From Complot to Potlatch by Bruno Bosteels

Paranoids too have enemies! - Ricardo Piglia, Prisión perpetua

In a really globalized world, the truth appears to be on the side of paranoia. From all sides a vague sense of persecution is proliferating, based on the suspicion of an enemy both global and diffuse. After a moment of decline, there comes the moment of overcompensation in the invention of secret and clandestine plots, just as the incredulity toward the "grand narratives" of modernity is followed by an obsessive accumulation of what we might call postmodern "global fictions"-that is, paranoid stories about the conjuring tricks of the other, which are reproduced ad nauseam both on the side of ultracapitalists and inside the new antiglobalization movement. Not only is there a presupposition that the violent process of subsumption under capital obeys the laws of an implacable logic the deeper structure of which would be as enigmatic as a nightmare after waking up. What is more, the same mortiferous coalition of capital, war, and "freedom," which today conflates into a single act of humanitarian aid with the brutal use of really existing weapons of mass destruction, also alleges that the true enemy hides in mysterious networks of terrorism, millenarian conspiracies of fundamentalism, and innumerable sleeper cells. Nobody can deny that we live in a glorious age for conspiracy theorists. We are all potential suspects; the enemy is systematically the others; and the only social bonds, permeated by the grayest of affects, are those based on suspicion, terror, and war.