The opacity of power: history and fiction of state secrecy

Abstract

While public debates about digital culture call for transparency, the historical semantics of secret and its multiple political functions demonstrate that the concept often entails a reduction in complexity. With the birth of the modern state, a paradigm shift occurs: the religious and cosmological connotation of mystery shifts into the political technique of secret. In the modern era, the rational calculation beyond political secrecy becomes a strategic device of a raison d'État, aimed at preserving and extending power. This transformation has led to the state, by operating in secret, becoming vulnerable to an endless cascade of conspiratorial accounts of its activities, both from conspiracy theorists using alternative media and from political opponents who adhere to the norms of democratic debate. After examining the relationship between state secrets and conspiracy narratives, this essay analyses political fictions by two Argentine writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Ricardo Piglia, which depict the impotence in the face of the opacity of power in a sovereignty whose conspiracy permeates the formal aesthetic discourse of the stories themselves, thus highlighting the capacity of fiction to analyse the secret logic of political conspiracies.