Conspiracy Theories:

Catalog description

It is no secret that we live in an age of paranoia, our times distinguished by a heightened concern about surveillance that is far from pathological, and a disturbing return, since 2015, to what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 termed “the paranoid style in American politics.” Our seminar is thus an attempt to gain an orientation in these times by engaging in a close and critical reading of texts and sources of theory about paranoia, from Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Freud and Lacan’s readings thereof, to works by Melanie Klein, George Orwell, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, and others. Close attention will also be devoted to documents relating to WikiLeaks and to two of the best known whistleblowers of our time, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. In broader terms, this course is designed as opening the question of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to the analysis of texts both literary and political in a time of rapidly changing media and communications technology.