Journal of American Studies, Page  of 

© Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 
doi:./S

Conspiracy, Pornography,
Democracy: The Recurrent
Aesthetics of the American
Illuminati
GORDON FRASER

This essay examines reactionary, countersubversive fictions produced in the context of two con-
spiracy theories in the United States: the Illuminati crisis (–) and Pizzagate (–).
The author suggests that both cases emblematize a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomaso-
chism that recurs across United States culture. Building on the work of Hortense Spillers,
Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others, this essay argues that observers
should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic
fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far
right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized
pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary
paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the
underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic,
countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world.

The cultural production of paranoia has long been a concern of literary scho-
lars. Even before the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories about, for
instance, a child-sex ring in a Washington, DC pizza parlor, scholars of
American literary studies, in particular, have been noting among cultural pro-
ducers a rearticulation of counterconspiratorial fictions – in essence, fictions
that describe totalizing conspiracies to be discovered and contested. Russ
Castronovo, for instance, notes that the emergence of Wikileaks in the
global mediascape recalls an eighteenth-century “printscape” of politically
transformational frauds, leaks, and conspiracies. Early US printer Philip
Freneau, Castronovo points out, lauded a democratic discourse characterized
by outright falsehood. “If he prints some lies,” Freneau suggested of the arche-
typical country printer, “his lies excuse.” Castronovo and others – from

School of Arts Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester. Email: gordon.fraser@man-

chester.ac.uk.

Russ Castronovo, Propaganda, : Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in
Early America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon to Duncan Faherty to Ed White – have returned to
the scenes of counterconspiratorial politics, moreover, in response to import-
ant recent changes in the United States. They discover, finally, that fraudulent
and paranoid modes of cultural production have long been constitutive of US
democracy. One can perhaps best understand the project of returning to scenes
of counterconspiratorial writing as continuous with Richard Hofstadter’s
foundational “Paranoid Style in American Politics” (), but with a key
difference. Whereas Hofstadter interrogated democratic paranoia as a means
of establishing the boundaries of consensus liberalism, and of excluding
modes of political discourse that had no place within that framework, more
recent scholars have suggested that frauds, leaks, lies, paranoiac mass move-
ments, and imagined conspiracies are, in fact, continuous with American dem-
ocracy itself.
This essay will return to Hofstadter’s point of departure, the so-called US
Illuminati crisis of  and , for two reasons. First, and most simply, I
will offer a minor historical corrective to studies of the counterconspiratorial
crisis in the United States. In the late s, anti-Enlightenment writers in the
Atlantic world fantasized about a secret society of Bavarian university profes-
sors who had masterminded the French Revolution and were spreading the
spirit of upheaval to other nations, including Great Britain and the United
States of America. They called this imagined cabal the “Illuminati,” both
drawing from the name of an actual Bavarian secret society that had disbanded
in  and conjuring through wordplay the central metaphor of the
Enlightenment itself: intellect as illumination. Most scholars of this history
dwell on the imagined conspiracy’s emergence in  (in Great Britain)
and  (in the US), and so ignore how a paranoid fantasy about conspira-
torial intellectuals had transformed by  into a fear of black revolutionaries
from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the US South. To put as fine a point
on this claim as possible: by , the Illuminati crisis in the United States was
characterized by a fear that global intellectual elites were conspiring with sub-
altern black men to rape white women, enslave white men, and destroy


Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic
World, – (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, ), ; Duncan
Faherty, “‘The Mischief That Awaits Us’: Revolution, Rumor, and Serial Unrest in the
Early Republic,” in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler, eds., The Haitian
Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –; Ed White, “The Value of Conspiracy
Theory,” American Literary History, ,  (), –.

Numerous scholars have read Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) as a site of Gothic fantasy and
revulsion for readers in the United States during the early republican period. See, for
instance, Matt Clavin, “Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic: Inventing the Haitian
Revolution,” Early American Studies, ,  (), –.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
Christianity and democracy in a single stroke. By examining the sermons,
pamphlets, novels, and even library records of the Illuminati crisis, this essay
will consider how fantasies of racial violence transformed the conspiracy
theory in the United States and produced an aesthetic model for racialized
paranoia.
Second, I suggest that noting the relation between race and paranoia reveals
the pornotropic style of paranoid democratic politics in the United States. The
“pornotrope,” first theorized by Hortense Spillers and reconsidered in recent
years by Alexander Weheliye and others, places the experiences of black
women during Atlantic slavery and after at the center of discourse.
Importantly, Weheliye writes, the pornotrope concerns “the sexual dimensions
of objectification” in spaces of “extreme political and social domination.” The
word traces multiple etymological trajectories and multiple histories of vio-
lence: porno, from Greek, referred to enslaved women sold for the purposes
of prostitution; trope, also from Greek, referred to a “turn” or “manner”;
and trope, from Latin, referred to a recurring figure of speech. In short,
then, the pornotrope functions as a figuration of racialized, sexual subjection
that turns (now toward the violence of bondage, now toward the violence
of sexual exploitation), but one that also recurs across time and space. By sug-
gesting that the paranoia of the Illuminati crisis manifested as pornotrope,
then, I am attempting to consider the ways in which reactionary political para-
noia manifests violent, recurring fantasies of racialized sexual subjection and of
bondage. The political paranoid seeks revelation, an unmasking of the hereto-
fore concealed operations of power. But this final revelation is – to borrow
Hofstadter’s phrase – seen always through “distorting lenses.” It was no
secret, for instance, that racial slavery constituted a relation of sexual subjec-
tion, and yet the political paranoids of the Illuminati crisis sought to
unmask this obvious reality. What they suggested, ultimately, was a radical
inversion of slavery’s fundamental organization. Of course, they suggested,
white men subjected black women to sexual domination. But the secret
plot – the plot that had to be revealed – was that black men would very
soon subject white women to the same sexual enslavement. What emerged,
finally, was a voyeuristic political discourse premised on the subjection of all
women.


Alexander Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” Journal of Visual Culture, ,  (), –, ;
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories
of the Human (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, ), –. See
also Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
Diacritics, ,  (), –, .

Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, Nov.
, –, .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
The inversion described above was not subtle. In his  oration celebrat-
ing the Fourth of July in Hartford, Connecticut, William Brown warned of
the Illuminati and asked his listeners to imagine “the groans of wretched
white-men, butchered by their infuriate slaves, the shrieks of mothers, and
of virgins, a prey to more than demoniac lust and barbarity.” Brown went
on to describe French soldiers, who had cast off all Christian belief, “joining
in the impure and shocking death-dance of Africa.” Yale president
Timothy Dwight likewise asked, “Shall … our daughters [become] the concu-
bines of the Illuminati?” Behind the ubiquitous characterization of
Enlightenment philosophy as a project of secret, totalizing power lay scenes of
sexual subjection and bondage. Granted, the circumstances of the Illuminati
crisis were highly contingent and local. Orthodox Congregational ministers,
threatened by the erosion of their influence in the face of both secularism and
enthusiastic Christianity, discovered an explanation for social change in a con-
spiracy theory that described Enlightenment liberalism as a sinister force order-
ing world events. Yet the aesthetic quality of this countersubversive fantasy was
pornotropic. The fantasy centered on the sadistic, and often masochistic, desires
through which whiteness and hegemonic masculinity are constituted.
The simultaneous anxiety and fantasy expressed by eighteenth-century
countersubversives – that black men will, in combination with intellectuals
and foreigners, sexually dominate white people – should be recognizable to
even the most casual observer of contemporary conspiracy theories. An
emblematic example can be found in the widespread use of the epithet “cuck-
servative” by white supremacists and counterconspiratorial writers today,
including those who were part-authors of the so-called “Pizzagate” and
“Gamergate” conspiracy theories. According to an analysis by the Southern
Poverty Law Center, the word reached mainstream usage through
Gamergate conspiracy theorist @Drunknsage, and it essentially describes a
Republican who cuckolds himself by cooperating with then President
Barack Obama, an intellectual and a black man. Essentially, “cuckservative”


William Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, on the
Anniversary of American Independence, July th A.D.  (Hartford: Hudson and
Goodwin, ), , .

Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis, Illustrated in a Discourse,
Preached on the Fourth of July,  (New-Haven: Thomas and Samuel Green, ),
–.

Bryan Waterman, “The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of
the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly, ,  (), –, , ; Waterman,
Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American
Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –.

Hatewatch Staff, “Getting Cucky: A Brief Primer on the Radical Right’s Newest
‘Cuckservative’ Meme,” Southern Poverty Law Center,  Aug. , at www.splcenter.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
recapitulates the white-supremacist aesthetics of paranoia in US culture even as
its contingent politics manifest in different contexts and among different
sociopolitical communities. I am suggesting, then, that we can best understand
the reiterative aesthetic logics of conspiracy in the United States as a kind of
literary trope, specifically as a pornotrope. Such recognition, I suggest, reveals
not only the literary character of conspiracy theory, but also its pleasurable
quality. Countersubversives, in short, derive erotic pleasure from the
fictional, even Gothic, conspiracies through which they produce paranoid
forms of sociality.
United States democracy has long been characterized by fantasies of total-
izing, all-powerful enemies, of sexual subjection, and of inescapable racial vio-
lence. The particular politics of such fantasies are historically specific, and yet
their aesthetics are surprisingly recurrent. As Castronovo suggests, moreover,
aesthetic choices are political choices, and they “can echo with compulsion,
implicitly demanding that all others subscribe” to their conception of the
beautiful or, I would add, the disgusting, the terrifying, or the erotic.
What I propose here, then, is that we trace the pornotropic rearticulations
of paranoid white supremacy through democratic discourse. If paranoia is a
style, as Hofstadter suggested a half-century ago, then it is a style characterized
by sadomasochistic aesthetics. I do not mean to collapse the highly contingent
politics and histories of particular paranoid moments, but I do mean to suggest
that these moments have revealed a recurrent representational logic. Attention
to this logic, finally, will reveal the compelling power of conspiratorial fantasy
as it comes roaring back into the center of political life in the United States.

THE SADOMASOCHISTIC AESTHETICS OF RACIAL

DEMOCRACY
If the present moment demands a reconsideration of paranoia in US politics,
as I suggest it does, then Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” remains an important –
if imperfect – point of departure. The problem with Hofstadter’s mid-twen-
tieth-century view of political paranoia, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observed, is
not that it misunderstands such paranoia in any fundamental way. Rather, the
problem is that the original audience for Hofstadter’s essay appears to have
vanished, if it ever existed in the first place. In the intervening half-century
since Hofstadter published “The Paranoid Style,” paranoia has proliferated

org/hatewatch////getting-cucky-brief-primer-radical-rights-newest-cuckservative-
meme, accessed  May .

Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, ), ; and Castronovo, Propaganda, , –.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
even among those in positions of social authority. Throughout his discussion
of the deep history of conspiracy theories in US culture, Hofstadter imagines a
reasonable, detached, and secular liberal reader. As Sedgwick explains: “there
remains,” in Hofstadter’s essay, “a presumptive ‘we’ – apparently still practic-
ally everyone – who can agree to view such [counterconspiratorial] extremes
from a calm, understanding, and encompassing middle ground.” This audi-
ence, Hofstadter seems to imagine, recognizes that the operations of power are
contingent and local. There is no totalizing force able to order world events,
and even the politically powerful are constrained in the realization of their
goals. Sedgwick observed that such a consensus reader (if such a reader ever
existed) has long since departed from mainstream political discourse. In
place of this reader, we have a welter of competing conspiracies, a widespread
mistrust of institutions, and a fractured media landscape more akin to the late
eighteenth century than to the mid-twentieth.
In such a context, I suggest that we do not require a totalizing theory of
paranoia so much as an understanding of the affective – even libidinal – aes-
thetic qualities of the conspiracy theory. In short, I am following Ed
White’s injunction that we not search for “a saner understanding” of conspir-
acy, but rather seek to understand conspiracy’s role in the “production and
praxis of culture.” Such an understanding is only possible, I think, if we
engage conspiracy’s recurrent tropes. To that end, I seek to call attention to
a recursive pattern, a periodic rearticulation of the pornotrope and its ima-
gined inverse among US political paranoids. Certainly, the counterconspira-
torial thinking behind the Illuminati crisis emerged in a discrete political
context of eighteenth-century partisanship, global revolution, Enlightenment
secularism, and enthusiastic Christianity. The counterconspiratorial panic
of late eighteenth-century New England was very different from paranoid con-
spiracy theories in the present: the fear, for instance, that a secret cabal of
“social justice warriors” has systematically propagandized commercial video
games to remove misogynist or racist content, or that a former Democratic
presidential candidate trafficked children across international borders for the
purposes of sexual exploitation. The politics and circumstances of these
cases do not map easily onto one another. But, in each case, we can observe


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Sedgwick, ed., Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University

Press, ), –, . White, “The Value of Conspiracy Theory,” , .

Jonathan Den Hartog, “Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism: Reaction and Religion,” Early
American Studies, ,  (), ; Waterman, Republic of Intellect, –.

Dan Beran, “chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump,” Medium,  Feb. , at
https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-ecbcb,
accessed  April .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
a similar set of aesthetic decisions through which the contingent politics of
political paranoia have been mediated. In each case, we can observe what
Eric Lott has called the “undoing of white male sexual sanctity.” A libidinal
aesthetic economy premised upon the ongoing exploitation of women, begin-
ning with women of color, gives way in these conspiracy theories to a fantasy of
white masculine sexual subjection that is never realized in the material world.
Before considering the periodic rearticulation of these libidinal aesthetics, it
will be productive to provide some context for the Illuminati panic itself – the
scholarship about which is voluminous. The first account of the Illuminati to
be printed in the United States was Jedidiah Morse’s Fast Day sermon of 
May , although there were forerunners and hints in the epistolary
record of what was to come. John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy
(), purportedly a complete account of the Illuminati in Europe, had
arrived in the United States sometime in March , two months before
Morse’s sermon, and had been republished in Philadelphia in mid-April.
The panic, and the debate it engendered, fully emerged in the summer of
: in newspapers, pamphlets, and particularly sermons. Shortly after,
Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism (), another anti-Illuminati
study published in Europe, arrived in the United States. The US anti-
Illuminati writers were generally church leaders: Morse, Yale president
Timothy Dwight, John Cotton Smith, and Elijah Parish among them.


Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; first published ), .

Consider, for instance, Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati
(New York: Columbia University, ); Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the
Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary
Quarterly, ,  (), –; White, –; Seth Cotlar, “The Federalists’
Transatlantic Cultural Offensive of  and the Moderation of American Democratic
Discourse,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds.,
Beyond the Borders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American
Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –; Waterman,
Republic of Intellect, –.

In January of the previous year, Morse received a letter from the Rev. John Erskine of
Edinburgh, who hinted at the imagined cabal and mentioned the forthcoming publication
of John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (). See James King Morse, Jedidiah Morse: A
Champion of New England Orthodoxy (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
See also Stauffer,  n. .

See Jedidiah Morse, “For the Chronicle,” Independent Chronicle and the Universal
Advertiser (Boston), – June , .

References to Barruel appeared as early as  June  in the Connecticut Courant. See
Stauffer,  n. .

In chronological order see Timothy Dwight, The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy,
Exhibited in Two Discourses, Addressed to the Candidates for the Baccalaureate, in Yale
College, September th,  (New Haven, CT: Geo. GE Bunce, ); Jedidiah Morse,
Doctor Morse’s Sermon on the National Fast, May th,  (Boston: Samuel Hall, No.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
Federalist partisans, such as William Brown and Timothy Dwight’s brother,
the poet and newspaper editor Theodore Dwight, also contributed.
Moreover, printers published at least two novels based upon the conspiracy:
Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness () and Sally
Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Julia, and the Illuminated Baron ().
Finally, it was in , as anti-Illuminati writers began to feel increasing pres-
sure to substantiate their claims, that they more fully articulated the specific
racial dangers faced by the new United States. During this period, counter-
subversive writers speculated about whether the “sooty sons of Africa” would
collaborate with foreign subversives.
That a conspiracy theory in the United States quickly transformed into a
narrative of racial paranoia should be relatively unsurprising. The crisis
emerged, after all, in a representational economy already structured by the sub-
jection of black people. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anti-slavery
discourse in the US North was constitutive of a highly racialized sexual
economy. Marcus Wood, for instance, suggests that “displays of extreme
and perverse brutality against the black body” functioned for eighteenth-
century readers as “sites of white pornographic projection.” Saidiya
Hartman amplifies this claim when she explains that visual depictions and lit-
erary descriptions of beatings complicate the project of “beholding black
suffering since the endeavor to bring pain close exploits the spectacle of the

, Cornhill, ); Dwight, The Duty of Americans; John Cotton Smith, Oration,
Pronounced at Sharon, on the Anniversary of American Independence, th of July, 
(Litchfield, CT: T. Collier, ); Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon Preached at Charlestown,
November , , on the Anniversary Thanksgiving in Massachusetts (Boston: Samuel
Hall, ); Morse, A Sermon, exhibiting The Present Dangers, and Consequent Duties of
the Citizens of the United States of America. Delivered at Charlestown, April , , the
Day of the National Fast (Hartford: Reprinted by Hudson and Goodwin, ); Elijah
Parish, An Oration Delivered at Byfield July ,  (Newburyport: Angier March, ).

See Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford; Theodore Dwight, Oration Spoken at Hartford,
in the State of Connecticut, on the Anniversary of American Independence, July th, 
(Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, ). See also Cicero (pseud.), Cicero; or, A Discovery
of a Clan of Conspirators against All Religions and Governments in The Whole World.
Extracted from Robison, Mournier and Barruel; and interspersed with hints in due season
(Baltimore: J. Hayes, ). The Presbyterian minister and future Rutgers president
William Linn would contribute as well. See William Linn, A Discourse on National Sins:
Delivered May , ; Being the Day Recommended by the President of the United States
to be Observed as a Day of General Fast (New York: T. & J. Swords, ), – n.

The first instance I have been able to locate is Morse, A Sermon, exhibiting The Present
Dangers, esp.  n. A.

[Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood], Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (Portsmouth, NH:
Charles Peirce, ), .

Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, Pornography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ), .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
body in pain.” The well-known engravings by William Blake, which
appeared in John Stedman’s Narrative, of five years’ expedition, against the
revolted Negroes of Surinam (), perhaps best emblematize the libidinal
economy I am describing. These images simultaneously registered a protest
against black suffering and sexualized that suffering. In one image, a
“Female Quadroon” appears in a translucent skirt. In another, a bare-breasted
woman hangs by her hands from a tree, her body marked by the scourges of a
whip. Stedman’s account was available and widely discussed in the United
States as early as . The sexual exploitation of black women in the
North, moreover, was not merely a matter of representation. The black
writer Nancy Prince would recall, for instance, that her sister Silvia was
“deluded away” from a position as a “nursery girl” in Boston and, by
February , coerced into performing sex acts to pay down debt. While
many of the counterconspiratorial writers of the Illuminati crisis favored the
abolition of slavery, they were nonetheless implicated in a libidinal economy
that trafficked in the material and representational subjection of black bodies.
Yet the conspiracy theorists of the Illuminati crisis fantasized about the inver-
sion of the pornotropic aesthetic mode through which black women had been
made available for sexual subjection. When William Brown suggested that
French revolutionaries would join self-emancipated black men in “the impure
and shocking death-dance of Africa,” he was (perhaps inadvertently) calling atten-
tion to a material, representational, and libidinal economy in which white men
operated at the center of power and discourse. Brown’s promise that the sexual
prerogatives of white US American men would be upended in favor of black
men and foreigners traded in the simultaneous fear and pleasure evoked by sado-
masochistic play. Just as William Blake’s engravings enabled white men to linger
on the exposed and scourged body of a black woman, Brown’s promise that black
men would let loose their “demoniac lust” upon white “virgins” likewise allowed
readers and listeners to indulge in a fantasy of racial humiliation that was materi-
ally harmless to the white men construed as its ideal consumers.
The fantasies of racial subjection enabled by the Illuminati crisis in the
United States were unlike anything seen during the same paranoid crisis in


Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of
Surinam, in Guiana, on the wild coast of South America, Volume I, engraver William
Blake (London: J. Johnson, ), , , . See also “An Account of some of the
Cruelties Exercised on the Negro Slaves in Surrinam,” Philadelphia Monthly Magazine,
,  (), .

Nancy Prince, A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, rd edn (Boston:
Published by the Author, ), , .

Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, , .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
Europe. This difference between European and US countersubversion is
particularly important because, when New England’s countersubversive
polemicists warned of Illuminati conspiracy, they were describing a
Gothic doppelgänger of their own revolutionary politics. The Illuminati
began twenty-two years earlier not as a countersubversive fantasy but as
an Enlightenment intellectual society. Indeed, this society ran a chrono-
logically parallel course to the American Revolution. German academic
Adam Weishaupt founded the Illuminati in  at the University of
Ingolstadt, in Bavaria. The group’s members were part of Europe’s
Republic of Letters. They were political thinkers who wrote to one
another using classical pseudonyms, including Cato, Brutus, and Philo,
just as numerous revolutionaries in British North America had done.
These names gave a marble polish to what was, in many ways, a modern
project of remaking the world in the name of virtue, self-government,
and democracy. Carl Theodore, Duke of Bavaria, banned the Illuminati
on  June , a year after the United States signed the Treaty of
Paris. On  August  (a month before the US Constitutional
Convention adjourned), Carl Theodore issued a final edict against the
Enlightenment-era society. A few of its members, including Weishaupt,
would escape persecution. But the influence of this brief confederacy
would live on. British reactionaries would link the French Revolution to
the (imagined) influence of the Illuminati. But it was only in the


Adam Weishaupt officially founded the Illuminati on  May . See Stauffer, New
England and the Bavarian Illuminati, ; Lindsay Porter, Who Are the Illuminati?
Exploring the Myth of the Secret Society (London: Collins and Brown, ), . Thomas
Jefferson began drafting the Declaration of Independence the same month. See Thomas
Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume I, –, ed. Julian P. Boyd
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ),  n.

For the use of classical pseudonyms during the American Revolution see Erin Shalev,
“Ancient Masks, American Fathers: Classical Pseudonyms during the American
Revolution and Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, ,  (), –,
esp. –,  n. . For the use of pseudonyms by the Illuminati see John Robison,
Proofs of a Conspiracy (Boston and Los Angeles: Western Islands, ; first published
), .

Stauffer, –, –. See also Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in
Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, ), ; and Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek,
“Radicalism, Republicanism and Revolutionism,” in Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory
Claeys, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), –, .

Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt fled persecution and escaped. See Stauffer, –
n. .

See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin UK, ;
first published ),  n.; Robison, .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
United States that reactionary polemicists fantasized about the sadomaso-
chistic racial politics of Illuminati conspirators. More than a decade after
the demise of the Bavarian intellectual society, one US writer would
imagine that the Illuminati were readying “powerful engines of revolu-
tion.” Having been disbanded in , the Illuminati were engaged in
no such activity. But expressing concern about the actions of other
Enlightenment-era revolutionaries provided a means of casting doubt on
the project of US democracy itself.
In short, by aestheticizing the sadomasochistic racial dimensions of a con-
spiracy theory, the paranoids of the US Illuminati crisis produced a complex
map of political power in which they and their Gothic doppelgängers oper-
ated at the precarious center of discourse. In the world produced by these
writers, racialization enabled a proliferation of sexual fantasies that all
served the libidinal desires of an imagined white masculine readership.
These fantasies derived their erotic jouissance, moreover, from a materially
harmless description of racial humiliation at the hands of imagined conspira-
tors – the chronological and ideological twins of American patriots. To
imagine Illuminati conspirators and their black allies as sexual sadists, in
short, was to acknowledge racial democracy as a kind of sadism. To
imagine the sexual subjection of white women and white men at the hands
of these conspirators was to acknowledge the precarity of a democratic politics
built upon a foundation of racial domination. As these fantasies played out in
the pages of pamphlets and sermons, they revealed fundamental, unresolved
questions about the relation between race, sexual domination, and nascent
democratic politics.
Thirty years ago, Hortense Spillers observed that the transatlantic trade in
human beings produced a condition in which “the female body and the male
body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver.” The bodies of
enslaved people are – from the perspective of enslavers – easily evacuated of
gendered meaning and transformed into “the source of an irresistible, destruc-
tive sensuality.” More recently, scholars such as Ariane Cruz, Jennifer
Christine Nash, Anthony Paul Farley, and Alexander Weheliye have taken
up Spillers’s call to consider the sadomasochistic dimensions of racialized
fantasy. For Farley, whiteness is “a way of feeling pleasure in and about


Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, .

As Roland Barthes has it, jouissance (or bliss) in a text “unsettles the reader’s historical, cul-
tural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a
crisis his relation with language.” See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans.
Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
one’s body,” a libidinal experience through which “power masks itself as
nature.” For Nash, likewise, race functions as a “technology of domination
and a technology of pleasure.” Each of these scholars calls attention to the
sadomasochistic dimensions of racial fantasy, the ways in which racialization
provides the aesthetic space in which to stage relations of power, to indulge
in what Cruz calls the “unspeakable pleasures” of “racialized abjection.”
For the white men whose writing in  transmitted implausible accounts
of impending foreign subversion, the libidinal aesthetics of racialization pro-
vided the means by which they could map themselves into those relations.
The sexuality of black men would be instrumental to the desires of foreign
revolutionaries, they imagined, just as the sexual subjection of black women
would prefigure the sexual subjection of white women. For these countercon-
spiratorial fantasists, operating at the intersections of whiteness and masculin-
ity, the sadomasochistic fantasies of racialization provided the critical aesthetic
terrain upon which to organize themselves in relation with one another and
with the larger world.
Importantly, these men positioned themselves in the center of their
paranoid discourse. The Illuminati, recall, were of a piece with the
Enlightenment-era project that produced US democracy in the first place.
Adam Weishaupt’s intellectual society embodied the “Spirit of ” just
as readily as did the Sons of Liberty. The counterconspiratorial writers of
the Illuminati crisis wove a web of imagined, sadomasochistic relations
through which readers might come to understand the pleasures and perils
of racialization. The body of texts they produced (primarily published
sermons and pamphlets) compelled readers to visualize the relations
between political and human bodies. In short, foreign revolutionaries and
black men represented – for the counterconspiratorial writers of the
Illuminati crisis, at least – not only a threat to the demos, but a Gothic,
sadomasochistic corollary to nascent US democracy. To these writers,
black and foreign bodies were at once an ongoing threat to political cohesion
and an object of aesthetic desire that could be consumed as terror, pleasure,
and eroticism.


Anthony Paul Farley, “The Black Body as Fetish Object,” Oregon Law Review, ,  (),
–, , .

Nash’s work represents a “critical departure from scholarly work on race” because she con-
siders how black women experience the pleasures of racialization. See Jennifer Christine
Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, ), .

Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (New York:
New York University Press, ), .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
THE LIBIDINAL PLEASURES OF PARANOIA IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
What does the pleasurable consumption of a conspiracy theory look like in
practice? Importantly, such pleasurably erotic conspiracy theories do not
exist in isolation. They are embedded in a complex web of conspiracy
fictions. Indeed, recent scholarship has revealed that the Illuminati crisis was
only one among several paranoiac fantasies associated with the French
Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the US quasi-war with France. As
Chandos Michael Brown has observed, late eighteenth-century reactionaries
expressed a fear that emergent ideas about women’s emancipation, particularly
as articulated by Mary Wollstonecraft, were part of a larger, world-revolution-
ary conspiracy. Duncan Faherty, moreover, has traced a widespread panic
among newspaper editors and civic officials in  as a flotilla of French
prison ships reached the US coastline. Numerous observers feared that reen-
slaved revolutionaries from Saint-Domingue and elsewhere in the West
Indies would escape into the countryside, fomenting racial revolution.
Faherty observes that stories of these prisoners circulated even after the
ships themselves had departed, and that these stories often echoed the
Gothic horrors depicted in popular novels of the period. Like the early
twenty-first-century United States, the late eighteenth-century United States
was a place of counterconspiratorial panic – panic very often made manifest
in the aesthetic mode of sadomasochistic racialization. Anti-Illuminati texts
not only articulated a disciplinary racial project. Rather, they were consumed
as pleasurable, libidinal racialization alongside similar narratives, both the
fictional and the (putatively) factual.
To illustrate how anti-Illuminati fantasists spoke in the register of the pleas-
urably and recognizably Gothic, I would like to return briefly to the Hartford
attorney William Brown’s prediction that the Illuminati and their black allies
would systematically rape and murder as they marched northward to New
England. Brown’s predictions are shot through with the pleasurably literary,
the pleasurably Gothic. At a time when the novelist Charles Brockden Brown
(no relation) is articulating a theory of the Gothic novelist as a kind of
“painter,” William Brown is suggesting that his listeners and readers “paint”
for themselves a mental image of Illuminati violence. William Brown writes,


Chandos Michael Brown, “Mary Wollstonecraft; or, The Female Illuminati: The Campaign
against Women and ‘Modern Philosophy’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early
Republic, ,  (), –, .

Faherty, “‘The Mischief That Awaits Us,’” , , –.

[Charles Brockden Brown], Edgar Huntly; or, The Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, Volume I
(Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, ), .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
Imagination already conceives, myriads of furious Africans, collecting together the
materials of vengeance, and marching in dread array, to the dwellings of their
masters. Paint to yourselves, cities given up to indiscriminate plunder, villages
sacked and burned, the country desolated, and the fields “watered with the blood of
their cultivators.” Listen to the groans of wretched white-men, butchered by their
infuriate slaves, the shrieks of mothers, and of virgins, a prey to more than demoniac
lust and barbarity, and the cries of infants,
– “stabbed at the breast,
Or reeking on the points of sportive javelins.”
Brown calls upon his readers to perform acts of imagination. “Paint to your-
selves” the portrait of Illuminati violence, he writes. “Imagination already con-
ceives” the coming horror, he suggests. Indeed, Brown’s eighteenth-century
readers were primed to conceive of the images Brown asked them to paint
to themselves. Much of the passage is borrowed or adapted from other
sources: a popular translation of Cicero’s oration against Catiline (“the
shrieks of mothers, the flight of children, and the violation of the vestal
virgins”), an essay in the British Mercury (“overflowed with the blood of
their cultivators”), and even the Bible (“materials of vengeance”:
Revelation :). But Brown reveals his ultimate aesthetic project with the
final quotation, a line from Henry Brooke’s play Gustavus Vasa (). As
Laura Doyle describes it, the well-known drama retold the story of the
“‘Gothic’ liberator of Sweden.” Much of the eighteenth-century literature
that we would describe today as “Gothic” would not have been described as
such until the s, and yet this literature was quite often associated with
medieval castles and the histories of Germanic peoples. Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto () was subtitled “a Gothic story.” Charles
Brockden Brown described the wilderness setting of his novel Edgar Huntly
() as more frightening than the “Gothic castles and chimeras” of its
European corollaries. And Gustavus Vasa was absolutely “Gothic” in this
sense: pleasurably frightening, sadistically violent, and (as its author described
it) “Gothic and glorious.” In short, William Brown’s prediction of
Illuminati violence drew upon a recognizable, and even pleasurable, literary


Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, .

Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Against Catiline,” in Cicero’s Select Orations, Translated into
English, trans. William Duncan (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, ), –, .

Jacques Mallet du Pan, “An Historical Essay upon the Destruction of the Helvetic League
and Liberty,” British Mercury, ,  (), –, .

Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, –
 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, ), –.

See “Gothic, adj. and n., Draft Additions December ,” in OED Online, March ,

Oxford University Press. [Brown], Edgar Huntly, .

Henry Brooke, Gustavus Vasa, in The Poetical Works of Henry Brooke, Esq. (Dublin: Printed
for the Editor, ), –.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
register. The coming violence would look precisely like the violence of a
popular “Gothic” play. Moreover, with the  publication of formerly
enslaved Londoner Olaudah Equiano’s life story, numerous readers might
have known that the well-known black writer also went by another name:
Gustavus Vassa. In short, Brown’s description of horrific violence came
laden with associations – with blackness, with the Gothic, with the pleasurably
literary. Through Brown, readers came to recognize the violent potentials of
black men as akin to the violence those same readers already consumed in
the safety of circulating libraries and parlors.
I have suggested that we can best understand the Illuminati crisis as a period
of political paranoia, on the one hand, and as a literary project, on the other. As
a literary project, moreover, the crisis borrowed its aesthetics from violent, even
erotic, literature. The records of the New York Society Library at the time, for
instance, hint at just such a pleasurable relation between political paranoia and
aesthetic consumption. Library patron John J. Watts checked out John
Robinson’s anti-Illuminati treatise Proofs of a Conspiracy () within days
of checking out Anne Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Italian; or, The
Confessional of the Black Penitents (). Patron Rebecca Laight checked
out Augustin Barruel’s countersubversive study of the Illuminati only one
day after returning the final volume of Rash Vows; or, The Effects of
Enthusiasm (), the fictional story of a woman whose sexual desire prevents
her from keeping her vow of chastity. Library patron Thomas Delves also
checked out Barruel’s study and, on the day he returned it, borrowed all
three volumes of Rash Vows. Novelistic treatments of illicit sexual desire
were very much of a piece with ostensibly factual accounts of Illuminati machi-
nations: accounts of abortions that concealed illicit sexual relations, of the rape
of white “virgins” by African men, and of secret cabals between enslavers and
their enslaved laborers. Several of the library’s patrons – including John
T. Glover, John Le Conte, and John Mercier – checked out ostensibly
factual accounts of the Illuminati and novelistic treatments of the inter-
national conspirators. While it is impossible to know precisely how library


Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” ; and Doyle, –.

“John J. Watts,” “Rebecca Laight,” and “Thomas Delves,” City Readers, New York Society
Library, at http://cityreaders.nysoclib.org, accessed  May .

[William Bently], Extracts from Professor Robison’s “Proofs of a Conspiracy” (Boston:
Manning and Loring, ), ; Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, ; and Peter
Porcupine [pseud. of William Cobbett], Detection of a Conspiracy, formed by the United
Irishmen, with the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the
Government of the United States (Philadelphia: William Cobbett,  May ), –.

All three checked out Brown’s Ormond in addition to Robison’s Proofs, Barruel’s Memoirs,
or both. See “John T. Glover,” “John Le Conte,” and “John Mercier,” City Readers,
New York Society Library, at http://cityreaders.nysoclib.org, accessed  May .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
patrons were interacting with these texts (or even if they were reading them at
all), one can nonetheless observe in these records that the ostensibly factual
anti-Illuminati discourse occupied the same temporal and generic space as
Gothic fiction.
In the United States, moreover, the authors of Gothic fiction wrote obses-
sively about gendered and racialized bodies. In Charles Brockden Brown’s
Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (), the suspected Illuminatus and
attempted rapist Ormond occasionally disguises himself as a “negro and a
chimney-sweep” to gather intelligence. In Sally Sayward Barrell Keating
Wood’s Julia, and The Illuminated Baron (), a less widely known
novel of the Illuminati crisis, a central character nearly drowns and, when
he awakes, is surrounded by “sooty sons of Africa.” The initial threat – who
are these black men? – gives way to relief as he realizes that he has landed at
Mount Vernon. The black men, he writes, are “the servants, or rather
humble friends, of the Illustrious WASHINGTON; from him they had
learnt to follow the dictates of humanity, to obey the impulse of benevolence,
and to tread on the broad paths of philanthropy.” Wood’s language strains
for control of the racial hierarchy. The enslaved men are, initially, “servants” to
the former President. Then they are imagined as “humble friends.” They have
learned from their enslaver – or, rather, their “friend” – to “obey” and to
“follow.” Ormond and Julia were published within months of each other,
and each expresses profound anxiety about the relation between blackness
and international conspiracy. Would the US racial hierarchy provide a tool
of foreign subversion (as in the case of Ormond), or would the loyalty of
sub-sovereign US subjects remain inviolable (as in the case of Julia)? The
answer was hardly a foregone conclusion.
Anti-Illuminati sermons, orations, pamphlets, and even novels enabled
writers and readers to focus their attention inward. The lurid descriptions
provided by these texts were, in many ways, the work of fantasists concerned
with and titillated by the imagined inversion of a system of sexual domination
by white men. For one anonymous countersubversive writer, for instance, the
true horror of the Illuminati lay in their attack on biological reproduction. He
described French revolutionaries as murdering the “unborn fruit of the
womb,” and added that the present political moment was a Gothic
doppelgänger of a reproductive woman’s body: “big with danger and pregnant
with horrid machinations.” For another anti-Illuminati orator, the impend-
ing conflagration was a punishment of Christians in the North for having


[Charles Brockden Brown], Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (New York: G. Forman, for

H. Caritat, ), . [Wood], Julia, –.

Cicero (pseud.), Cicero, –.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
allowed the sin of slavery to persist. “We know where we are most vulnerable,”
he writes, “and melancholy is the tale of St. Domingo.” Countersubversive
texts wove together fantasies of sexual and racial violence, but these fantasies
often bore little relation to the actual violence of Atlantic revolutions. They
were solipsistic fictions, and very often fictions that did little to conceal
their fictionality. One countersubversive writer even suggested that “slave-
holders in either Carolina or Virginia” had set their enslaved laborers free
in order to “involve the whole country in rebellion and bloodshed.” Such
a claim – that southern enslavers would intentionally foment a revolution by
the enslaved – only makes sense if one does not seek to inquire too closely
into the actual operations of political and economic power and instead
focusses exclusively upon the object of horror and desire: bodies construed
through discourse as black, as female, or as both.
Indeed, horror and desire constituted the twinned manifestations of coun-
terconspiratorial fantasists. For Morse, French subversion constituted an act of
national seduction. Nations, he writes, are “easy prey” unless they are “vigor-
ous, active, and united in opposing” these “insidious and seductive arts.”
Literary scholars have long noted the relation between seduction and US dem-
ocracy. For Elizabeth Barnes, narratives of seduction in the early republic were
the inevitable result of “the complicated relationship between coercion and
consent characteristic of democratic disciplinary agendas.” In short, a
society based upon (ostensibly) horizontal affiliation required a discourse
that could parse the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate versions
of coerced consent – that could distinguish between the loving but coercive
father and the coercive (but illegitimate) lover. As a result, novels of seduction
proliferated, including novels featuring Illuminati as villains and antagonists.
The proliferation of such novels is notable in this context because Morse
echoes their operative logics when he describes the violence of black men as
an example of the “seductive arts.” Countersubversive writers feared that for-
eigners – from French philosophes to West Indian black soldiers – would
seduce and coerce sub-sovereign members of the new US family (white
women, enslaved blacks) into unsanctioned relations of sexual violence. But
they also fantasized about this possibility, and their fantasies took on the qual-
ities of popular, Gothic fiction. They consumed their horror as pleasure.
Racial democracy depends upon a set of mediating fictions – about mem-
bership in a political community, about the collective past, about the inevitable

 
Linn, A Discourse on National Sins, –. Porcupine, –.

Morse, A Sermon, exhibiting The Present Dangers, , original emphasis.

Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel
(New York: Columbia University Press, ), .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
future. And yet consumers of these fictions need not believe in their factuality
in order to adhere to their operative logics. Fictions are pleasurable. It hardly
matters whether eighteenth-century readers distinguished between the osten-
sibly factual accounts of Illuminati collaboration with enslaved black people
and the fictional account of Ormond covering himself with soot to pass for
a “negro” in the streets of Philadelphia. Readers consumed the obviously
fictional alongside the ostensibly factual. Library patrons borrowed putatively
accurate accounts of the Illuminati even as they borrowed Gothic novels.
Readers found in accounts of the Illuminati conspiracy, moreover, the kind
of titillation they encountered in such Gothic novels. Countersubversive
writers described white New England women transformed into “concu-
bines.” They described secret sexual liaisons concealed by illicit abortions.
They offered readers the chance to linger over words describing the rape of
white virginal women by “infuriate” black men. Fiction, like race, is as
much a technology of pleasure as a technology of power – and conspiracy the-
ories are indeed a kind of fiction. In a racial democracy, the production and
consumption of countersubversive fiction authorizes libidinal pleasures. The
consumer of such fiction is offered a totalizing view of the world. He is
offered control over a fictive field of discourse. And he is offered fantasies of
sexual domination and sexual subjection that are (to him) materially harmless.
Debates about the political authority of orthodox Congregational churches, a
central point of contention during the s, have long since been left in the
past. Yet the aesthetics of the Illuminati crisis – essentially the masochistic por-
notropes of Illuminati rape fantasies – have proven alarmingly recurrent. They
are, I would suggest, very much with us today.

THE PORNOTROPES OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL

REACTION
Shortly before : p.m. Eastern Time on  October , less than an hour
after the leak of a video in which then Republican presidential nominee
Donald J. Trump bragged about groping women without their consent,
the Wikileaks website began to release emails from the account of Hillary
Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Once Podesta’s emails began to
circulate, numerous users on the Internet imageboard chan began to specu-
late about Podesta’s frequent references to “cheese pizza.” For those familiar
with the operations of a political campaign – an organization that depends
upon numerous volunteers, interns, and staffers – the idea of a campaign

 
Dwight, The Duty of Americans, –. [Bently], Extracts, .

Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
manager ordering cheese pizza would seem innocuous. But on chan,
“cheese pizza” frequently served as code for child pornography. Equally sus-
picious, to anonymous chan writers, were Podesta’s discussions about
Italian fine dining, including Ligurian cuisine. Surely, chan users specu-
lated, references to “walnut sauce” must have been code for sexual activity.
Within a month, chan users had collectively authored an elaborate con-
spiracy theory. According to this theory, Podesta and his brother, Tony
Podesta, were the masterminds of an international child-sex ring centered
around a Washington, DC pizza parlor. The two had, according to this
theory, kidnapped the white British child Madeleine McCann (who had
disappeared in Portugal in ) and had organized lurid forms of sexual
exploitation and murder involving then Democratic presidential nominee
Hillary Rodham Clinton, then President Barack Obama, and others.
From the imagined subterranean seraglio beneath the pizza parlor, to the
wholly invented “kill room” in the back of the restaurant’s kitchen, to
the Italian American aesthetes behind the entire operation, the story that
emerged was positively Gothic.
It was, moreover, pornotropic. Whatever else it might be, chan is a website
through which users share highly racialized pornography. Even more signifi-
cantly, political discussions on the website often center on racialized fantasies
of sexual subjection. Users openly discuss, for instance, whether white women
disproportionately favor progressive social policies because they are “subcon-
sciously longing” for the bodies of “brown exotic” men, for sexual liaisons
with “dominant animalistic” racial others. In these discussions, questions
about the free movement of people or the future of democratic systems
often devolve into discussions about the imagined, subversive alliance
between global intellectual elites and subaltern and postcolonial subjects.
Discussions on chan, in other words, manifest the same sadomasochistic aes-
thetics that have characterized prior Gothic political fictions. It should come as
no surprise, then, that chan users collectively authored a Gothic narrative in
which black men, white women, and cosmopolitan elites (in this case, two
Italian American men) conspired to kidnap, rape, murder, and seize control
of the US nation-state.
Many observers of the present political crisis have settled upon the question
whether those who articulate conspiracy theories truly believe them. The
New Yorker’s Amy Davidson, for instance, observed that high-ranking


Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang, “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy
Theories,” New York Times,  Dec. , at www.nytimes.com/interactive////
business/media/pizzagate.html, accessed May , .

Anonymous [ID: zYsLuf], “Why Did Women Overwhelmingly Voted [sic] for Macron,”
chan, last modified  May , accessed  May .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
Republican officials, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn,
were responsible for disseminating this story, which came to be known as
Pizzagate. “Which is more alarming,” Davidson asked, “the idea that
Pizzagate is being promoted by politically motivated cynics who don’t actually
believe it, or that people with influence and proximity to power, including
people with access to the [then] President-elect, are really susceptible to this
sort of nonsense.” I would suggest, however, that Davidson’s question
misses something important about the aesthetic experience of countersubver-
sive fantasy. Conspiracy theories, I suggest, can be understood as objects of
erotic pleasure. When eighteenth-century countersubversive William Bently
published in Boston a pamphlet summarizing the charges against the
Illuminati, he lingered upon the rumor that the organization’s founder,
Adam Weishaupt, had carried on an illicit affair with his brother’s wife,
and that this affair had culminated in the abortion of an illegitimate fetus.
Bently lingered, in short, on the titillating. When William Brown offered
his own description of the Illuminati, he described for readers the rape of
white virginal women by black men. When Jedidiah Morse imagined the
Illuminati in the United States, he described an army of black men practicing
the “seductive arts.” The pleasures of fiction, particularly Gothic or erotic
fiction, are hardly rational, but they nonetheless provide a means of ordering
the world.
The pleasures of such fictions explain, at least in part, the ongoing appeal of
their pornotropic aesthetics, and even of the “Illuminati” itself as a symbol for
organizing these aesthetics. “Guccifer .” – the online persona now widely
believed to have served as a front for the security services of the Russian
Federation as they orchestrated a hack of the Clinton campaign – claimed
in June  that his alleged ties to the Russian government were nothing
but a lie spread by the Illuminati, writing, “F[***] the Illuminati and their con-
spiracies!!!!!!!!!” The choice to identify the Illuminati as the actual source of
the threat was no mere accident. Several of those spreading the Pizzagate con-
spiracy theory associated the alleged pedophilia with the Illuminati themselves,
implying that the contemporary heirs of eighteenth-century revolutionary phi-
losophes were now participating in lurid acts of kidnapping, pedophilia, and


Amy Davidson, “The Age of Donald Trump and Pizzagate,” New Yorker,  Dec. , at
www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-age-of-donald-trump-and-pizzagate, accessed

 May . [Bently], Extracts, .

Brown, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, , .

Morse, A Sermon, exhibiting The Present Dangers, .

United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho et al., Criminal No.  U.S.C. §§ ,
,,A, , and  et seq. (United States District Court for the District of
Columbia,  June ), .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
 Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy 
murder. These imagined acts recalled the lurid, and highly racialized, fears
and desires of William Brown, William Bently, Jedidiah Morse, and others.
In “The Paranoid Style,” Hofstadter observed in passing that conspiracy
very often functions as a kind of “pornography” for political outsiders. I
would suggest, however, that the pornotropes of paranoid countersubversion
represent not only pornographic titillation, but also a coherent political aes-
thetic. Figurations of erotic desire and disgust, as Laura Mulvey writes, are
very often significations that fix and freeze historic events “outside of rational
memory and individual chronology.” Objects of desire and repulsion,
Mulvey contends, retain the markers through which we can trace their
origins in the real world of suffering, violence, and trauma. It should be unsur-
prising, then, that those who share child pornography under the sobriquet
“cheese pizza” would offer their own paranoid readings of a Washington,
DC pizza parlor. It should be unsurprising that those who lived in cities
where nominally free black women were forced via debt to perform sex acts
for white men would fixate upon the erotics of racial subjection. In the
pages of the New Yorker, Davidson asked if US political conservatives “are
really susceptible to this sort of nonsense.” But the “nonsense” of political
paranoia makes sense to its consumers, even if it is nonrational, implausible,
and Gothic. Paranoia is fiction, and fiction is pleasurable.
The resurgent far right in the United States has revealed itself as a group
united as much by the sadomasochistic aesthetics of countersubversive
fantasy as by a coherent political program. The newly visible interplay
between the pornographic and the political, moreover, has forced journalists
for legacy publications to explain to an often baffled readership what, precisely,
is meant by the sudden emergence of cuckolds and other archaic sexual figures
in electoral discourse. I have suggested here, then, that scholars and other
observers turn with new attention to the sadomasochistic racial aesthetics of
countersubversion’s long history in the United States. A close examination
of paranoid theories – and even a cursory examination of many of them –
reveals an underlying aesthetic logic organized around the titillating fictions
of racial masochism and racial sadism. Conspiracy fictions in the United
States, from those of the Illuminati crisis to those of Pizzagate, are united
transtemporally by the pornotropes that their authors encode. Historians
and cultural critics since Hofstadter have treated the Illuminati crisis as the


Matthew Odam, “How Austin’s East Side Pies Became Target of Fake #Pizzagate,” Austin
American Statesman,  Dec. , at www.statesman.com/news//how-austins-
east-side-pies-became-target-of-fake-pizzagate.

Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style,” .

Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, ), xiv, . Davidson.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408
  Gordon Fraser
antetype of paranoid politics in US culture. Certainly, it was the first such
national crisis in the republican period. We should be unsurprised, then, by
the sadomasochistic racial aesthetics of the Illuminati panic. Such aesthetics,
after all, have reappeared even in conspiracy fictions of the present.
Pornotropic aesthetics, moreover, reveal as they recur. Even as they distort
underlying conditions of racial domination, they call attention to such condi-
tions. The fictions of countersubversive fantasists, in short, offer a window
onto how those fantasists imagine themselves into a relation with the world.
When Anthony Paul Farley suggests that whiteness provides a means “of
feeling pleasure in and about one’s body,” or when Jennifer Christine Nash sug-
gests that race functions as a “technology of domination and a technology of
pleasure,” both are revealing of race what has long been recognized of
fictions. Fictions provide the pleasure of a confirmed self and the periodic jouis-
sance of that self’s momentary erasure. The act of reading, Roland Barthes sug-
gests, enables the reader to set aside the real and to surrender to the erotics of
language. Barthes writes, “the reader can keep saying: I know these are only
words, but all the same … (I am moved as though these words were uttering a
reality).” In such a context, the lines between fact and fiction are, very literally,
immaterial. The subterranean seraglio beneath a pizza parlor echoes with the
same “compulsion” as stories of a European rapist disguised as a “negro
chimney-sweep,” as an “infuriate” black man escaped from bondage. What
is missing from these accounts – the actual exploitation of women, including
and often especially women of color – remains an unacknowledged background
condition. What is visible instead is the fantasy of erotic erasure, an aesthetic of
white masculine subjection that periodically obliterates (and restores) the power
and pleasure of whiteness and maleness. Readers – turning pages in an eight-
eenth-century pamphlet or scrolling across a twenty-first-century imageboard –
are “moved as though these words [are] uttering a reality.” They are moved by
an aesthetics of their own subjection. They are moved to a kind of bliss.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Gordon Fraser is a Presidential Academic Fellow in American studies and a permanent member of
the faculty at the University of Manchester. His scholarship has appeared in PMLA, American
Quarterly, and J, among other journals. In the – academic year, he is a Visiting Fellow
at the Center for Humanities and Information at the Pennsylvania State University.


Farley, “The Black Body as Fetish Object,” , ; Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy, .

Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, , original emphasis.

Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, ; [Brown], Ormond, ; Brown, An Oration, Spoken

at Hartford, . Barthes, .

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Saskatchewan Library, on 14 Nov 2018 at 13:59:43, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818001408