[...]... negotiating the shifting and perilous forms of representation that we all, of necessity, subscribe to in one form or another For all of his differences with our varying understandings of politics, I argue, Benjamin’s conspiracy, his method, is inherently political Benjamin may help us to expand our understanding of what the political stands for, where it occurs, and how it works For Benjamin, a conspiracy... conspiracy is to think of him in clearly political terms; it is to bring an idea from an explicitly political vocabulary and apply it to this thinker for whom the connection to politics often appears tenuous or vague And, by extending this analysis to include many other coconspirators, we can broaden and deepen our sense of what the political consists of In the West, political theory has long had a troubled... a politics based on textual conspiracy, on alien forms of hope and alliances with objects, we confront a basic question of how we think about politics, what we expect something properly political to look like Generally speaking, we can say that contemporary understandings of politics presuppose an active and self-conscious political subject, one who maximizes her or his will and desires through an... make a connection between Benjamin and political theory, is the idea of conspiracy As I see it, this concept allows us to think about the question of fetishism and representation in a political fashion Even if Benjamin Introduction | 19 doesn’t always speak of conspiracy in his later work, I argue that it underlies, uni‹es, and explains what he is trying to do from a political perspective Like the atmosphere... one moment and one place The German term verschwörern similarly suggests a relationality, literally: those who swear together Yet for Benjamin, to base a conspiracy purely on temporal or physical proximity risks reinforcing and being subject to the very certainties and inevitable fates of any one time and place that create the need for conspiracy in the ‹rst place Benjamin con- 18 | Textual Conspiracies. .. relationship to conspiracy Historically, much of political theory has been devoted to battling and controlling it When it is referred to at all, conspiracy is generally regarded as a scourge for the order and stability that is a necessary prerequisite for political life Indeed, when one thinks of the term “conspiracy” in popular culture (just as in political theory for the most part), one thinks of dark... to reevaluate our own moment, a time when more conventional understandings of open resistance and rebellion seem to have either run their course or perhaps (for many at least) have even become unthinkable, impossible, the events in Egypt and Libya notwithstanding To be clear, I do not believe that all political and literary thinkers and actors participate in the conspiracy I am describing in this book... forms of 12 | Textual Conspiracies resistance and identities that are generally overwritten by the exigencies of colonialism, revolution, and postcolonialism Placing Benjamin’s theories in a constellation as I do expands and applies his method in contexts that he could not have been aware of Using a political theorist like Machiavelli helps to give strategy and teeth to a conspiracy that might otherwise... are affected by the sign, including in ways that are both desirable and necessary As we will see further, we would have no meaning, no identity, no politics at all without the sign We can learn to take advantage of the aporias and disruptions of the 14 | Textual Conspiracies symbolic order and generally navigate (or at least understand ourselves as being able to navigate) rather than simply occupy our... words may be in order about the political connotations of this project The conclusion will be the chapter that most directly addresses the political upshot of textual conspiracies, of “hope [that is] not for us.” For now I would simply like to highlight the way that this project, for all its distinction from more traditional understandings of politics, remains critically political in nature When thinking . w0 h0" alt="" Textual Conspiracies