“Hate to tell you but the only time ‘real’ comes into it is when they’re shooting at you. In practice, ‘real’ means dead—anything else, there’s always room for some conversation.”
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket
Paranoid Publics is a rich and incisive analysis of what Zahid Chaudhary calls the psychopolitics of truth. It is, in fact, a vivifying force in the particularly moribund field that we might call commentaries on truth in the age of so-called post-truth. It’s not to say that there has not been good work thinking through the politics of truth – Chaudhary cites much of it, especially in his deep engagement with Foucault and the idea of “games of truth” from his late lectures. But the analyses undertaken by Chaudhary, following Foucault, and others, have been mostly absent from recent commentary. Instead, we have been left with facile assertions of the factness of facts, uncritical belief in the power of reason and rationality to control desire and irrationality, and the temporal and historical problem of the “post” in post-truth, which suggests that there was a time, in the recent past – before Trump, or before postmodernism (Trump is often seen in these accounts as the witting or unwitting inheritor of postmodernism) when truth was obvious, clear, and stable. To take one example, here is the philosopher Daniel Dennett from a 2017 interview, commenting on truth, consciousness, politics, and Trump: “what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around saying, ‘Well, you’re part of that crowd that still believes in facts’” (Guardian, Feb. 12, 2017). In this view, before, say, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault, there was no cynicism about truth and fact. Another prominent mode has been what I have referred to elsewhere as “factcheckers in the service of liberal democracy” – historians noting that there are factual inaccuracies in historical claims, an occasional journalist doing the same, late night talk show hosts mocking Trump’s hyperbolic lies. (I recently saw that a small letterpress studio in Delaware produced a 9,000-page, 52-pound accordion style artist’s book documenting all of Trump’s lies). The alternative is not to give up on facts, or be unconcerned with truth, but rather that we need more than simple-minded notions of truth coupled with a blinding belief in the power of facts and reason that are clearly belied not only by this particular moment but by a much longer sweep of history. If this moment has its own games of truth, its own inflections of crisis, it is not wholly novel and there is no golden age of truth, fact, and knowledge to which to return.
Chaudhary recognizes this in an account of the psychopolitics of truth that attends to the psychic life of truth and to the disorienting conjunction of psyche and politics. As he puts it toward the end of the book, “orienting an analysis of politics toward the unconscious has profound implications since it discloses politics as a domain far larger and stranger that that conceived by sociology or political science…. Psychopolitics, in turn, also necessarily challenges concepts offered by psychoanalysis. The social realities and the expanded notion of the political that psychoanalysis opens up to critical thought demand that psychoanalytic concepts themselves must be reinvented” (146-147). What we get here is an analysis, with much needed precision, of the libidinal economy of truth and politics in the contemporary conjuncture. Chaudhary’s proposition is not to replace the political economic, historical materialist with the libidinal economic, but to treat them as asymmetrically supplemental to one another. As he writes, “an analysis of paranoia requires combining psychosocial considerations with political-economic ones. Alternative facts, delusions, and falsehoods are psychosocial realties as much as they are political-economic ones…. Paranoid publics do not lend themselves to interest-based analyses, and the diagonal forms their politics take cannot be resolved by a tidy class analysis” (2). (This makes me think, incidentally, of Freud’s line in Civilization and Its Discontents (one that I know is not much loved) where he notes the appeal of communism but goes on to suggest that the abolition of private property will not do away with the drives.)
Chaudhary gets to this point later in his introduction:
Tacitly, these liberal explanations for our ‘post-truth’ era suggest that an authority with enough political will could rectify the underlying political-economic error, and then the psychic underpinnings of cultural politics would align once again with reason. Many such commentators leave untouched the operations of those psychosocial realities that had occasioned the analysis of populist anger and conspiracy in the first place. Such analyses are most productively read as warnings rather than explanations since the causality they offer is somewhat simple. What if conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and the overvaluation of opinion and feeling were not only epiphenomenal? Not just some kind of vaporous distortion resulting from age-old economic contradictions that could be corrected with appropriate fiscal policies. (10).
The liberal approach, of which Chaudhary is rightly critical, requires its own phantasmatic scene – one in which the force of reason animates political will, attends to the political-economic, and brings about much needed change, sustained by treating as epiphenomenal conspiracy, falsehood, delusion, and opinion. That said, what is at stake in treating the psychosocial or the psychopolitical (are they actually interchangeable, as the book I think suggests) as causal? In what remains I would like to address this via two concerns: first, the relationship between pleasure, truth, knowledge, and the political, and second, the relation between history and paranoia.
In liming the psychopolitics of truth, Paranoid Politics provides us with one of the deepest and most precise pictures of the current libidinal economy. As such, it is hardly a surprise that Chaudhary has much to say about pleasure. To give a few examples: “the whistleblower promises the libidinal pleasures of a previous game of truth” (36); “In cynical reasoning, truth actually matters a great deal because acting in spite of it is what endows the action with its distinctive fetishistic pleasure” (39); of conspiratorial LARPing “these are games of truth that have turned veridiction itself into a form of enjoyment” (74); “The overriding affect of their politics is the thrill of vengeance paired with the practice of a scandalous freedom that evades accountability, destroys existing law, and overturns the existing order—such are the pleasures of jouissance as proffered by QAnon” (79); of Moms for Liberty and TERFs “These substitutive satisfactions provided…their own kinds of pleasure, and if truth-telling becomes a form of enjoyment, it is because it risks offending sensibilities, norms, rules, and laws. At the same time, Moms for Liberty and TERFS never pass up the opportunity to be offended, since taking offense sustains the feeling of embattlement and grievance so critical for binding libidinal pleasure to the superego’s appetite for destruction” (105); and finally, “In conspiracy theory, the libidinal attachment to a deceptive and powerful figure delivers a form of enjoyment that combines identification with unsurpassed power with the twinned pleasures of deception and truth-telling” (145). These are all, in one form or another, the pleasures of transgression sometimes coupled with the pleasure of punishment for being a righteous transgressor. As much as they transgress, their pursuit of pleasure must make one believe that the greatest tragedy for the conspiracy theorist or the whistle-blower would be success, would be the overturning of the norm or the rule that they have so cathected. In this, we would do well to think of contemporary paranoid publics as descendants of various reform movements, from temperance to anti-masturbation, that set themselves impossible tasks such that they are guaranteed the pleasure of repetitively circling the object of reform without ever reaching it.
Pleasure is no less the animating principle of the liberal debunker and factchecker – this is both the pleasure of knowledge and knowingness, in one sense no less paranoiac and hysterical than the conspiracy theorist. For if the debunkers and fact checkers may usually have facts on their side – for instance, no, J.D. Vance, there are not 30 million “illegal immigrants” purchasing all the single-family homes, thus causing a housing shortage and affordability crisis – they are prone to diminishing the pleasure that inheres in the utterance. We need not get caught up in a feedback loop of factchecking the factcheckers, but we might well ask where the cathexes in this repetitive and mostly ineffectual factchecking are. In this, we do well to heed Tim Dean’s admonishment in a recent essay on the contemporary purchase of Klaus Theweleit’s massive analysis of fascist phantasy. “The potential for fascism can no more be consigned to the completed historical past than we can justify exempting ourselves from is psychical residues. While we are far from complicit with fascist fantasies in the same way or to the same extent, none of us is wholly innocent” (Dean, 253). The questions of pleasure, of libidinal economy, of psychopolitics are ones that exempt no one, and as such shift the grounds of political analysis. But then, what is to be done? Must we oppose pleasure itself? Can we?
As Dean suggests in his comment on fascist phantasy, it cannot be consigned to the historical past. Elsewhere in the essay he puts it like this: “It is not that the past inevitably returns (as in the return of the repressed) but that certain fantasies survive the march of history; this is precisely what it means for them to be unconscious” (Dean, 254). Chaudhary does an excellent job diagnosing and analyzing our contemporary moment, but we might ask how to think this historically and indeed if it matters. In a quite different analysis of paranoia in American politics, the historian Richard Hofstadter would have seemingly been writing of his own moment too. Originally delivered as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1963, an abridged version appeared in Harper’s in 1964, and the full version, expanded from the Oxford lecture, in a book of his essays in 1965, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” was written in the wake of McCarthyism and opens with a reference to Barry Goldwater. Of paranoia Hofstadter writes, “today this fact is more evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority” (Hofstadter, 3). But for Hofstadter this was not particular to Goldwater or the extreme right in the 1960s; rather for Hofstadter the paranoid style was transhistorical. “One of the most impressive facts about the paranoid style, in this connection, is that it represents an old and recurrent mode of expression in our public life which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent and whose content remains much the same even when it is adopted by men of distinctly different purposes. Our experience suggests too that, while it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all by ineradicable” (Hofstadter, 6). All but ineradicable? Is paranoia, then, a timeless structure? Does the content of paranoid fantasies matter? And what facilitates it recurrence and occasional intensifications?
If we read Hofstadter with the French political theorist Claude Lefort’s musings on democracy and then turn back to Paranoid Publics, we might have the beginnings of an answer. In a well-known passage in his 1983 essay “The Question of Democracy,” Lefort describes democracy this way:
In my view, the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life….without the actors being aware of it, a process of questioning is implicit in social practice, that no one has the answer to the questions that arise, and that the work of ideology, which is always dedicated to the task of restoring certainty, cannot put an end to this practice….When individuals are increasingly insecure as a result of economic crisis or of the ravages of war, when conflict between classes and groups is exacerbated and can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political sphere, when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented then we see the development of the fantasy of the People-as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a state free from division (Lefort, 19-20).
Is the paranoid style, the paranoid public – and I want to be clear that Chaudhary and Hofstadter are engaged in very different projects that approach paranoia, politics, and the nation in very different manners – a question of certainty? If so, and if the loss of certainty, or rather the loss of the markers of certainty, is the condition of democracy, is there a non-paranoid democratic scene? How might we guard against the psychopolitics of certainty?
But is it a question of democracy, as such, that is the problem of paranoia? Let me turn now to the epigraph with which I opened this essay. Thomas Pynchon is, of course, one of the great diagnosticians of paranoia, conspiracy, and its absurdity. As Leo Bersani put it in an essay on Pynchon and paranoia, “Would we ever want a life without paranoid terror…. Not only that: to escape from paranoia would be to escape from the movement that is life” (Bersani, 183). Which is to say, in a different register from Hofstadter’s, paranoia has something of a timeless quality, coincident as it is here with “the movement that is life.” Chaudhary suggests as much, too. Writing of Moms for Liberty and other medical freedom and parents’ rights groups, Chaudhary turns to Freud, the superego, and death. “What Horkheimer had referred to as the ‘blind power’ of economic necessity has the authority of fate,” Chaudhary writes
which, Freud reminds us, is also associated with a variety of surrogates for parental authority: Providence, God, Nature. These are remote and implacable powers to which the superego binds one libidinally, and the fear of them is itself a correlate of the fear of death. Derived from the originary authority of the parents, fate, necessity, and inexorability are the forms in which one is delivered finitude, or what Lacan called ‘obscure aspirations for death.’ Death is the logical endpoint of the need for punishment, which Freud has said has key significance in ‘unconscious guilt.’ The fear of such mortal punishment is at the same time a wish for it, given the superego’s channeling of the death drive. Such fear-wishes can take the form of fighting for ivermectin, which can only cure COVID in doses so large that they would kill the person consuming them (101).
If paranoia attends to the movement of life, as Bersani and Pynchon suggest, then fear of death is not only about the end of life but very much about the end of paranoia. We can oppose the politics of much of the paranoid conspiracists who make up the field of Chaudhary’s book while also noting that our own defenses against paranoia obscure rather than clarify contemporary conditions.
Nevertheless, this raises a historical question – if paranoia is related to the movement of life, to the “conversation” that is everything short of death, to the abstract, transhistorical figure of the superego, then why think of it historically at all? Are we in a particular historical moment of paranoid publics, as Chaudhary argues? Chaudhary’s convincing argument is tied to the shifting games of truth, to the contemporary moment being suspended in something of an interregnum between truth regimes, a moment that fosters the paranoiac. We might also, taking Pynchon, Bersani, and Chaudhary himself as our guides, wonder if a historical transformation in our relation to death itself occasions this historically specific paroxysm of paranoia. For if we have long been enveloped in apocalyptic scenes, climate change – a now inexorable force – has certainly changed the global relation to death, which has effectively been disavowed, not least in all these paranoid publics that refuse to address it. As Alenka Zupančič has argued apropos of climate change, “disavowal doesn’t make something disappear; rather, it changes, affects that nature and meaning of this something. We could say it de-realizes it” (Zupančič , 14). As the global death of climate change and climate migration hang over the movement of life, we could say these paranoid publics are the symptoms of a historical change in life and death.
Over the past couple decades, a critical desire for repairing the world – the reparative turn – has been counterposed to what is deemed the stultifying repetitions of suspicion, of paranoia. As Chaudhary, Pynchon, and Bersani note, in their own ways, we are nothing without our paranoia and thus the issue is not repair but a critical practice that attends to the psychopolitics of truth. Chaudhary is a welcome guide for thinking this moment.
Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and editor of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History
Works Cited
Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” In The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Cadwalladr, Carole. “Daniel Dennett: ‘I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics.’” Guardian, February 12, 2017). https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/12/daniel-dennett-politics-bacteria-bach-back-dawkins-trump-interview.
Dean, Tim. “It’s the Libidinal Economy, Stupid.” History of the Present, 15.2 (October 2025): 243-257.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Lefort, Claude. “The Question of Democracy.” In Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Pynchon, Thomas. Shadow Ticket. New York: Penguin Press, 2025.
Zupančič, Alenka. Disavowal. Cambridge: Polity, 2024.
