ABSTRACT
Whence is derived the pleasure of the thriller? Wherein lies the pleasure of its thrills? By producing a mechanics of pleasure from uncovering the seemingly interminable reaches of the state, the thriller, especially its conspiratorial mode, could be seen to accomplish the unleashing of a desire, a revolutionary desire, to chart and interpret our societies. As discussed above, conspiracy proffers a Jamesonian production of the missing psychology of the political unconscious and its transcription of the local to the global, a means by which the absent totality of social relations may be figured as a connective network of crime. Therefore, the thrill at the political centre of the genre, the confrontation of human consciousness with the spectral reaches of the late capitalist state, even as they engulf the human subject, offers a paradigmatic modality of the experience of (post)modernity itself:
To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often destroy all communities, values, lives: and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change our world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so may modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts (Berman, 14).
