Paranoid Publics - by Zahid R Chaudhary

About the Book

Exploring the psychosocial realities of the assault on truth.

Book Synopsis

Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth.

Today's paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics.

Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.

Review Quotes

"Paranoid Publics is a smart, original, and provocative take on some of the most pressing political questions of our time. Chaudhary examines the collective libidinal life of outrage, paranoia, scandal, and other negative emotions that have accompanied the ongoing assault on truth. He shows how psychoanalysis can help explain the libidinal eruptions of energy that have characterized the contemporary political horizon as truth and reason have waned."---Camille Robcis, Columbia University

"Paranoid Publics is an important and original contribution to our understanding of today's political movements. The book takes up a fascinating topic--the current political status of 'truth'--and shows how a psychoanalytic reading of its many manifestations help clarify its operations and its effects. A persuasive and subtle book."---Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study

"By boldly foregoing the usual discrepancy between a subjective psychoanalytic category and collective life as such, and deftly traversing critical theory debates, mass culture practices, social media entrepreneurships, and algorithmic governance mechanisms alike, Chaudhary delivers an incisive dissection of the heterogeneous appeals to "truth" that bind knowing, belief, and political power play today. This book is a work of insight, imagination, and intellectual sophistication."---Rey Chow, author of A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present

"Chaudhary's theoretical dexterity and brilliant mapping of the political symptomology of cultural phenomena together render Paranoid Publics indispensable for grasping the contemporary political landscape. Paranoia, he reminds us, is a feeling, one that splinters into disavowal, anxiety, projection, and pleasure, organizing 'truths'--from anti-vaxxing to Havana syndrome--that we dismiss at our peril. A must read!"---Wendy Brown, Institute for Advanced Study

"If there's anything the U.S. presidential election of 2024 made clear, it's the urgency of thinking politics and psychoanalysis together. Paranoid Publics captures, with the precision of an x-ray, the metastases of truth in our moment, pinpointing the psychic pressures and unacknowledged libidinal pulsions that readings of the social body ignore to their detriment--and to ours."---Lee Edelman, author of Bad Education

About the Author

Zahid R. Chaudhary is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (Minnesota, 2012).