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 we need in this historical moment, the political life of paranoia on the right and left, and the changing relations between truth and power. As Ben Baer astutely notes, the book’s subtitle—“Psychopolitics of Truth”—is its truth. To that end Paranoid Publics concerns itself with paranoia because unlike other dominant public feelings such as resentment and anger, paranoia is, fundamentally, a direct preoccupation with the problem of truth.  And yet it is the instability of truth itself that is at stake in the current moment, whose predicament Brian Connolly points out as “being suspended in something of an interregnum between truth regimes, a moment that fosters the paranoiac.” As disoriented as many commentators have been of late, the one thing they can agree on is that the certainties of a familiar mode of politics are slipping and may already be lost, while a new rationality of power and truth has not yet fully emerged. In this interregnum, no matter where one falls on the political spectrum—from far right to liberal centrists to the progressive left—everyone seems caught in a crisis (with some profiting from the possibilities opened up by crisis), but without an agreed upon set of terms with which to understand either crisis or possibility.

Yet despite the widespread disorientation of the moment, one thing is clear: alarming new forms of power are coming into their own. Baer’s essay wonders whether perhaps “we are in a kind of interregnum in which a governing regime of truth in the political domain is not in fact lost (devolved into a plurality of games of truth) but is, in a horribly messianic way, mutating into power being its own manifestation of truth in the form of excessive predatory violence, aggression, and entitlement.” The ongoing genocide in Gaza, punishment meted out to students at American universities who opposed this genocide, the US invasion of Venezuela, the consolidation of tech capital that has buttressed the aspirations of companies like Palantir and OpenAI to shape governance by fusing data analysis with state violence, all indicate that power indeed has begun to manifest as its own form of truth.

Of course, the links between power and truth precede this moment; what we are seeing is a mutation from a regime in which truth was backed up by power, to one in which power and truth are synonymous.  The old regime was a composite, stabilized by consensus for some decades, whose aspects can be described through a variety of names: “the rules-based international order”; liberal democracy; neoliberalism; globalization; “the American century,” and so on. None of these are worthy of nostalgia because each name is a euphemism that papers over some form of violence, whether of war, exploitation, debt, or cultural supremacy. Indeed, the exposure of the limits of this regime have led to what Melanie Klein had called the depressive position, which is less an immediate response to a loss or a conflict than a psychical achievement aiming to overcome the paranoid-schizoid splitting of the world. The “sadness” that Baer points to in the pages of Paranoid Publics is not a hankering for a past in which consent and consensus were successfully manufactured, but a kind of depressive position in the face of an interregnum in which even the vanquished stabilities are not worth the longing. As achievements go, the depressive position indexes psychic integration, but instead of resolving into consolation or a feeling of plenitude—as in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of Kleinian repair, so incisively sketched by Robyn Wiegman in this forum—the depressive position offers only ambivalence as the basis upon which futurity might be built.

Using psychoanalytic categories that were generated at the scale of the individual psyche to understand collective social phenomenon necessarily brings to light a dialectical tension between individual psychology and the social field. Yet this tension already exists as a part of social reality, and in our current interregnum the relationship of the individual to the collective is the very object of political and psychic contestation. Psychoanalytic concepts are fundamentally no different from other concepts in that they can only approximate their referents without fully capturing them, which is why Paranoid Publics ends with a discussion of the Havana Syndrome and Resignation Syndrome, as case studies that throw psychoanalytic veridiction itself into crisis. As such Paranoid Publics makes the moment of a historical loss of certainty its own methodological priority.     

No other feeling is so primarily and obsessively concerned with certainty and truth as paranoia. Here lies the deep intimacy between paranoia and epistemology itself, which according to Jacques Lacan always and necessarily has a paranoic aspect. This is so, according to Lacan, because all knowledge entails an imaginary relation to another, and even if knowledge may provide the consolations of self-certainty such consolations are illusory, ever threatened by feelings of persecutory anxiety or self-alienation, not to mention the eruptions of the real that threaten all understanding. As an aspect of all forms of knowledge, paranoia is not a pejorative term but itself designates a paradox of knowledge. As Leo Bersani once put it, “The customary distinction between delusions and truth too accurately replicates the illusional structures we may wish to understand” (181). In other words, the distinction between delusions and truth replicates the paranoiac division between manifest reality and a hidden and suspected truth.

Being suspended between truth regimes fosters paranoia in part because such an experience of the interregnum unsettles the usual coordinates for political action. Paranoia is often interpreted as a symptom of political incapacity. Yet even as Paranoid Publics follows this line of thinking, it is equally interested in how psychopolitical considerations are critical for understanding the ways that political incapacity transmutes into a form of capacity: a fringe conspiracy theory (QAnon) becomes GOP policy, and Moms for Liberty and medical freedom movements have racked up more political wins than losses in the last ten years. Paranoia has no necessary relation to political incapacity even if the paranoiac’s narrative consistently situates him or herself as exposed and vulnerable to some malevolent power. The titans of Silicon Valley (increasingly aligned with MAGA politics) share with QAnon and Moms for Liberty a narrative about being under threat from malevolent powers, notably expressed by assuming a position of a truth-teller disclosing uncomfortable truths. All these political actants are involved in the reorganization of the relationship between power and truth. For each, paranoia instigates political action in the service of making power itself a manifestation of the truth. In other words, even as paranoia heightens a feeling of political incapacity, that very feeling can be a psychopolitical goad to action. This is what Paranoid Publics outlined in its discussion of the January 6 insurrection, in which political action makes “real” a paranoid belief. By doing so, paranoia counterintuitively becomes the grounds for political capacity.

If what remains of the left in the United States is to have any political traction, it must have psychical appeal and offer forms of collectivity that are adequate for political subjects who are necessarily split and deeply conflictual, and whose desires outrun any liberal notion of self-interest.  That appeal will not come from centrist liberals in the US (who are often wrongly conflated with “the left”) who are quick to make alliances with MAGA figures whose political success and forms of enjoyment seem so alluring to these liberals. These centrists are among the people who would have truth conflated with power. Extreme moderates like Ezra Klein (or Hilary Clinton or Chuck Schumer) espouse contradictory positions that somehow resolve into a self-pleasuring serenity. The basis of their smugness is a belief that political power is the ultimate prize, and if this entails riding the wave of emerging fascism and sharing in its forms of enjoyment so be it. For such liberals, “electability” trumps democracy and is itself narrowly conceived as form of appeasement for right-wing positions. The reorganization of the relationship between truth and power such that truth becomes what power speaks, can be conscious and deliberate, as in the big tent politics of Steven Bannon’s variant of fascism, or foolishly opaque to itself as in Ezra Klein’s pleas for big tent politics that would welcome anti-trans activists and white supremacists. Such centrist politics aligned with emerging forms of fascism are part and parcel of what I, along with Baer, identify above as a new political mutation that has become increasingly clear in 2026.

To these politics can be added the figures Connolly has dubbed the “factcheckers in the service of liberal democracy.” These are the liberal debunkers who may have captured one’s attention on late night television or on a social media reel, and who revel in the pleasure of knowingness. It is not knowledge but knowingness that provides the liberal debunkers and their audiences the gratification they had been seeking. This knowingness that exhilarates and thrills is similar to the pleasures on offer by the conspiracist, the TERF, the Mom for Liberty, and the insurrectionist. Christina León has called attention to what she dubs “fascist splitting,” whose signature is the moral masochism of left academic critique that continues to idealize and burnish the image of the purely resistant subject in difference. Such a stance assumes that the right is stealing the left’s jouissance, and so one must consolidate a moralistic subject tasked with maximal enjoyment, without concern for the negativity that undergirds jouissance. Whether it is the feel-good “factcheckers in the service of liberal democracy,” the idealized and phantasmatic resistant subject moralized at an academic conference, left-wing resentment attached to its own victimhood (as in Baer’s account), or an unreconstructed defense of liberalism that remains blind to its role in contemporary political upheavals (which Eva Cherniavsky references), left and “left-leaning” responses to the ascendence of right-wing politics mimic the pleasures of their political enemies, and even as they participate in a similar posture of backward facing idealism (Facts! Morals! Liberalism!) they fall flat.

Given such similar psychopolitical pleasures available across seemingly opposed political positions, what is to be done? To echo Connolly’s words, “Must we oppose pleasure itself? Can we?” As Connolly indicates rhetorically (and I completely agree): no, we cannot oppose pleasure itself—in fact we must not. Since liberal democracy in the United States has cratered, the form of power now expressed in the pleasures taken by illiberal right-wing agents is of greater consequence at this moment than what remains of the left in the United States. Democracies, insofar as they are necessarily processual, must manage the eruptions of paranoid politics. That is, a robust democratic reality could probably cope with some flat-earthers, QAnoners, and the like, but has such a robust democratic reality ever existed? The answer would seem to be no, even in the liberal and centrist account of Richard Hofstadter’s investigation of the paranoid style. Hofstadter is explicit that he means to use the word “paranoid” pejoratively; it is an insult and a pathology, never the condition of knowledge itself. But more importantly, his notion of the “paranoid style” assumed a moderate and centrist notion of public reason against which he defined the timeless paranoid style of American politics. As Robyn Marasco puts it in her critique of Hofstadter, “[His] ideal subject is an agent of rational deliberation and decision […] His ideal American stands at the imagined center of an imagined ‘spectrum’ of ideologies where moderation is assumed to be a political virtue and the distinctive virtue of the most reasonable citizens” (237). I would add that this moderate, centrist position that would render the paranoid style to be both pathological and timeless comes with its own self-soothing pleasures.

Paranoid Publics does not presume a normative moderate subject of politics, which was so important for Hofstadter as a fundamental unit of democratic deliberation. This normative subject of politics—never named, always presumed in Hofstadter’s account—is the doppelgänger of the paranoiac, and is supposedly free from pathological symptoms. At a time when centrism and moderation have become their own forms of extremism complete with hallucinatory visions of the social world (again, think Ezra Klein), assumptions about the virtues of centrism and moderate political positions as the rational choice in a historical interregnum are untenable. In any case, what is insightful about paranoia is not its timeless character but the historically particular arrangements of power through which it finds expression. Melanie Klein’s insights are critical to this end, because in Kleinian terms, paranoia is a position, not an identity, and thus its distortions and affective idealizations are subject to shifts and transformations. If such a perspective explains why the MAGA base expanded to include new constituencies in 2024—including Latino men and many putatively liberal white women—it also holds open the possibility of political change being resolved otherwise. Yet, because some paranoid politics can threaten to upend democracy altogether, this is another index for understanding the weakness of liberal variants of democracy. This double bind—that there is no democracy without the possibility of paranoia because democracies replace the power of a single sovereign with a set of dispersed and anonymous authorities—is expressed well by Adorno in the epigraph to Paranoid Publics: “There is no freedom without opinions that diverge from reality, but such divergence endangers freedom.” To practice democracy, in other words, means to risk democracy.

Given the historical erosion of former certainties, it is in keeping with Paranoid Publics that Cherniavsky homes in on how “paranoia structures the political field right to left.” This is because paranoia can indeed be a symptom, among other things, of political incapacity and there is no doubt that in the interregnum this incapacity is widely experienced. As Paranoid Publics notes, even the usual understandings of political divides as stable referents were scrambled during the peak COVID-19 era and continue to mutate. Most worryingly, it has become harder to delineate what groups or factions might be deemed “the progressive left.” Multiple interlocutors in this book forum—most substantially Cherniavsky and León—point toward the paranoid, dogmatic, and proto-fascist tendencies of groups that consider themselves to be on the left. As Cherniavsky indicates, the left is not at all exempt from either the mood of exposure (arguably intensified under Trump 2.0) or the paranoid ideation to which it gives rise. She is also clear-eyed in noting that the existence of left paranoia—at a moment when MAGA has captured the state—does not suggest “any sort of political symmetry or equivalence” with right-wing paranoia. One of the aims of Paranoid Publics is to invite such careful comparisons that can disclose similarities across a polarized social order with the understanding that similarities are not equivalences from the perspective of the operations of power. For example, a paranoiac attachment to identity expressed at an academic conference is not equivalent to a Mom for Liberty’s activism toward banning certain books from libraries and schools.

Considering the political efficacy of an emerging fusion of truth with power, the problem of repair and reparations appears ineffectual. According to Wiegman and Connolly, repair and reparations as the alternative to paranoia rings hollow in the current interregnum. Wiegman perceptively notes that Sedgwick’s valuation of repair over and against paranoia begins with an account of a global pandemic (HIV) that killed millions, and Paranoid Publics, too, registers a pandemic in its first paragraph. It is telling that, as Wiegman writes, “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.” As others have noted, the paranoia versus repair opposition in Sedgwick’s essay does not operate as an opposition in this way in Melanie Klein’s theory on which Sedgwick draws; in Sedgwick’s account this opposition functions as a kind of paranoid-schizoid split in which bad interpretations are aligned with paranoia and good ones with repair. Yet, as Connolly notes in this forum, “our own defenses against paranoia obscure rather than clarify contemporary conditions” because paranoia coincides with what Leo Bersani called “the movement that is life” (183). Its proliferation in contemporary games of truth is indeed a sign of change in collective relations to death.

It is no wonder that among the derealized and hallucinatory fantasies of contemporary politics are the repeated wishes—expressed by oligarchs—for immortality, whether through technological or biological means. As Peter Thiel explained to Business Insider in 2012, “There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth.” The truth, apparently available to the likes of Peter Thiel all along, would seem to indicate that death is nothing more than mere ideology, or a lie we have repeated so long we have begun to believe it. Along with seasteading, Martian colonization, looksmaxxing, the creation of free economic zones, and the purchasing of bunkers to escape earthly catastrophe, the escape from mortality expresses a wish for impunity, a desire to be relieved of constraints to which others are bound. Laughable as Thiel’s statement may be, it arises from a milieu—increasingly referred by many as “The Epstein Class”—that can indulge such fantasies because they have already practiced forms of exemption, escape, and exit from existing laws and norms with impunity. Yet as protected as this class is by its wealth, power, and privilege, a distinct mood of exposure governs its actions and priorities even as members of the Epstein class expose others to mortal danger. Whether it is Big Tech CEOs and venture capitalists deploying data analysis as a form of surveillance and state violence, developing autonomous weapons systems, or creating administrative bodies like the “Board of Peace” that seek to replace multi-lateral governance with the force of capital, it seems that practices of impunity entail seeking protection from a feeling of exposure that, in turn, exposes others to violence.

Paranoid Publics analyzed just such a politics among medical freedom and parental rights advocates who sought exemptions to rules to which others were bound; for these activists “freedom is a promise of impunity as the glimmering hope of a fascistic utopia” (88). If the current interregnum is situated between the passing of erstwhile certainties and their forms of power (“rules-based international order” among others) and the rise of new forms of fascistic domination, it is more vital than ever to understand the constitution of truth as a result of the interface between power and psyche.

Zahid R. Chaudhary is Professor of English at Princeton University.

Works Cited

Angelova, Kamelia. “Peter Thiel: Death is A Problem That Can Be Solved.” Business Insider. Feb 9, 2012. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-death-is-a-problem-that-can-be-solved-2012-2

Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” In The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Marasco, Robyn. “Toward A Critique of Conspiratorial Reason.” Constellations Vol 23: No. 2, 2016. p.236-243.