"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 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 political present, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.

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