Symposium

Today we begin publishing our first book forum, a set of essays critically engaged with Zahid Chaudhary’s Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham 2025). Chaudhary, through a provocative intermingling of Foucault and Freud, excavates the contemporary psychosocial conditions of truth in the world of alternative facts, conspiracy, and widespread paranoia. An essential critical work on […]

In the Interregnum I am honored by these close engagements with Paranoid Publics, which together read like a conversation even though each author in this book forum was not aware of what the others would be writing. I offer my response as a continuation of this conversation’s reflections on the critical traditions of thought that

“It seems to me characteristic of the paranoiac that, though, on account of his persecution-anxiety and his suspicions, he develops a very strong and acute power of observation of the external world and of real objects, this observation and his sense of reality are nevertheless distorted, since his persecution-anxiety makes him look at people mainly

In Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth Zahid Chaudhary offers a finely honed and powerfully illuminating account of the psychosocial operations animating contemporary political culture.  As Chaudhary rightly notes, much political commentary on the left has tended towards an analysis of right-wing populisms, and the post-truth politics in which they traffic, in relatively reductive political economic

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Lewis Carroll, Through

“Hate to tell you but the only time ‘real’ comes into it is when they’re shooting at you. In practice, ‘real’ means dead—anything else, there’s always room for some conversation.” Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket Paranoid Publics is a rich and incisive analysis of what Zahid Chaudhary calls the psychopolitics of truth. It is, in fact,

Do you have to be paranoid to know a conspiracy theory when you see one? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her critique of the paranoid disposition of academic writing in the mid 1990s, convinced us so—at least that’s what I was tempted to think before reading Zahid Chaudhary’s Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth. Sedgwick’s famous essay,