Depathologized Conspiracy Theories and Cynical Reason: Discursive Positions and Phantasmatic Structures
Depathologized Conspiracy Theories and Cynical Reason: Discursive Positions and Phantasmatic Structures

Summary/Abstract: Publicly, conspiracy theories are considered a bizarre mode of thought. In the academic discourse, they are unserious statements positioned between bad imitation of scientific theory and political pathology. Therefore, their authors and consumers experience a procedure of exclusion from the community of “serious people”. But there are situations in which conspiracy theories are taken seriously, and established precisely as an exclusion device. These situations are predominantly interpreted as collective endangerment or political crisis. In that case, conspiracy theories stem from the center of political power as legitimate interpretation of reality. This was realized in an extreme way in the Nazi regime. So, the present academic discourse produces the Other by reason of standing for conspiracy theories. In political crisis and authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, the Other is produced by conspiracy theories. Historically, the academic attitude is partly produced by the consequences of the other attitude, through triple “demystification” of the conspiracy panic of Nazism/Fascism, Stalinism and, in the West, McCarthyism. But, structurally, it is the attitude of conspiracy-theory panic, or mimicry in exclusion. We propose a different approach, one that will simultaneously avoid acceptance of conspiracy theories as “facts” and their reduction to a phenomenon of mass hysteria. They should be considered beyond the opposition between delusion and hidden truth. Therefore, we define them as an interpretation pattern, structured as a double phantasm with the possibility of being traversed. This definition is close to Sloterdijk’s conception of Cynical Reason, according to which we can differentiate between cynical and kynical conspiracy theories. Cynical conspiracy theories speak in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian power trying to defend an organismic community, and preserve a phantasmatic structure. Kynical conspiracy theories are speaking from the position of particular, fragmentational and singular agents. From the periphery of discourse, they criticize the power elite by indicating the cleavages that are concealed by cynics. In that way, kynical conspiracy theories perform a positive function as a way of “exposing the dirty linen” of the political regime.

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