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.
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Information
Publisher
Fordham University PressYear
2025Print ISBN
9781531511876
9781531511869
Edition
1eBook ISBN
9781531511883
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: Psychopolitics of Truth
- 1. Exposure
- 2. Paranoia
- 3. Freedom
- 4. Hysteria
- Coda
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
- About the Author
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Yes, you can access Paranoid Publics by Zahid R. Chaudhary in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism Theory. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.