[notes: paranoid--> Someone who has paranoia has unreasonable false beliefs as a part of another mental illness]
- P.123 I finally, with some eagerness, asked (Cindy) Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors [AIDS] about the virus's origin. "Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate," she said. "But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy (陰謀): that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things -- what would we know then that we don't already know?"
- P.124 Patton's response to me seemed to open a space for moving from the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge do -- the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?
- P.126 The traditional, homophobic psychoanalytic (精神分析的) use that has generally been made of Freud's association has been to pathologize (當作一項疾病治療或解釋)homosexuals as paranoid or to consider paranoia a distinctively homosexual disease.
- What is illuminated by an understanding of paranoia is not how homosexuality works, but how homophobia and heterosexism work -- in short, if one understands these oppressions to be systemic, how the world works.
Paranoia is anticipatory
- P.130 The first imperative of paranoia is There must be no bad surprises, and indeed, the aversion to surprise seems to be what cements the intimacy between paranoia and knowledge per se, including both epistemophilia and skepticism (懷疑論).
- No time could be too early for one's having-already-known, for its having-already-been-inevitable, that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far in the future to need to be preemptively discounted.
Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic
- P.131 Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation.
Paranoia is a strong theory
- P. 134 To call paranoia a strong theory is, then, at the same time to congratulate it as a big achievement (it's a strong theory rather as, for Harold Bloom, Milton is a strong poet) but also to classify it. It is one kind of affect theory among other possible kinds, and by Tomkins's account, a number of interrelated affect theories of different kinds and strengths are likely to constitute the mental life of any individual.
- P.135 ...the main argument or strong theory of The Novel and the Police is entirely circular: everything can be understood as an aspect of the carceral, therefore the carceral is everywhere.
Paranoia is a theory of negative affects
- P.136 While Tomkins distinguishes among a number of qualitatively different affects, he also for some purposes groups affects together loosely as either positive or negative. In these terms, paranoia is characterized not only by being a strong theory as opposed to a weak one, but by being a strong theory of a negative affect.
- P.138......it is only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force and masquerading as the very stuff of truth.
Paranoia places its faith in exposure
- P.138 Whatever account it may give of its own motivation, paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se -- knowledge in the form of exposure. Maybe that's why paranoid knowing is so inescapable narrative.
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