the paranoid style

What is the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style, wrote Richard Hofstadter, is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a 'vast' or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force of historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give and take, but an all-out crusade.

Friedlander /The Years of Persecution / 84

stinking ass / lugubrious game

 

I take my stand. I have no other choice - thus pursuing this bestial hilarity to its extreme - but to lift my heart to Dali, and to grunt like a pig before his canvases.

paranoiac image

Paranoia uses the outside world to make the most of an obsessive idea, with the troubling particularity that the reality of this idea becomes evident to others. The reality of the outside world serves as an illustration and proof, and is put into the services of the reality of our mind. All doctors agree in recognizing the speed and the inconceivable subtlety frequently observed in the paranoiac, who, taking advantage of the motives and the facts of such shrewdness that they escape normal people, arrives at the conclusions often impossible to contradict or reject, and who, in any case, almost always defies psychological analysis. It is by a clearly paranoiac process that it has been possible to obtain a double image: that is to say the representation of an object which, without the least figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another absolutely different object itself also stripped of any kind of deformation or abnormality which might disclose this arrangement. It has been possible to obtain such a double image thanks to the violence of paranoiac thought which, with ruse and skill, has made use of the necessary quantity of pretexts, coincidences, etc. taking advantage of them to make the second image appear which, in this case, takes the place of the obsessive idea. The double image (which, for example, may be the image of the horse which is at the same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another idea being then sufficient to make a third image appear (the image of the lion, for example) and so on to the extent of a number of images limited solely by the degree of paranoiac capacity of one's thoughts.

 

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