| This dissertation describes the relationship between conspiracy narratives and political consciousness in Émile Zola's Germinal, Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes, and Franz Kafka's Das Schloß. Conspiracy is understood as a form of political thought, albeit flawed, and I argue that in conspiracy narratives power is necessarily hidden or inaccessible—these narratives track the attempt to encounter, engage, and expose this power. Conspiracy is, however, a form of thought which inhibits any abstract or theoretical conception of social relations, for it blocks and substitutes for the synthesis of concrete and theoretical analysis. Finally, conspiracy is the consciousness of the quintessential modern subject, the paranoid and the psychotic, the subject who is unable to grasp the totality of social relations, fragmented as they are by capitalism.;In Germinal Zola relates the tragic attempt by the Montsou miners to control their own destiny through a strike. Yet, the strike fails, many of the workers die, and the consciousness which they actually attain is ineffective and finally self destructive. I maintain that the workers are never able to imagine social relations under capitalism, and instead resort to pursuing local scape goats and blaming the demiurge of capitalism who crouches over the horizon of their political imaginary.;Conrad's Under Western Eyes is about an informer, Razumov, who informs on an anarchist assassin, an acquaintance and fellow student, and subsequently agrees to spy on the anarchist circle exiled in Geneva. My interest lies with Razumov's reasons for informing and his allegiance to the state, which I link to interpellation and subject formation. The form of the novel is presented by the Conradian narrator as Razumov's written confession of his role as informer and spy. As a confession of a guilty conspiratorial consciousness this oddly mediated novel definitively links conspiracy, confession, and abject political consciousness.;Finally, much of Kafka's work has a conspiratorial quality due to the inaccessible figures of power whom his protagonists seek, and Das Schloß traces K's attempts to reach Count West West, his purported employer. This desire for an encounter with power must (necessarily) never be satisfied—the desire of the hysteric—and so this is not a transformative notion of desire. Instead we find that the desire for (a) desire, a structure of unrequited desire, entails repetition due to a constitutive lack. This notion of desire lies at the heart of any conspiracy narrative and points to their abject political character and implications thereof. |
