engleski

Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory and Conspiracy theory

This chapter summarises psychoanalytic accounts of conspiracist thinking. Since seeing ominous conspiracies behind the facade of power has come to seem pathological in the wake of the disastrous consequences of the mass political movements and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that were prone to conspiracist thinking, many historians, political scientists and sociologists tried to explain conspiracism as a symptom of paranoia, or as a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. The chapter maps out the historical origins of the concept of paranoia, the political application of this approach in social theory, and the theory of fantasy developed by Jacques Lacan, which, along with its reinterpretation by Slavoj Žižek, provides a way of explaining the compulsive desires that seem to drive conspiracist thinking. Finally, the chapter considers the interpretations of conspiracy theories in postmodern culture as symptomatic of the deep structure of capitalism itself rather than of individual psychology.

Aggresion, critical theory, desire, fantasy, ideology, knowledge (paranoid), paranoia, pathologisation, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, unconscious

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