“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 the Looking-Glass
There is always the risk, when writing about contemporaneity, that events will overtake what you have said, rendering your work a mere historical curiosity once it actually gets into the world; especially when you consider the glacial pace of university press book publication. Hence the seductively rapid payoffs of online “public-facing humanities.” I am glad to say that this is not the case with Zahid Chaudhary’s Paranoid Publics, because what it addresses, and how it addresses it, goes deeper than the topical examples of QAnon, Wikileaks, Moms for Liberty, the anti-vaccination movement, Havana Syndrome, and so on. Don’t get me wrong: the book has really interesting things to say about these phenomena that go far beyond the plangent hand-wringing and superficial attempts at damage control of most liberal and left discourse on them.
Yet an immediate question emerges from scanning the topical surface of the book, which is the question of what guided Chaudhary’s choice of examples from among all the flora and fauna of the ever-growing populist desert. Obviously, the author’s own affect comes into the picture at this point: it is very clear whom and what Chaudhary hates; and his evocation, in the book’s Acknowledgments, of beginning from a “sense of shock” at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville is an index of the kinds of relevant metonymic currents that emerged from latency to manifestation in the wake of Donald Trump’s first election victory in 2016. One way to approach Paranoid Publics, then, is as a partial (and constitutively unfinishable) reconstruction of this chain of displacements.
But perhaps to interrogate the choice of examples at this point is to put the cart before the horse. Jacques Derrida once wrote that a text’s examples always carry you away by overflowing themselves (Derrida 1995, 17). For now, I am going to try and avoid getting carried away by the flood of examples, ultimately impossible though that may be, and spectacular, urgent, and compelling as Chaudhary’s framing of them is. Others will doubtless have many questions about these aspects of the book for some time to come. I want rather to try and respond to the thought-experiment that the book represents, which is an original and challenging attempt to theorize, and to practice, a mode of psychopolitical critique. (Such work needs examples, of course, which is why we shall always have to return to them). Paranoid Publics gives us a kind of seminar in a psychopolitical mode of reading and interpretation: “reading for seemingly unreadable phenomena,” as Chaudhary puts it in the Coda (145). The “seemingly” tells us that there is something that will indeed be readable between the lines of a disorienting social text; but that we also need new protocols for doing so.
In this light, the biggest wager of Paranoid Publics—the task it sets for itself and the challenge it poses for its readers—is to find a new point of articulation between Freudian psychoanalysis and the work of the later Michel Foucault. Not as an abstract exercise in theorizing, of course, but as a means of critically engaging with some of the most intractable political phenomena of our moment. This is where the examples come into play, mostly, but not exclusively, drawn from the cruel social and affective landscape of a neoliberal United States.
Neoliberalism: Paranoid Publics gives a helpfully minimal and non-obfuscating working definition of neoliberalism: it is the doctrine—let us say it is the phantasmatic doctrine—that the market functions as an abstract and impersonal seismograph and arbiter of “truth” for governmentality. This is itself a convenient alibi for policies that are, to say the least, cruel and indeed ruthless, and which Chaudhary focalizes under the heading of “exposure”; especially in the section “Exposure as Biopolitics” (45-48). It also brings us to the fact that the market is driven as much by affect (in economic lingo this is called “sentiment” or “mood”) as by a transparency of pricing mechanisms. “The market is in a bad mood today” thus becomes a plausible statement in economics. The market is an angry god. And, crucially,the affect is both irreducible and contagious. It can no more be reduced out of the market than out of the social field, which is one reason we need a psychoanalytically oriented language of critique, a psychopolitical approach. Additionally, and most interestingly, however, Paranoid Publics implicitly raises the question of whether neoliberalism itself is cause or symptom. We would then have to ask: symptom of what? Especially if paranoid publics are not simply its symptoms.
But I am getting ahead of myself. In Chaudhary’s argument, to get to psychopolitics we have to go through truth, and it is the word “truth” that I want to underline from what I just said, because the question of truth is the real heart of the book. “Psychopolitics of Truth”: the subtitle is the book’s truth. Although Paranoid Publics has a lot to say about paranoia and related states, it is about truth as a problem, a question, and in Chaudhary’s Foucauldian language, sets of “games of truth” and “regimes of truth” that are occupied by desire: invested, or “cathected” to use the questionable English translation of Freud’s Besetzung. We thus arrive at the production of truth as something invested by desire and as a locus of phantasy. It is on this point, the introduction of the work of phantasy in truth, that Chaudhary adds something tremendously original to Foucault’s strategically positivistic and non-psychological account of games and regimes of truth.
One thing this all points to is that we are not really talking here about the anxieties of living in a supposedly “post-truth” era. In politics, as in society, lying, misdirection, deceit and so on are as old as the hills. They are normal elements of political practice. Read Plato, Machiavelli, Weber, Arendt, or basically any classic political philosophy. Has the endless enumeration and denunciation of Donald Trump’s lies made an iota of difference? The lies should nevertheless be catalogued. But how to account for the fact that large numbers of people are fascinated by and identify with lies, corruption, and violence—as their own fantasized truth? What does accountability look like here? Accountability first in the sense of accounting for the psychic reality of such collective identifications; and second in the sense that Chaudhary often invokes it in the book: the increasingly feeble forms of democratic and public answerability for political actions and social effects. It is completely evident from Paranoid Publics that Chaudhary is not simply an advocate for enforcement of laws as the system of public accountability in this sense, because important as it may be, mere enforcement misses the psychic dimensions of the problem. What, then?
Rather than accepting the proposition of a “post-truth” reality, Chaudhary’s Foucauldian analysis situates truth otherwise. Drawing on Foucault’s 1979-80 lectures On the Government of the Living, his argument shows how the exercise of power is necessarily accompanied by a “manifestation of truth” (Foucault 2014, 4 and passim). This is not a truth configured in terms of utilizable knowledge as an instrument of governance or application of law, but rather a massive, and often spectacular or ritualized “manifestation” of truth in excess of any knowledge and utility for the practical mechanics of governance. Foucault goes so far as to say “useless truth” (5). The excess is the point. It is no coincidence, then, that Mr. Trump’s imitation of Twitter (now known as X) is called “Truth Social,” and that the ritual procedure of making any statement in this space is named “truthing.” The case is there to be read in the most blindingly literal way in a pure manifestation of the signifier TRUTH and its transformation into a verb.
Consequently, I understand Chaudhary as arguing that truth has not at all gone away. We are far from being in a post-truth era. Rather, the manifest sign or figure of truth in the domain of social and political power has been inflated, magnified, precisely to the extent that it appears dispersed and relativized. Such that for Moms for Liberty (a key example in the book), the excessive and uncontrollable signifieds of “Freedom” are manifestations of a truth that exceeds yet governs each one. “Freedom” is the truth that must be submitted to in excess of any specific referent or utilitarian goal of practical policy, such as the prescription of ivermectin for COVID-19 (83). It can mean anything you want it to (Humpty Dumpty) so long as this very excess of meaning stages the manifestation of “truth.” It lifts the restriction on any impulse that is felt as a limitation on the subject, both justifying excess and underwriting the properly paranoiac phantasy that limits as such are the powers of a malevolent persecution.
In any case, here again Chaudhary eloquently expands Foucault to show that it is the excess of “truth’s” manifestation that allows it to become a particularly potent locus for the production and investment of desire and phantasy.
There is a crucial further step that Chaudhary takes in his argument that Foucault for his own part avoids. Chaudhaury maintains that the procedures (the “games” and “regimes”) by which truth comes to be manifested, acknowledged, recognized, justified, have an unconscious dimension. This also gives a certain wild and incalculable tenor to the production of truth as excess that is tremendously destabilizing even as it binds certain groups. A central question emerges here from a cluster of terms that secure points of the argument of Paranoid Publics and that, in spite of their variation, seem to point at the same thing: pleasure, enjoyment, jouissance, satisfaction, libidinal frisson. The analysis keeps returning, almost obsessively, to the enjoyment involved in submission to the excess of truth’s manifestation. Is jouissance, then, the surplus or supplement that allows or even demands submission? What we are talking about is not of course specifically conscious pleasure, but pleasure experienced unconsciously even as it can take the phenomenal form of “fun.” “January 6 was a carnival,” writes Chaudhary (54). I wonder about the political intractability of pleasure at this level, because it seems to raise the question of a nonidentity politics that somehow must address a split in the subject between identification and disidentification. Chaudhary tracks the ways in which the paranoiac state enjoys the fact of its own sense of being persecuted by limits by aggressively attacking those limits in the name of “freedom” from them (exemption from vaccine and other legal regulations, exemption from particular kinds of school instruction, exemption from the legal obligations of citizenship, etc.). Disidentification here goes with the disinhibition of unleashed aggressivity. Yet this engenders new forms of identification with—and submission to—patriarchal and authoritarian forms of mastery that ultimately transpose into an apocalyptic register, a “world catastrophe as a cleansing process, in which one’s own survival is secured through an assumed exemption” (108). This kind of futurity is only ever utopian or apocalyptic (it has correlates on the left), and in effect passes through a restricted disidentification into the most dire forms of identity-politics. The psychoanalytic account, on the other hand, sustains a view of the subject as irreducibly struggling with the resistances of its own otherness to itself and its experience of limits as restrictions that have to be lived with and worked through. Chaudhary’s searching inquiry invites us to consider whatever subjective or collective powers or resources there might be to actually live with limits, to accept them without fighting for a “truer” otherworldly world on the far side of the catastrophe.
It is on this question of limits that paranoia becomes especially interesting, because as already mentioned above, the paranoid state seems to experience (fantasize) limitation as a form of persecution; and paranoia develops its own libidinal response to perceived limitation by engendering a pleasure-giving truth-game of naming, pointing to, taxonomizing, and designating its persecutor. This is obviously connected with the other great underlying theme of Paranoid Publics, ressentiment, which, it seems to me, is a real signature of our epoch. I can hear Nietzsche saying, “I told you so.”
I will leave ressentiment as a more implicit question, but I would like to add a supplementary and genuine query about the extent to which these issues—especially ressentiment—profoundly afflict the left. I wonder whether there is a version of Paranoid Publics that would address related problems on what we can still just about call the left of the political spectrum? Chaudhary is addressing prevailing rightwing populist tendencies because they are ascendant, and he is right to keep his focus there. However, the book’s implicit call is for a new language and political imagination for a left that has, to a significant degree, been the tragic instrument of its own defeat because of the ressentiment—and apocalypticism—it inherits from its Christian roots. (To be clear, by “left” I mean anything resembling a socialist or communist left, and not the liberal or “progressive” wing of the ruling class). This is a huge question, and so I will not develop it further here; but Paranoid Publics generates a space for others to follow up. The task is immense, forbidding.
One of Chaudhary’s boldest moves, as he recasts Foucault, is in the application of Freudian concepts to collective phenomena. There is a whole debate about this in psychoanalytic theory, and as with ressentiment I will not get into the weeds with it here. As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, Freud made many of his concepts and categories social, collective, and political from the start (Rose 1996, 1-15). But Chaudhary seems quite confident in more or less taking concepts like paranoia, or the maternal superego from the Freudian-Kleinian lexicon and allowing them to wander across the social field without much modification (though with a little help from Adorno). This is a genuinely interesting aspect of the thought-experiment, but I also wonder whether Chaudhary encountered moments of doubt about this, or instances when he thought that the psychoanalytic concepts themselves might require modification to yield the traction of a robust psychopolitical account. This is especially pertinent in the light of psychoanalysis’s vicissitudes in establishing its own criteria of veridiction, from Freud’s own struggles to establish the scientific validity of psychoanalysis to critiques such as Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth.
For me, one of the greatest gifts of Paranoid Publics is its reluctance, maybe even its resistance, to offering pat solutions, or instructions on “what is to be done.” It recognizes that the problem of reconstructing our language and imagination of political practice affords no easy answers, no matter how much we may want them. The book’s very last gesture, indeed, offers an allegory of reading for its organization, a warning, precisely, against getting carried away by and giving in to the immediate vividness and outrage of the unending and extreme examples of provocation (in this case Nazi salutes given by Elon Musk and a rightwing Swedish politician). “The real concern, therefore,” writes Chaudhary, “is not the sign’s latent meaning, but the collective investments guided by it. Such guidance includes the full range of affective response, from enthusiastic acceptance to anticipatory obedience to outright opposition; only an analysis attuned to psychopolitics can illuminate such social realities” (148). These are the last words of the book.
And this brings me to my own last point and my final questions. For there is in the book, and even in the closing sentences quoted above, a latent tone or current of mourning or even melancholia for a lost stability of truth-as-consensus in a more general and public sense. A kind of sadness—not without laugh-out-loud moments of humor— but still a kind of sadness over the loss “of a shared standard of truth” (2, original emphasis), and the specter of its baleful correlative in “games of truth ungoverned by a regime” (18). This seems to me at odds with Foucault’s more openly relativistic position, which is that there is a plurality of truth regimes too: for him, each domain has its own procedures and techniques (a regime) for recognizing and compelling submission to the truth as it is gamed out, such that the epistemology of philosophical logic has different regime-procedures for “submitting” to the truth than literary criticism or political power. It seems to me that Foucault is closer to the Jean-François Lyotard of Just Gaming and The Differend than Chaudhary allows, yet this aspect of Foucault’s theses on truth is unremarked in the book. In this light, I wonder if Chaudhary, with his psychopolitical spectacles on, would entertain the possibility that 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 (and the pleasures that attach to these things. And the pleasures that can attach to seeing oneself as the terrorized victim of these things). I am reminded of the La Fontaine fable that Derrida attached as epigraph to his book on rogue states, “The Wolf and the Lamb”: “The strong are always best at proving they’re right … The Wolf dragged and ate his midday snack. So trial and judgment stood” (Derrida 2005, x). A regime of truth for political justice, ventriloquized long ago by the Marquis de Sade, and coming now straight from the mouth of Stephen Miller. This situation does not, however, necessarily entail falling prey to the fascination of cataclysm and horror on the one hand, and ressentiment on the other; and Paranoid Publics offers us resources to work it through otherwise.
Ben Baer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
This text was delivered as a response to Zahid Chaudhary’s Paranoid Publics for Princeton University’s Media+Modernity Program in March 2026. It has been lightly revised for publication.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques, On the Name trans. David Wood et al (Stanford: Stanford University, 1995)
Derrida, Jacques, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University, 2005)
Foucault, Michel, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2014)
Rose, Jacqueline, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)
