Why are people attracted to conspiracy theories? This essay conceives of conspiratorial motivation as an aesthetic phenomenon. To defend this account, I offer a coarse-grained taxonomy of contemporary motivational hypotheses that have been proposed to answer this question, describing their strengths and weaknesses. Next, I offer an aesthetic account of conspiratorial consumption; I argue that people’s preference for conspiratorial narratives is the product of a taste for a particular kind of story. To clarify the approach, I show how aesthetic appreciation (...) is often confused with epistemic evaluation, leading the conspiracy theorist to believe she is involved in epistemic practice instead of aesthetic practice. I then describe the genre of conspiracy theorizing, explaining how my proposed genre account makes sense of several puzzles about conspiratorial consumption. The essay concludes by suggesting that the genre account offers a unique mode of engagement with conspiracy theorists that might be employed in order to profitably dialogue with those who hold these fringe and often dangerous beliefs. (shrink)

A distinctive characteristic of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony is its insistence on the denial of an essence or ground of the subject. This element of their theory is derived from their notion of antagonism, in which a relation with a ground is brought into question by revealing its contingency. This article argues that the political dimension of this argument makes sense only in the context of Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of modernity. However, the universalizing of modernity as the (...) form of hegemony reduces the ontological notion of antagonism to a dialectical or empirical notion of contradiction. This article examines two key moves in this process: first, the reduction of the subject to Lacan’s account of the subject; and second, the reduction of modernity to an ontotheologicalpolitical structure derived from Lefort as the support of the hegemonic subject. From this the article examines Laclau’s response to the exhaustion of political modernity in the figure of complexity, from which antagonism is evacuated through the hegemony of the category of myth. Finally, the article discusses a nonhegemonic approach to antagonism derived from the work of Foucault, Wolin and Rancière. (shrink)