Politics of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Don DeLillo's Fiction

Late capitalism is a devastating economic and political phenomenon. The dominant conception of power in this late phase of capitalism is not monocentric, but dispersed and liquid. Don DeLillo’s novels are characteristically engaged in the cultural and political representations of overwhelming corporate and cultural mechanisms in contemporary American society. In his fiction, the resistance patterns that emerge against the contemporary power politics are equally dispersed and polycentric. This book, on the whole, asserts that power and resistance networks are inextricably entangled, with the intention of demonstrating how DeLillo superimposes these patterns of power and resistance over contemporary American lifeworld through the discourses of paranoid fear, conspiracy, terrorism and risk management. It is displayed that a neo-Marxist perspective, which also allows room for the grafting of post-structuralist terminology onto critical social theory, offers the most suitable theoretical aid in this effort of cognitive mapping. This study ultimately seeks to determine the set of social problems that structurally lies underneath paranoid speculation as a cultural practice.