Conspiracy theories and literary ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion

Comparative Literature, Spring 1999 by Boym, Svetlana

The history of the making of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has been translated into fifty languages, demonstrates how a certain archetypal plot travels from medieval demonology to gothic fictions, then to the classical nineteenth-century novel, and finally to rightwing popular culture. The conspiratorial plot migrates between religious and secular texts, between high and popular culture, and across state borders. In this process of cross-cultural migration the fictional frames of the story and the names of its authors disappear. Fiction is read as a document; a novelistic scene turns into a text of revelation. The history of this migrating conspiratorial structure is thus an important topic for cultural studies, which tends to examine the more benevolent democratic side of popular culture, rather than its reactionary superstitions and prejudices. "Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality?" asks Umberto Eco's disgruntled hero (407). Kis, on the other hand, insists on the need to return to self-reflexive modernist literature and the practices of estrangement and perspectivism in order to think through ethical ways of confronting the absurdity of evil and politics of paranoia that haunted much of Eastern European writing and life.

In Freud's description, paranoia is a fixation on oneself and a progressive exclusion of the external world through the mechanism of projection. Paranoia is a logically reasoned delusion usually involving persecution or grandeur. The paranoiac believes that there is a pattern to random events and that everything is somehow connected to him or her. The rational quality of this delusion is very important; every element and detail makes sense within a closed system that is based on a delusionary premise. For example, the proposition "I hate him" becomes transformed by projection into, "He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him," and then, "I do not love him-I hate him, because he PERSECUTES me." Thus, "the internal perception is suppressed, and instead, its content, after undergoing a certain degree of distortion enters consciousness in the form of an external perception" (Freud 33).' In the case of Schreber, for instance, the internal crisis was projected into an external world on the verge of immanent catastrophe. He saw himself as the only real man still surviving and perceived others as "cursory contraptions" (Freud 39). While a case of acute paranoia, it highlights the typical paranoiac relation to the other as a terrifying projection of the self. Moreover, the terms paranoia and conspiracy, besides being used in a narrow sense to describe a clinical disorder or a historical plot, have also become important metaphors in twentieth-century culture-from Salvador Dali's "critical paranoia" as a modus operandi to Frederick Jameson's recent reappropriation of conspiracy theory for the discussion of "geopolitical aesthetics." Lacan has even suggested that the paranoiac state is not merely the opposite of a normal psyche, but corresponds to a certain developmental stage and informs fundamental structures of human knowledge. (And for Foucault paranoia is partially justified as a response to institutionalized violence. Cultures whose experience of historical violence is more immediate tend to be more suspicious of naturalizing and equalizing different kinds of violence and acceptance of paranoia.)