Скачать книгу - Conspiracies

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows – bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology – more or less concomitant inventions – had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it. The adventures of the conflict between these two realities – superficial versus real – provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels – G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carre and Graham Greene among others – Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

More and more people are beginning to realize that we are being manipulated and lied to. We are denied access to secrets that shouldn't be secrets. Our politicians obfuscate, deny, and outright lie. No one knows whom to trust. The nightly news is being replaced by carefully orchestrated propaganda. Our iPhones are monitored as are our laptops and our landlines. As for social media, that too is ripe for spying by men in black suits. No wonder, then, that the last few years have seen an incredible rise in conspiracy theories about deceptions and cover-ups. They range from the controversial to the shocking and from the nightmarish to the downright terrifying. From the dark agendas to restrict our access to the Internet and even ban books to suppressing cancer cures to ensure the pharmaceutical industry continues to reap gigantic profits and the murder of politicians, scientists, world leaders, and even Princess Diana in the name of national security, this book reveals dozens of nefarious conspiracies, plots, hidden agendas, and betrayals.

One of the most sensational incidents in the history of France, the Dreyfus Affair was a landmark federal case involving treason and antisemitism. A controversial documentary about the trial by pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès caused riots when it was shown in 1899, and was banned from any screening in France for the next three quarters of a century. Who engineered Dreyfus's conviction? Was the man who played him in the film actually murdered by a mob of enraged moviegoers? And why is Jack Kews, a shadowy 20th-century Zola in New York City, so determined to find out? A web of intrigue, menace and betrayal reaches through space and time, as the search for keys to a historic trap hones in on a cache of zealously guarded forgeries and tins of crumbling film stock. "This erudite page-turner takes us from late 19th-century France to the film studios of the great Georges Méliès to the tribulations of a film restorer who finds herself caught up in political intrigue, a century after the famous Affaire Dreyfus . As in her celebrated L. C. , Daitch constructs a compelling dialogue with an earlier century that shifts our perspective on our own time."—Susan Bernofsky, Foreign Words "It's Susan Daitch at her finest! A smart, absorbing study of those at the margins of history who, under her deft pen, turn out to be vital. Fascinating story, captivating writing."—Deb Olin unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love and Went to Join the War " . . . Daitch manages to reveal her characters in a light that makes us wonder if we are seeing them as they are or as another shadowy transparency. While the book is extensive in scope, the writing is sharp and lean."— The Black Sheep Dances "Daitch has lost none of the bristling intelligence that makes her work so uniquely literary. . . . Daitch's narrative can certainly be enjoyed as cerebral noir; the cryptic calls and notes delivered to Frances are reminiscent of Paul Auster."— The Review of Contemporary Fiction "The world Susan Daitch spins is like uncovering a lost history first-hand through the eyes and ears of those who were there. An engrossing novel for the age of censorship and redaction."— Tottenville Review "Enthusiastically recommended to fans of highbrow, erudite historical fiction. Readers who enjoy the novels of Umberto Eco, for example, will probably also enjoy those of Ms. Daitch."— New York Journal of Books "Questions of integrity, authenticity and the slipperiness of 'truth' in a politicized society animate Susan Daitch's ambitious and highly satisfying novel about France's infamous Dreyfus Affair and its legacy."— Shelf Awareness Susan Daitch is the author of four novels— The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir (City Lights),  Paper Conspiracies (City Lights), L. C. (Lannan Foundation Selection and NEA Heritage Award), The Colorist— and a collection of short stories, Storytown . Her work has appeared in a variety of publications such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology , The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction  and The Brooklyn Rail . Her work was featured in The Review of Contemporary Fiction along with William Vollman and David Foster Wallace. She taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently teaches at Hunter College.