ‘order’ is certainly a signifier. But what does it signify? On one hand, it refers to what is lacking in the work of the anomic subject. Yet, on the other hand, it refers to what is needed if her work is supposed to make sense. Therefore, ‘order’ signifies a lack that is both impossible and necessary to fill, and in that sense it is an empty signifier in the proper sense (Laclau 1991, 27; Stavrakakis 2002, 80).

Hegemony

Social order is composed of social relations, but social relations are not merely visible. They are of significance as far as they are articulated as signifiers (Laclau 2002, 68).

Take for example the concept of the people. Although this covers a visible mass of bodies, its identity depends not on the identity of the bodies but on the representation of a border that divides the people from their other, let us say the elites, and demarcates a virtual space shared by anybody who is different from the elites. In that sense, the concept articulates a chain of equivalence between different bodies. It is this chain of equivalence that constitutes the people as a body politic, rather than the endlessly disseminating web of proximities and distances between the visible bodies²¹ (Laclau 2002, 131, 160–1).

Therefore, social order is symbolic order, and the identity of any element of the social order is defined by its difference from other elements which can be substituted for it or stand in some contiguity to it (Laclau 2002, 68).

But the social order is a totality, and the significance of any social action or interaction is grounded on it as a totality, just like language as a totality is the condition of possibility of any meaningful speech act (Laclau 1996, 37).

Since the totality of social order is the ground of any significance, it should also be articulated as a signifier. But signifiers imply difference. If the symbolic order was defined by its difference from something else, its significance would depend on something else and it would not be a totality. So, the constitutive difference should be internal to the social order (Laclau 2002, 69–70, 1996, 38).

Therefore, social order is defined by a remnant that is excluded from it and at the same time is internal to it. But, since this remnant is excluded from the totality of social order, it is in an equivalent relation to any of its elements. Because of that, this constitutive remnant can be represented by any element of the order (Laclau 2002, 70), and hence, the element that represents it is essentially contingent. What is more, it is inescapably unstable because it is articulated as a tension between the particular identity of the contingent element and its abstract function as a representation of a chain of equivalent relationships of exclusion (Laclau 2002, 130, 1996, 38).

Now, since such a contingent element represents a remnant that is excluded from the social order, its signified is lacking and it functions as an empty signifier (Laclau 2002, 70–1, 1996, 39; Glynos 2001, 201; Stavrakakis 2002, 73).

Furthermore, as the empty signifier of the constitutive other is a contingent element that represents the totality, it produces the powerful effect usually termed hegemony (Laclau 1996, 43; Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 139; Glynos and Howarth 2007, 105–7).²² For our present purposes, let us assume that hegemony consists of the power to represent what is common and therefore to represent a form of power, the resistance to which is uncommon; in other words, any resistance to this power can be justified only by means of extraordinary political, economic, or cultural capital.

Conspiratorial fantasy

If conspiratorial fantasy is described by the concepts outlined above,²³ then it differs from the general structure of fantasy because it articulates an empty signifier that stands for a lack in the social order and because it produces hegemony by representing the social order as a whole (Glynos 2001, 201–2).

Another important difference from the fantasies discussed in the previous sections is that conspiratorial fantasy is characterized by a negative conditionality, since it represents not the object which causes desire but rather what would have been that object if there was not a conspiracy. It is a fantasy about a stolen or forestalled object-cause of desire, about the loss of the very cause that makes the social order desirable for us – our enjoyment (Žižek 1999, 201, 2018, 172; Stavrakakis 2007, 197).

Because of its negative conditionality, conspiratorial fantasy is articulated as an imaginary scenario of meaningless violence, the function of which is not to cover the constitutive lack of desire by staging the impossible relation between the subject and the object-cause of her desire but rather to reaffirm in the real the power lost because of the impotence of the symbolic order (Žižek 1999, 322–3).

It seems that behind the screen of conspiratorial fantasy that tries to hold together the symbolic order despite its fractured power, behind the endlessly developing scenario of frames of meaningless violence, frozen just before the time of living on, just before the time after the trauma, we can discern the outlines of the proper object of conspiracy theories: the political monster.

Political leadership

The hegemonic effect of empty signifiers can be recognized by the advantage they bring in political competition.

The most vocal opponent of the movement for resolution on the geophysical weapon allegedly developed by the United States was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a self-proclaimed nationalistic liberal democrat who was often considered the most recognizable Russian right-wing populist.

It was Zhirinovsky who claimed that the motion for resolution was a surreptitious communist plot to hinder progress and ultimately to destroy the United States, a happy country where “nobody smokes, all have an average income of 3000 USD, and anybody can immediately get a house, a car, a washing machine, and excellent services, a country without poor or beggars” (Duma 2002).

Although Zhirinovsky’s argument did not make much sense on the level of its manifest content, it performed at least the following discursive operations:

• 1 The argument amassed contingent signifiers like the United States, the Soviet Union, the Russian tsar, the millions of young mobsters or hustlers who could seize power at any minute, and the research group of Academic Selyakov, which had developed a project to make Russia five times richer and stronger.
• 2 The accumulation of signifiers foregrounded a double equivalence between them – enjoyment of power and the threat to enjoyment posed by a hostile other, which figure was circumscribed by a double opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – ‘us, the Russians’ versus ‘them, the other nations,’ but also ‘us, the Russians whose enjoyment of power was stolen’ versus ‘them, the communists who stole it.’
• 3 Zhirinovsky tried to identify Astrakhankina with the communists who stole power, and since he opposed her, the argument was intended to make ‘us’ identify ‘ourselves’ with him, and in that sense to pose him as the political actor who protects the enjoyment of power, hence as the actor who would be able to restore it, who could fill in the lack of power, whose absence would amount to further loss of power.

In sum, Zhirinovsky used his conspiracy theory to articulate himself as an empty signifier of order, as the signifier of a leader capable of compensating for the impotence of government. And even though Zhirinovsky was recognized as that empty signifier only contingently, mostly by himself, he managed to represent a lack in the political order that would be soon filled by a master.

Astrakhankina responded with some irony that she was happy to inspire Zhirinovsky for such a passionate speech. But her ironic reference to his improper passion did not provide an alternative articulation of the empty signifier of the leader, and she seemed unable to oppose Zhirinovsky. In effect, although her agricultural and communist colleagues stood up for her, she was put in her place and lost her last chance to take the place in politics she was aspiring to.

Revolutions of the weak

If we can sum up the argument of this chapter, it is that conspiracy theories articulate a desire caused by an impossible object and intended to cover a lack of meaning in the social order by an impossible scenario of conspiracy against it.

But then conspiracy theories articulate an impossibility that escapes the social order and yet is constitutive of it, a disorder that gives the ground for social order. In that sense, conspiracy theories are discursive revolutions.

As far as they do not articulate any alternative order, conspiracy theories are weak revolutions. And as far as they do not rise to hegemonic power, they are revolutions of the weak. Perhaps that is the positive core of the concept of ressentiment, the first concept intended to capture the desire that we now commonly associate with conspiracy theories – the revolution of the weak as weak, the revolution of the slaves as slaves (Deleuze 2005, 109).

But any revolution is a reversal of power relationships (Foucault 1997, 123), and any reversal of power relationships requires more power, just as any resistance to power requires power. Then how is a revolution of the weak as weak possible?

Notes

1 For a powerful critique of contextual explanations of conspiracy theories, see Bratich 2008, 19. For a critique of the concept of conspiracy theories as “cry and rage from the margins,” see Fenster 1999, 83.

2 For another version of the history of the concept of paranoia in relation to the concept of conspiracy theory, which describes it as an amalgamation of a delirium of protest, delirium of interpretation, delusion of grandeur, and persecution complex, see Boltanski 2014, 173–7. The version in this book is focused on the problem of counterproductive work of reason rather than on medicalization of suspicion. It does not take into account many variations of the relevant psychiatric arguments and concepts, for which see Shorter 2005, 206–11.

3 On the deviation of monomaniacs from their social position, which shaped the psychiatric problematizations of paranoia, see Esquirol 1845, 320; Boltanski 2014, 175–6.

4 An alternative line of problematization used the concept of delirium of interpretation (Sérieux and Capgras 2008, 448). An important defining feature of this concept was that the subject abused the facts in order to develop a line of thought which would transform them into knowledge about herself.

5 In a paper intended to capture the logic of conspiracy theories, Marc Angenot proposed that ressentiment is the mechanism of conspiratorial reasoning and that they are actually one phenomenon (Angenot 2013, 13).

6 For important comments on the link between conspiracy theories and the repression hypothesis, see Wacquant 2009, 29; Melley 2012, 8.

7 The concept of paranoid personality developed by Adorno was grounded on the concept of psychological type introduced by Ernst Kretschmer and on the political typology developed by Harold Lasswell. The critiques that the concept of paranoia is applicable to conspiracy theories only by analogy or as a metaphor, although convincing in general, often do not take into account its difference from the concept of paranoid personality. See, for example, Knight 2000, 15–19; Fenster 1999, 36; Boltanski 2014, 171–9. For an alternative problematization of conspiracy theories as mass hysteria epidemics, which however fails to provide a convincing explanation of how hysteria can turn into a contagious disease, see Showalter 1997, 11–14.

8 For an argument that conspiracy theories are shaped after late capitalist media spectacles which articulate systematically the fantasy of a central point of control, see Hardt and Negri 2001, 323.

9 For a detailed analysis of Chossudovsky’s theory about 9/11, see Knight 2008.

10 Clare Birchall has argued that conspiracy theories make sense of events by problematizing them from the perspective of the future trauma of the worst to come, a line of problematization shared by late modern security apparatuses (Birchall 2006, 62).

11 The Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge is a Seattle-based non-governmental research institute with a sort of New Age profile.

12 The features are described on the basis of Barthes 1967. The traffic lights example is adapted from Eco 1976, 127–9.

13 On the difference between demand and need in the context of conspiracy theories, see Fenster 1999, 100. On the detail as an object-cause of desire in conspiracy theories, see Fenster 1999, 105–6.

14 The concepts of the visible and sayable are adapted from Deleuze 1988, 32, 38–9.

15 The example is based on the case of Sidonie, in which context Lacan defines his concept of passage into act, passage à l’acte (1963, 97–8, 69, 96–109; Freud 1951). For an analysis into passage into act as an act constitutive of the speaking body, which is the condition of possibility of speech acts, as well as a definition of performance as the unconscious remnant of any performative act, see Felman 2003, 65–7. The interpretation of the concept is based on Žižek 2010, 65, 2012,209–10, 2001, 28–9.

16 For a relevant discussion of the intensive affects produced by conspiracy theories, tentatively captured by the concept of conspiracy rush, which does not use the concept of jouissance, see Fenster 1999, 110–11.

17 In a Lacanian perspective, the positing of the Other in the real is the distinguishing feature of paranoia Žižek 1992, 216. Yet, unlike paranoiacs, conspiracy theorists counterbalance it with cynicism that resists the symbolic order of any authority, a cynicism that claims to believe only what it really sees and that claims to obey only the imperative of unconstrained choice, yet at the same time enthusiastically indulges in conspiracy theories (Žižek 2012, 337, 1997, 1v992, 219).

18 On voice as passage into act, see Zizek 1999, 319.

19 On conspiracy theories as an element of the cultural apparatus of the covert sphere, which tries to deal with the contradictions of contemporary democracy by means of articulating fantasies and fictions, see Melley 2012, 5–6.

20 From the perspective of Laclau, unlike indexical expressions, floating signifiers in the social order are underdetermined because they belong to more than one chain of equivalence and refer to more than one empty signifier. For more details, see the discussion of social order in this section.

21 Today, revolutionary politics cannot rely on a subject like the proletariat, which can overpower opponents by its sheer multiplicity. Because of that, many leftists find hope in chains of equivalence, which would amalgamate the particular subjects of dispersed demands into a powerful whole. In practice, however, chains of equivalence often turn out to be empty and fragile. I think that parrhesia, discussed in chapter 3, can provide a more reliable ground for revolutionary politics.

22 For a detailed critique of the relevance of the concept of hegemony developed by Laclau to conspiracy theories, see Butter 2014, 16–19. To summarize the argument, on one hand, the concept implies that political and semiotic representations are indistinguishable, and because of that, it is inapplicable to any opposition to conspiracy theories that does not intend to represent the people; on the other hand, the concept is unable to describe how conspiracy theories misrepresent the real struggles for hegemony by distorting and deflecting their issues and by superimposing identities of the people and their enemies that are often resisted by the social actors.

23 For arguments for the relevance of this concept of fantasy to conspiracy theories, see Melley 2012, 14; Dean 1998, 176.

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