Paranoid Publics

""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