I read the really fascinating symposium on Paranoid Publics.  I haven’t read the actual book yet, so I can’t really respond to its concrete arguments.  But the symposium itself was rich enough and stimulating enough that I wanted to send some thoughts for the purpose of conversation.  Hopefully, they don’t miss the point.  I’ve tried to divide them up in no particular order.

History and Paranoia (1).  One of the things that I found interesting in reading it was the question of whether there is a historicity to paranoia and the way we think about it.  Robyn Wiegman raises this issue most explicitly I think through her invocation of AIDS and Sedgwick but it runs through the others.  But if we take her account as fair (rooted in suppressed bisexuality in the Freudian model and then splitting in the Kleinian) I wonder if it makes any difference that we live in a culture of narcissism?  I don’t necessarily think that Christopher Lasch got Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg right, but the idea that we are dealing with a culture where the self is empty and needs constant filling (hello President Trump) seems different than the moment of high bourgeois repression.  Does this affect the way we understand the politics of paranoia?  We now live in a world where we are constantly being surveilled and also shaped by algorithms.  Does the fact that the narcissist is so dominant in American society now change the way we think about paranoia and its violences?

History and Paranoia (2).  I had another question/thought reading about history and paranoia.  I don’t know if this is true in the book, but in the symposium, it seemed to me that paranoia was being used interchangeably with conspiracy for the most part.  The historian Gordon Wood had a famous article where he talked about conspiratorial thinking in the 18c.  His central point was that given the nature of 18c categories conspiratorial analysis was perfectly rational.  It was only later, with the invention of things like sociology and possibly political economy and the change from ranks to classes that conspiracy became irrational.  The late 18th and early 19th centuries were huge sites for conspiracy theories.  That seems relevant to me in terms of how we understand conspiracy as a game of truth within a regime of truth.  Obviously, conspiracies go back to ancient societies, but if we think about the 18c-19c as a very rich period of conspiracy thinking (of course in relationship to the revolutions), but also as the beginning of sociology, and then thinking about the 1950s and 60s as another upsurge in both conspiracy and theories of conspiracy you see a somewhat similar tension between the conspiratorial and the sociological, the psychic and social.  Think of Richard Hofstadter coming at the same time as modernization theory or Daniel Bell’s end of ideology; or the upsurge in psychoanalytic theory à la Herbert Marcuse or Norman O. Brown versus social history.  Michael Rogin, of course, tried to bridge this gap in approaches like political demonology or his psycho-biographies.  I’m not sure where this leads to, but I do wonder if we have to think about conspiratorial thinking and the analysis of conspiratorial thinking as rooted in competing games of truth.

Left and Right.  This was most striking to me in the end of Eva Cherniavsky’s piece and in Christina Leon’s piece.  Cherniavsky makes the really important point that the left has to recognize its own libidinal investments in its analysis.  But she then limits that insight by saying effectively that “even though we are right we are still not unmediated.”  But the whole point of being mediated by fantasy or being within a game of truth is that you don’t have the privileged position to know you are “right.”  Leon does something similar in criticizing the desire to split good victims from bad victimizers, but then tries to say that what matters is a more accurate accounting of the ways in which different people victimize others.  I’m not sure what to do about this since I don’t want to fall into congenital ambivalence but it seems to me that neither Freud nor Foucault allow the type of certainty that slips in at the end of these pieces.  This is bigger than paranoia of course.  But it does have to do with how we can bring together Freud and Foucault to do our analyses.

Michael Meranze is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.