From Complot to Potlatch by Bruno Bosteels

How would it be if these insane people were right, if in each of us there is present in his ego an agency which observes and threatens to punish, and which in them has merely become sharply divided from their ego and mistakenly displaced onto external reality? - Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

The fact that the state would have lost much of its hegemonic role in more recent years-a truism that can easily be advanced against this baleful interpretation of post-revolutionary politics in terms of complot-by no means diminishes the attractiveness of existing conspiracy theories. On the contrary, this change only seems to have increased the latter's power of persuasion, to the point where today their dominance seems to be irrefutable. Perhaps the most powerful conspiratorial theory, in this sense, is the one that may help explain the international success of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's bestseller Empire, including in Latin America. Combining many familiar ideas about globalization in a portable encyclopedia of sorts, the book is absolutely sweeping in its capacity of absorption, in spite of the official nomadism of its numerous lines of flight-with its crushing and all-encompassing outlook finding its most immediate precursor not in Marx's Capital or even in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, so much as in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.