Post #543

As R. D. Laing observed in The Politics of Experience, a text that would significantly influence Deleuze and Guattari, "We defend ourselves violently ... with terror, confusion and 'defenses' against ego-loss experience". That such "paranoid" defenses stem from a confrontation with schizophrenic ego-Ioss indicates the extent to which these two extreme mental states are interrelated. lf we must speak in the language of postmodern theory, then "modern" paranoia seems, paradoxically enough, to have become a response to "postmodern" schizophrenia. Reports of the liberal subject's death, it turns out, have been somewhat exaggerated. T. Melley - Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (1999), p. 186