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, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” helped generate a backlash to what Paul Ricoeur called “the hermeneutics of suspicion” by begging the question of what other methods of interpretation might be amenable to discerning not only the operations of literary and cultural texts, but the forms of politics and power at stake in them. The destination of Sedgwick’s essay, readers might remember, was toward the object relations of Melanie Klein and the cognitive/affective theories of Silvan Tomkins, two thinkers who helped her break up suspicion’s famous genealogy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to become major figures in the emergence of paranoia’s seeming successor, reparation. Today, it seems, reparation has started to lose some of its critical steam (or so the titles of a few recent publications suggest), and there’s no doubt, in an era that goes by the nicknames of alternative facts and post-truth, that paranoia and its cultural dominant, conspiracy, are back in the news.¹ Is there a way to square the circle here, between Sedgwick’s exhaustion with paranoid reading in favor of reparation and Chaudhary’s turn to both Freud and Foucault (with help from Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Klein) to understand the cultural phenomena giving paranoia new life today? Or more to the point, does the revival of attention to paranoia demand, as Sedgwick assumed, that it would “‘take[] one to know one,’” or are there other ways to situate debates over reading and interpretation in the critical humanities in a political present supercharged by paranoid affects? (2003, 127).²

Paranoid Publics does not directly enter the contestations that lie at the heart of these questions, though Sedgwick makes a brief appearance in Chaudhary’s careful rehearsal of Freud’s use of the famous Daniel Paul Schreber case to establish what would stand for decades as the foundational psychoanalytic conception of paranoia (it’s the latent homosexuality stupid!). For Sedgwick, it’s precisely this history of paranoia, with its century-long pathologizing effects, that encourages her search for a practice of reading that can conjure other affective relations, especially for queer theory which, in addition to literary studies, is the interdisciplinary nexus that frames her methodological concerns. In the stage setting opening of the essay, Sedgwick ruminates with her scholar-activist-friend Cindy Patton on the potential truth or falsity of conspiracy theories concocted within the gay community about the origins of HIV. Had the virus “been deliberately engineered or spread”? (2003, 123). Did it “represent[] a plot or experiment by the U.S. military that had gotten out of control, or . . . was [it] behaving exactly as it was meant to”? (2003, 123). Patton responds: “‘I have trouble getting interested in that . . . [S]uppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap when they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants . . . . [W]hat would we know then that we don’t already know?’” (2003, 123). Patton’s resistance to paranoia’s belief in its own knowingness—that there is, at the heart of conspiratorial reasoning, a finer grained truth that has been willfully obscured—serves as the essay’s method-changing motive. “Patton’s comment,” Sedgwick writes, “suggests that for someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequence” (2003, 124). In this way, Sedgwick sets out to break the linkage between what is already known about “systemic oppressions” and a mode of analysis committed to the repetitious practice of exposing the obfuscations of power that propel them.

Sedgwick’s essay, as is clear from this opening, finds its historical context in the ruminations of an oppressed community facing what Leo Bersani diagnosed in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” as the state’s genocidal desire for the eradication of homosexuals, manifested in the guise of mistaking HIV-AIDS as a gay disease so as to ignore or perversely celebrate it. But in the years since Sedgwick’s intervention the historical prompt—a global pandemic killing millions—has dimmed as the essay has come to stand as the methodological formulation not only for reparative modes of reading but for the rise and proliferation of affect studies as well. To be sure, one might take Sedgwick’s essay as authorizing just such a diminishment of the historical particular in favor of the methodological general as “Paranoid Reading” doesn’t return to or mention HIV once the scene-setting work of the first three pages has been done. But we’d be poorer readers than Sedgwick to think that the political constellation of the essay’s historical present was not absolutely germane to its drive to fulfill a wish, as she put it, “to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (2003, 149). In fact, one of her key arguments against the near universal investment in paranoid reading she saw as dominating the humanities was the necessity of “unpack[ing] the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller” (2003, 124). Such unpacking, she was sure, would draw on “a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks,” not to illuminate what we already know about “systemic oppressions” but to locate resources that paranoid practices routinely overlook (2003, 150). “What we can best learn from [reparative] practices,” she writes in the last line of the essay, includes “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (2003, 150-51). In the sonic register that this sentence invites, the essay closes by confirming the distance it has traveled from suspicion to sustenance, and hence from suspicion’s investment in knowingness (ie epistemology) to the contingencies of the affective that sustain selves and communities alike.

Reparativity and its affective revisions are thus very much bound up in a historical present overwhelmed by state-sanctioned death and, as any reader familiar with Sedgwick’s archive knows, by her own battle with what would become a terminal breast cancer diagnosis. To say that Chaudhary’s Paranoid Publics is of another time is not only to mark the most obvious—thirty years on from Sedgwick’s earliest ruminations against paranoid reading—but to bring to the foreground the different stakes as well as uncanny echoes that give rise to his project. Let’s start with the most haunting echo. From the book’s opening paragraph, readers know that the second pandemic of many of our lifetimes is a key figure for Chaudhary’s grappling with our historical present, as Covid 19, in a phrase too often repeated to track down an original source, “broke people’s brains,” shredding the epistemological authority of science-backed health agencies and further fracturing the always fragile relationship between government authority and the civilian population it is euphemistically said to serve. Many of Chaudhary’s objects of study—rightly called “social phenomena” to situate the book’s critical environment as cultural, not primarily literary, studies—are related to the pandemic and its ongoing fallout, with contestations over masks, vaccinations, and schools breeding new social movements against “governmental and corporate control” (19, 1). Think parental rights, medical freedom, Moms for Liberty, and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) for starters. Each of these phenomena—the very making of them as phenomena—takes shape through conspiracy-laden suspicions that ramp up as well as reconfigure both social antagonisms and the public domains in which the terrain of political power is managed and contested. Had Covid 19 “been deliberately engineered or spread”? Did it “represent[] a plot or experiment . . . that had gotten out of control, or . . . was [it] behaving exactly as it was meant to”? (Sedgwick, 2003, 123). In the current environment, Patton’s answer to these questions, for Chaudhary, is patently wrong, not just in that airy way we might say things are different now, but because how they are different tells us a lot, he argues, about what we don’t already know—about paranoia as well as its role in the mediated realm of the political itself. “Orienting the analysis of politics toward the unconscious has profound implications,” he writes, “since it discloses politics as a domain far larger and stranger than that conceived by sociology or political science”—or we might add many left leaning discourses that presume to already know the political (146).

These then are the stakes of Paranoid Publics, and they require a methodological maneuver borne of the contingent and local formation of the phenomena Chaudhary studies, which entails a keen interest in tracking the pleasures and lure offered by the “paranoid dispositions” of a post-factual world—QAnon conspiracy theories, whistleblowing, medical “freedom” movements, mystery illnesses, and the public vocabulary that courses through them, including the daily mantras that condemn the “deep state” and “fake news” through “truthing” (20). This world, for Chaudhary, is not readable in epistemological terms—we don’t and can’t already know how it operates—in part because these paranoid publics are not contending for epistemological authority and knowledge, as Sedgwick’s conversation with Patton assumed. Instead, “belief takes priority over fact and feeling priority over knowledge” (7). In a rather fascinating inversion of the bargain Sedgwick offered, Chaudhary moves toward the affective not to be liberated from the contagion that paranoia breeds but to understand the distinctly “psychosocial mechanisms” that enable it, which include “fantasy, anxiety . . . disavowal, projection, and the like” (3). In taking up the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Chaudhary thoroughly rejects the individualist myopia that has marred it critical history and contemporary reputation, working instead within the antagonisms that have long haunted the hermeneutics of suspicion when it comes to the different itineraries of Marx and Freud: the one aligned with the social as the material condition of the subject’s consciousness, the other with the individual’s psychic constitution based largely in the experiential contours of personal history. In this negotiation, Chaudhary’s project rests on what we sometimes already know(!), ala the Frankfurt School, that the individual is not “merely individual because the psyche is governed by needs, demands, and compulsions that are fundamentally social and historical in nature” (23). His investment in reconfiguring the psychoanalytic brings to the fore its hermeneutic appetite for encounters with the indivisibility of reality and fantasy, truth and fiction—shorn now of  epistemological faith in effecting a cure or, as in the case of Sedgwick via Klein, mitigating anxieties to sustain the self in the face of social harm. To that end, Chaudhary chides, in a footnote, not so much the value “Paranoid Reading” confers on reparation, but how its arguments have been universalized in ways that simultaneously “conflate[] paranoia with critique and sideline[] the necessity of thinking more carefully about paranoia”—a damaging diminution when it comes to understanding the disorienting conditions of a political present in which “paranoid publics are on the rise” (157, n49).        

A reconfigured psychoanalytic is the key methodological formulation here. Following the work not only of Frankfurt School theorists but of contemporary scholars rethinking race through psychoanalysis, Chaudhary makes the necessary leap to see paranoia’s contagion as a political formation and, while many of his objects of study are bound to the right’s ecosystem, the book understands that we all live in a post-fact world now. Hence he takes the “disfigurement of subjectivity” found in an individual case history as inseparable from the “corrosive effects” of the social order—a position that would seem to be in synch with Patton’s own sense that what conspiracy theories reveal about HIV is bound to what she already knows as a lesbian and queer activist about the “systemic oppressions” of the social order (22). But Paranoid Publics does not proceed as if the stakes of the political—or the terrain in which systemic oppressions are perceived (let alone lived)—are as obvious as Patton and Sedgwick assume. In its terms, what Patton describes are the effects, not the operations of oppressive systems—and certainly not the mechanisms of what Chaudhary calls their psychopolitics. “Instead of understanding unconscious processes as a reaction to or reflection of social and political realities,” he writes, “this book assumes that unconscious processes themselves constitute the political”—and further that, “[n]o matter how unhinged a paranoid fantasy might appear to be, there is something in the social order that warrants the fantasy since the social order has generated it” (3, 24). To get at this complexity requires not only critical regard for the unconscious in both its subjective and social determinations, but a commitment to bypass the largely epistemological orientation toward paranoia and conspiracy that Sedgwick takes for granted in order to repel them. Chaudhary builds this bypass by turning from knowledge to the problem of truth where the epistemological weight of evidence and proof are delinked from the rationalist trappings of liberal inheritances that privilege facts and other forms of veridiction to constitute authority. In his terms, the vocabulary of truth that circulates in the present—from left leaning diagnoses of post-truth to alt right “truthing”—demonstrate that “the relationship between truth and power is being reorganized,” hence the book’s subtitle: Psychopolitics of Truth (6).

To be sure, citing Chaudhary’s turn toward truth regimes does not settle the matter of whether paranoid reading is necessary to grasp paranoia as a public affect but it does make clear how, for Paranoid Publics, the question of interpretative practice is not borne in a literary critical contestation over the reparative capacities of surface, slow, or distant reading versus suspicion’s predilection for unmasking but in the work of tracking the changing contours of the political itself. In this critical posture, Chaudhary attends to Sedgwick’s insistence that modes of interpretation do not innocently precede their objects of study by responding to paranoid publics in ways that second Stuart Hall’s call for theory to be used, as Wendy Brown described it in “Resisting Left Melancholy,” for “apprehend[ing] the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character” (19). The contemporary character of our age, Paranoid Publics insists (and who would be tempted to argue?), is epitomized by the “‘deformation’ of reality” or what Eva Chernivasky in Neocitizenship has called the “derealization” of politics in the contemporary moment (25). The final chapter, on hysteria, brings this derealization home by retrieving a much maligned psychoanalytic concept to consider the implications of two “mystery illnesses”—Havana syndrome and resignation syndrome in Sweden (109). Here the figure of the border and of hostile environments for embodied life are brought to the foreground as the book’s analysis moves seemingly outward from the focus on largely U.S. national and intra-national conflict to two populations rarely (if ever) discussed in tandem: diplomats and spies, and asylum seekers. In doing so, Paranoid Publics is able to consider how the lived experience of psychopolitics produces symptoms but no clear or final diagnosis, as neither of the illnesses under discussion has been accounted for in its etiology by medical expertise. This relation—of symptoms without an adequate, knowing diagnosis—is itself representative of the task that Paranoid Publics sets for itself, as it reads symptoms of the derealization of the political without attempting to form a final or settled diagnosis. The value of the project and the importance of its contribution to contemporary scholarship lies precisely here, in its ability to illuminate and explore symptoms of a present impossible to fully grasp, as psychoanalysis has repeatedly taught us. It is the strength of the book that it renders the limits of its own knowing through a commitment to the analytic it so brilliantly offers.

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of the Programs in Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University.

1. Signs of the decline of repair include Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique and Summer Kim Lee’s Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair, as well as the ongoing engagement, from multiple queer and feminist perspectives with negativity. See my extended discussion of the reparative turn in feminist theory (2014), as well as my consideration of debates about the anti-social thesis in queer theory (2017).

2. Sedgwick began publishing her critique of paranoid reading in the mid 1990s, first in her introduction to a 1996 special issue, “Queerer Than Fiction,” for Studies in the Novel, and a year later in her introduction for the expanded edited collection Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Both early versions feature the conversation with Patton that would serve as the essay’s prompt when it appeared in its most cited form, as chapter four of Touching Feeling in 2003. But by then, reparative reading had become a synonym for the affective turn and the conversation with Patton at the outset gets read as a rhetorical anecdote to launch the essay and not as itself a symptom of the truth regimes at work in the formation of the cultural wars that decade—regimes that Chaudhary’s book helps us to understand in both their uniquely configured present and in the longer political struggles of which they are a part.

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 197-222.

Brown, Wendy. “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2, 26.3 (Fall 1999): 19-27.

Cherniavsky, Eva. Neocitizenship: Public Culture After Democracy. New York: NY University Press, 2017.

Lee, Summer Kim. Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003: 123-151.

—. Introduction: Queerer Than Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 28.3 (Fall 1996): 277-280.

—. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997): 1-37.

Stuelke, Patricia. The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

Wiegman, Robyn. “Sex and Negativity, Or What Queer Theory has for You,” Cultural Critique 95 (Winter 2017): 219-43.

—.  “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn,’” Feminist Theory 15.1 (2014): 1-24.