Paranoia, Suspicion, and the Modern Encounter with the Problem of Agency

The paranoid denial of agency and/or its displacement onto an other has been “one of the chief modes of social action in modern culture,” (311) and as such, is key to an understanding of the intellectual landscape of modernity since the Middle Ages. Or so, at least, claims John Farrell in his impressively researched and erudite study of paranoia and the modern imagination. Farrell offers an explanation of “the surprising centrality and, at times, dominance of the paranoid character in modern Western culture by tracing portrayals of agency - freedom and responsibility, power and control - from the late Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century” (1). By locating paranoia at the center of modernity, Farrell makes what I think for many will be an unanticipated rhetorical move. After all, I doubt many of us see in paranoia the means to an understanding of the wide-ranging intellectual trends that have eventuated in the modern self. However, by situating it within larger struggles over the meaning and legitimacy of human agency, Farrell convincingly demonstrates the crucial role paranoia has played and continues to play in what it means to be human in the modern era.

By “paranoia,” Farrell intends something more than garden-variety psychological delusion, though that is certainly part of it. In addition to the “purely psychological tendency toward suspicion, grandiosity, [and] persecutory delusions,” Farrell also uses paranoia “to describe those accounts of the human situation... that aim to undermine our ability to distinguish our thought from coherent delusion or manipulative contrivance” (5). It is this latter, more expansive understanding of paranoia that places Farrell’s study within the broad sweep of modernity’s concern with agency. By virtue of our belief in the capacity of humans to act other than they have so acted, we not only make moral judgments but elevate the accumulated decisions of an individual to the status of “character.” At the same time, we are vitally aware of the degree to which our actions are conditioned by forces alien to us, be it our own faulty appraisal of the circumstances of our action, the interference of an other (malicious or otherwise), or mere fate. This awareness has only grown more acute with the advent of modernity, thanks in large measure to its fondness for various modes of determinism (e.g., biology, psychology, history, economics, culture, etc.). The upshot is that “The vocabulary of moral judgment, grounded in the possibility of doing and being otherwise, comes to look like a tissue of naÃ̄ve mistakes... an indefensible remnant of idealism joined to a stubborn habit” (15). Modernity, then, can be productively understood as a prolonged attempt to come to grips with deterministic frustrations of our human ideals, a coming to grips that is fundamentally committed to paranoid displacements of responsibility for those frustrations onto some sort of other.

By virtue of this approach, Farrell both forestalls nostalgia for some bygone days when human agency had some “real” basis, and motivates a critique of the wholesale denials of agency that have flourished in the wake of modernity’s fondness for determinism. This critique marks Farrell’s entry into philosophical debates concerning human action, and the result is an argument whose persuasiveness is matched by its originality. A broad spectrum of modern thinkers, from Cervantes to Pynchon via Luther, Hobbes, Marx, and Rousseau, among others, have rightly critiqued the possibility of human action in the face of alien forces that make a mockery of the sovereign subject. After all, it is undeniable that our actions are limited in multiple and fundamental ways. Along the way, however, the renunciation of agency has been transformed into an exemplary mode of explanation. Sartre’s “gaze,” Althusser’s discourse of responsibility, Lacan’s Father, Foucault’s power - each marks the victory of suspicion over idealism, as well as the elevation of the denial of agency to the status of bedrock certainty. Farrell finds this no less baffling than the faith in idealism it was...