The Latin etymological origin of the word “conspiracy” is conspīrāre, literally “to breathe together”, whence, “to accord, harmonize, agree, combine, or unite in a purpose, plot mischief together secretly.”

Formally, conspiracy is a category of criminal law, and as such, it is functional across different legal systems, save for subtle differences. Generally, it denotes “illegal combinations” of persons, and is often prosecuted as a “crime of intent”, especially when the alleged conspiracy is of a political nature, i.e. when the security of the state is deemed to be the target. In other words, no actual damage or injury need to materialize for the crime of conspiracy to be prosecuted, with shared intent or alleged agreement between individuals being  sufficient grounds. Technically, one can be tried for her state of mind, convicted for linguistic association of a particular kind, or for sharing a code deemed to be subversive. But then the charge of conspiracy often proves a misnomer in law. Across legal systems, conspiracy trials often signal misrecognition, or the law's inability and refusal to incorporate a proper understanding of the act/crime in question. The charge of conspiracy can be notoriously clumsy and nefariously vague.

Then there are the countless conspiracy theories that bestow us with a world where everything is connected to everything else, where everything under the sun is controllable, and where everything, in the final instance, can be explained. Conspiracy theory, according to Frederic Jameson, is “a degraded attempt to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.”[1] Such structural attempts tend towards a specific narrative genre of their own, arguably amounting to an epistemology replete with a distinct paranoid style. Often deemed to be politically irresponsible, immature and bereft of critical thought, conspiracy theories are apocalyptic and absolutist, fantastic and magical realist.

These trials and theories are set against the backdrop of a world where conspiracy indeed proves to be a ubiquitous mode in which contemporary power operates, often with impunity. Brave investigative journalists and whistleblowers testify. Declassified and leaked documents corroborate. "Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart? Have stories about spies always fascinated you?" asks the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act website with that feigned marketing enthusiasm – the retailer spellbound by his own product. What exactly is the relationship between the surreal imagination of conspiracy theorizing, and the state of the world today? Is the world as vast a place for outrageous conspiracies precisely because those in power imagine it as such? And is it, perhaps, the law of the conspiring state that mistakes other forms of breathing together as conspiracy?

The Manual for Conspiracy is a collection of critical and literary texts exploring the suspect epistemics and paranoid style of conspiracy, while reclaiming the uncertainty and subversive potential that lie at its core.

Excerpts:

“...If truth is always somewhere other than what ‘everybody sees’, the concept of conspiracy necessarily calls for a particular semiotics and a symptomatology of its own. Had things evolved otherwise, could something like ‘conspirology’ have taken shape as a branch under political science, and could this field serve as a “hunter of hunters”, hunting down signs left behind by those who hunt political power? Such a field of knowledge could draw on other ways of knowing which partake in the paradigm of clues, yielding a genealogy of those who hunt power in terms of the values that they represent...” from ‘Were Many Signs Seen Through the Land’, Ferhat Taylan

“...I am not one who feels certain that anti-Semitism is always just around the corner, hiding in ambush for my next slip. And just as I don’t believe in the anti-Semitic conspiracy, I have a hard time believing in the Jewish one. So it was a strange sensation to feel that I was ‘coming out’ to this young, excitable, shop clerk as a Jew, knowing he felt we were all potentially murderers of Muslims who controlled Hollywood. His friend, who was still trying to sell me tea, said he didn’t care that I was Jewish and that he still loved me...” from ‘Left Out’, Alisa Lebow

“...But they are living together, ‘illegally,” in secret, in a hiding place in Ramallah, A.’s city, while D. behaves as if she is living with her parents in the Galilee. She has her own bedroom there, and her mother wipes the dust off its furniture, and changes the position of her clothes and belongings on a daily basis for many years now, so as to make it look as if D. is living there, in case someone from the Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs came searching for her.

The longer the hiding person manages to mislead the searcher, the longer the game lasts. And the longer the searcher wanders around from one place to another, searching, the longer the others stay in their hiding places, which as long as they are not discovered, gradually grow to be familiar and safe, almost like a home.

In the news item published in Haaretz on May 5, 2006 comes:

‘Yitzhak said the area of his stand turns into a ‘home’ every night. He said one of the Palestinians slept on a thick mattress near the staircase.’ ” from ‘Hiding Forever’, Adania Shibli