Following in the footsteps of Patrick O'Donnell and others, Anne McClintock defines paranoia, in the context of the war on terror, as a particular way of seeing the world as articulated by government officials, the media, and others who create linkages from ordinary life to national life:
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty?Not incidentally, this is an argument that one sees in literature over and over again, from Don DeLillo's Libra to Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": the great arcs of culture (respectively, class struggle and post-sixties racial struggles) occur in tension with the private, painful struggles of the individual, the "wounds, defeats, and humiliations" that give cultural fantasies purchase on the individual psyche. McClintock, in struggling to understand how Abu Grayib could take place, widens paranoia into an interpellative, yet generative, force, one that simultaneously welcomes the wounded individual into a cultural order and absorbs the force of individual pain to push torment and power out into the culture.
