Conspiracist Manifesto

An anonymous political treatise that takes conspiracy seriously as a method of analysis and of resistance, and asks whether the suspicion of critical theory can be told apart from that of conspiracy theory.

The book examines whether capitalism and its social apparatus emerged through conspiratorial design, and argues that the evidence supports this reading. From there it makes the case for coordinated counter-conspiracies as an appropriate strategy at a time when human autonomy is under existential threat. Robert Hurley translated the text, and Semiotext(e) issued it as a 400-page paperback in April 2023. Reviewers in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Columbia Review read it as a bid to put conspiratorial thinking to political use in an age of misinformation.

The book first appeared in French as Manifeste conspirationniste from Éditions du Seuil in 2022. Its authors say: "This book is anonymous because it belongs to no one." The journalist Thomas Mahler believes, after an investigation, that Julien Coupat and the Invisible Committee wrote it. A French review found it a style before an argument, built on dense references to Foucault, Deleuze and the Situationists.