“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 from the point of view of whether they are persecutors or not. Where the persecution-anxiety for the ego is in the ascendant, a full and stable identification with another object, in the sense of looking at it and understanding it as it really is, and a full capacity for love, are not possible.” (Klein 155)
How can we think about the political, psychic, and epistemological aspects of truth in a world of increasing authoritarianisms? What might psychoanalysis teach us about the roles of desire, projection, and phantasy in such considerations of truth? In Zahid Chaudhary’s Paranoid Politics: Psychopolitics of Truth, we are delivered a timely and sober appraisal of the libidinal economy undergirding an increasingly paranoid set of political practices around truth. This book does not lament the decline of truth or invest in (assuredly paranoid) projections of a post-truth world. Rather, Chaudhary looks to two unlikely pairings—psychoanalytic writings on paranoia, projection, and hysteria and Foucauldian approaches to truth and power—to read the power of psyche in the current episteme. One particular strength of this book is that it can so convincingly bring psychoanalysis back into play with power, showcasing how regimes and games of truth are radically entangled with the workings of the unconscious along the lines of connection that bind the socius, nationalism, and the conceits of both mastery (of truth/the world) and purity (of nation/of race/of morality). If paranoid projection tries to master the world and know it, it does so by splitting objects into good and bad objects—objects that cannot be whole, analyses that cannot tolerate ambivalence. As such, Chaudhary’s work here is not to expose the truth of right-wing paranoia nor to find a final diagnosis of our moment, but to read psychoanalytically how truth requires phantasy, projection, and idealization in order to have its hold both psychically and politically. Moreover, these feelings of epistemic certainty and, even, victimization can create enjoyment: “Paranoia, for its part, offers up certainty as its own form of enjoyment, and often aligns itself with a moral higher ground, a superior vantage point from which the corruption of a cabal (for example) can be condemned” (6). If this is so and if, as Chaudhary warns us, paranoia is a psychic structure that subtends not only the right but also the purported left, then I wonder how we may read ourselves and our scholarly practices in this vein. I do so to inhabit a structure I know well, the knowledge economy of the university especially as it wrestles with categories of difference.
Division into two camps, two poles, and two differentiations is key to an understanding of paranoid politics. And while this differentiation requires a kind of splitting, it also then has a subtending ability to homogenize because difference is wholly valued a priori into either good or bad objects. Chaudhary details this for us by saying: “Fundamental to paranoid politics is the division of people, institutions, events, and policies into those that are good and those that are evil. Insofar as paranoia is a form of defense, it assures oneself of one’s own innocence in the face of evil” (76). Here is one important insight of the book’s reading of psychopolitics. Rather than adduce the constative value of truth, whether statements are true or not, Chaudhary reads the libidinal life that undergirds the political axioms people cling to as a form of cathexis, rather than simply an epistemic claim.
These projections and identifications are so powerful because they are unconscious, but also because they are defense mechanisms. Chaudhary’s reading of, among others, Melanie Klein allows us to think about how polarized politics and paranoid politics split the world around them in the hopes that there will be more certainty and more knowledge in the felt perception of persecution. We often talk about elite capture on the left and many of us, understandably, fret over how free speech debates have shifted to render unteachable the material realities of real dispossession. I wonder, then, how we might read the problem of paranoia back into our own practices, rather than idealize and aggrandize our own positions which too have strong libidinal lives. Chaudhary reminds us “Key to understanding Klein’s account of projection is to understand that both extreme idealization of the good object and demonization of the bad object represses the persecutory anxiety that this object had unleashed. Thus, both idealization and demonization are forms of adaptation to changing realities, and such splitting of the world into idealized poles entails a split within the ego itself” (76). If this is so, then one takeaway from Paranoid Publics would be to read the psychopolitics of truth in our own discourses, to submit ourselves and our peers to this psychopolitical reading.
Idealization, in this Kleinian scene, requires the feeling of persecution for the complex libidinal life to be set up. Such persecution could be structurally important for splitting if one feels whiteness is under attack or, equally, that one’s marked racial, gendered, or geopolitical difference is under attack. Because fact and phantasy have similar purchase on the psyche, such perceptions may not be adjudicated by truth alone. But what becomes fascinating is that such persecution grants the paranoiac the advantage of epistemological certainty and, also, a sense of innocence. Idealization entails this feeling of innocence, because a priori it is good. Chaudhary lays out this dynamic in his adroit reading of the quality of aggression in the January 6th uprising: “Such aggression, however, functions psychically to secure one’s own innocence and goodness, and nothing makes the expression of aggression feel more righteous than the feeling of persecution, whether imagined or real. It is a short step for the paranoic self to tip the certainty of its own innocence into supremacy” (emphases added 77). Innocence moves into supremacy because it makes the innocent good and sovereign, paradoxically, through perceived threat.
What I want to consider here, then, is how innocence becomes a paranoid position within supposedly leftist work. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang diagnose this issue in their now well-known essay “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” by looking at various “moves to innocence.” They write:
A more nuanced move to innocence is the homogenizing of various experiences of oppression as colonization. Calling different groups ‘colonized’ without describing their relationship to settler colonialism is an equivocation… In particular, describing all struggles against imperialism as ‘decolonizing’ creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work, especially among people of color, queer people, and other groups minoritized by the settler nation-state (Tuck and Yang 17).
What becomes clear when we read Tuck and Yang’s diagnosis of “moves to innocence” alongside Chaudhary’s helpful hermeneutics of the libidinal claims to innocence is that paranoia is not only about hatred and its defense mechanisms are not only about violence as such. Rather, the belief in a transparent, ideal good that one can claim often comes by way of ressentiment itself, by way of feeling persecution, “whether real or not.” This persecution then flips to idealizations and fantasies of innocence, “whether real or not.”
If the lessons of Paranoid Publics give those of us enduring this increasingly strange moment a guide, I think one conceptual strength of the book is that we cannot be too assured about our own purity or mastery of the current political moment and its inherent truths. This is not to despair, but much like the ethos of this book, to soberly and critically look at our own participation in ressentiment, in projection, and in the psychic splitting that subtends a paranoia all too easily co-opted or wielded by fascisms (those obvious and those neoliberal). What I want to consider, then, with this book’s teachings is some of the projections or idealizations that linger in my corners of academia not to disparage my own fields or my colleagues’ work, but to ask what this book may yet teach those of us who precisely feel victimized by the present order of things. What is refreshing here is an account of the attempts at security, certainty, and even safeguarding of one’s own goodness or righteousness that then explains the pleasure taken in such monstrous politics. As Chaudhary reminds us, “Paranoia has long been associated with fascism” (20). At least part of this association is both the process of splitting and, importantly, the way in which paranoid projections function to secure a kind of wholly good image that can be introjected for fascism.
In this way, Chaudhary’s book contributes to a growing body of work that marks how neoliberalism leads to authoritarianism and fascism that details the complicated political economy we find ourselves in. He further warns, “The survival of fascist tendencies within democracy (and the liberal tradition) is potentially more dangerous than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy” (28). This statement recalls Herbert Marcuse’s statements in a 1970 interview: “American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support” (Marcuse 138). In Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano performs a critical genealogy of fascism that looks not only to Nazi Germany, but also to the previous world domineering imperialisms that lead to such a genocidal regime, as well as the forms of racial and colonial fascism that do not often get registered as fascism. He convincingly argues that looking to these archives better helps us to see the pernicious link between neoliberalism and fascism writing:
A ‘progressive’ neoliberalism—the one that lies in the back of most mainstream denunciations of fascism—is defined by the production and reproduction of inequalities and exclusions inconsistently accompanied by formalistic and formulaic commitments to rights, diversity and difference. Those who make common cause with it will have to do so in the awareness that they’re ‘manning the imperial gates,’ allying with the cause to ward off its effects (Toscano 158).
Formulaic and discursive mandates around diversity and difference in a neoliberal economy work not to change the material base of political economy but to give rhetoric in place of material change. Such discourses actually replicate inequalities through a more “progressive” market logic.
Rey Chow reminds us that fascism requires not just hatred, but love. As a political and libidinal structure, it requires belief in transparent ideals and positive, not just hateful, images that are projections that fully delineate us versus them, self versus other. Fascism’s idealized images function not only because they are positive in this sense, but also “that they pose and posit, and are positivistic. This positivity is the “projection’ that the followers of fascism “internalize.” (Chow 24). Reading historical fascist aesthetics alongside late 1990s injunctions to include ethnic and racial others into our disciplines, Chow urges us to consider the issue of fascism not as deception but desire for goodness and luminosity. She writes “In all of these cases, it is the force of light, transparency, and idealized image that works in the service of ‘interpellating’ the masses, who receive the leaders as a mesmerizing film. To say that the leaders are ‘lying’ to the masses would be to miss the point of our thoroughly mediatized feelings and perceptions, which accept this aesthetics without coercion, and which accept it as positive and good” (Chow 26). Chiming in, Chaudhary reminds us that fascism’s lure is not simply brainwashing: “It is not that leaders are adept at techniques of mass psychological manipulation in any conscious way” (119). Instead, fascism uses the paranoid structure of a public and this split public’s latent wish becomes voiced and seductive: “Rather, it is the repeated voicing of an uninhibited latent wish of the group that proves so effective for mass mobilization. This explains why the fascist and quasifascist leader’s arguments operate not by means of rationality but rather by means of association, as in paranoid formulations” (119). Whether by way of claims innocence or luminous images, the libidinal life of truth requires a reckoning with assumed moral positions that operate off of aggrievement in order to master knowledge and this takes on important political dimensions when it comes to group logics.
Chaudhary’s insights into paranoid politics makes me wonder about such libidinal drives that operate in what I’m sure a good many of us perceive in our own fields and work in the contemporary university under attack. And yet, I also know, at least anecdotally, that I am not alone in feeling that this fascistic splitting and the feelings that accompany it enter our own rhetoric and defense mechanisms. As assaults on difference and the teaching of difference (we can think here of critical race, ethnic studies, certain area studies, critiques of coloniality, and gender studies) come under attack, psychic splitting can be an understandable response to the explicit and material threats endured. What idealizations can and do ensue as paranoid defense mechanisms that operate in similarly split attitudes—rendering everything we, under real threat, do as wholly innocent and wholly good by dint of being truly persecuted? What I mean by asking this question is not to suggest that defense, in general, partakes of fascism. There are many forms of strategic defense, and we need such material and practical strategies more than ever. But I do think an indispensable line of thinking within the pages of Paranoid Publics asks us to consider how a feeling of persecution can easily turn into a feeling of moral righteousness and, even, sovereignty in the face of real or imagined threat.
Subsequently, this logic can slip into a kind of enjoyment of victimization as if being persecuted proves that our objects and methods of study are in and of themselves good in contradistinction to the threat out there. What I mean to consider is how we may need, more than ever, to stave off this position and righteous feeling of victimization not because threats aren’t real, but because they should not shore up our valuation and critique of our own practices and positionalities. The lessons I have gleaned from years of being in classrooms that grapple with racial, colonial, and gendered difference underscore how such scholarly and politico-ethical discussions require a de-idealization and self-critique that reckons with complicities with structures of violence (like the university). For instance, we may think this in relation to the failure of DEI programs, whose losses are lamented at present but also hide another material loss: affirmative action. DEI, itself, operated off of an idealized and blown-up sense of the good of inclusion as an aesthetic. That is, it cultivated diversity at a corporate level based on neoliberal logic and rendered inclusion as an end predicated upon market logic. In this way, it functioned often as a public relations campaign for the corporate university and one that did not, exactly, shift its material base. Many infrastructures now crumbling participated in the aestheticization of politics that Benjamin warned about in “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility”—a fascistic aesthetic that offers expression but not change in material reality. The aestheticization of the politics of difference in the US academy has been at least partially reliant upon this neoliberal infrastructure that has housed our studies and the economy within which we have been able to do our work. We may want to hold onto an ambivalence about our own self-evaluation if built upon an idealized good or a moral righteousness based upon real and imagined threats, but also threats launched against the terms and logic of difference articulated within a neoliberal university. I am not saying we shouldn’t feel threat. Rather, Chaudhary’s articulation of the libidinal life of truth and power creates demands not only on how we read the authoritarianism of the right, but also the moral authority assigned to our own threatened positions within the university. None of these positions are immune from the paranoid splitting that structures fascistic tendencies.
Returning to Chow’s work on fascism’s faith in the good, she closes her chapter by showing how multiculturalism itself uses a neoliberal recruitment tool to diversify disciplines that traffic in dangerous idealisms that use fascist technologies in their projections of ideals. She writes:
Emerging in postcoloniality, the new “desire for our others” displays the same positive, projectional symptoms of fascism that I discussed in the preceding pages—a rebelliousness and a monstrous aesthetics, but most of all a longing for a transparent, idealized image and an identifying submission to such an image…. The indiscriminate embrace of peoples of color as correct regardless of their differences and histories is ultimately a desire for a pure otherness in pristine luminosity that is as dangerous as the fascism of hateful discrimination from which we all suppose we are safely distanced…
If the controversial label “fascism” is indeed useful, as I think it is, for a radical critique of the contemporary intellectual culture in the West, it is because it helps us identify and problematize the good conscience and noble obligations of the new liberal fascism with its multiculturalist modes and its sophisticated enterprises of visibility. Some will no doubt want to disavow such ongoing fascist longings in our midst; others, hopefully, will not. (32)
Projection of this kind, Chaudhary tells us, is inherent to paranoia. What I hope to draw out and consider with Chaudhary’s book are these moments that Tuck and Yang, as well as Chow, signal in studies that necessarily grapple with non-hegemonic difference. All of these texts show how the inhabitation of a victim status as either a claim to innocence or an inherent, transparent, and idealized good display the same splitting processes that make paranoia so amenable to fascism. And it may well be that the reason for this is that the study of underrepresented or non-dominant peoples has lost the material gains of programs like affirmative action and has more recently relied on the corporate logic of inclusion in neoliberalism in which a form of authoritarian and naturalized logic adheres to the market which treats diversity, often, as a form of marketing for corporate goodness and innocence. In such terrain, reading back upon us, how might we cultivate an ambivalence to our own positions and objects of study lest our own work psychically split ourselves too much in this hostile terrain?
Christina A. León is Associate Professor of Literature, Romance Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Duke University, as well as the co-editor of the Gender Theory series at SUNY Press.
Works Cited
Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Klein, Melanie. “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 16 (1935): 145–74.
Marcuse, Herbert. The New Left and the 1960s. Edited by Douglas Kellner. Vol. 3 of Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. London: Routledge, 2004.
Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso, 2023.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
