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Kelman, David. Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2012. viii + 193 pp.
Owing equal parts to deconstruction and to political theory, and situated halfway between US Americanism and Latin Americanism, Counterfeit Politics is a rare book. For some readers, such a variety of registers will constitute an asset, while others might find it excessive. This review is of the opinion that the work is a valuable contribution to hemispheric literary studies.
Kelman's core idea, following Ernesto Laclau, is that conspiracy is not an exceptional phenomenon, but a defining aspect of the political. As the book reiterates on numerous occasions, fictional conspiracies have much to say about how power at large operates. Consequently, Kelman regards literature as a source for theory. His literary analyses allow him to question some of the under-examined assumptions of contemporary criticism, including Fredric Jameson's estimation that conspiracy theories constitute "a degraded politics" (139ss). Drawing eclectically from Borges and from Pynchon, the author claims instead that the complot "is a necessary moment of politics precisely because it introduces a chasm into the social space without fixing the frontier of this division" (150). Indeed, the most compelling point made by Counterfeit Politics is the need to reassess the political potential of conspiracy theories in the literature of the Americas.
The book has four chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter allows Kelman to characterize his method of "reading for the complot" by examining the logic of conspiracy in Ricardo Piglia and Ishmael Reed, with a brief allusion to Hemingway (mentioned in Piglia's "New Theses on the Short Story," 1998). This peculiar mode of reading emphasizes openness and focuses on the interruptions within a given plot line-the moment when something other surfaces. Deconstruction has long since deployed similar reading strategies, but Kelman gives them a distinctly political orientation. It is not just that, upon thorough examination, a text reveals an opposite meaning from that which it openly states; it actually reveals the field of opposing forces that constitutes the political.
Kelman puts these ideas to the test in the second chapter, which addresses the role of secrecy in narrative. Provocatively, he reads alongside Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), a novel that examines the assassination of John F....