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Paola Mieli: It is my pleasure to introduce our next panel: It includes Ruth Stein, psychoanalyst; Ron Britton, psychoanalyst; Susan Tucker, lawyer and head of the Justice program at the Soros Foundation; Noah Feldman, lawyer, Middle East specialist, and professor at NYU. We will continue to explore the question of the political manipulation of fear and paranoid anxiety.
We spent a great deal of time this morning defining the differences between anxiety, fear, paranoia. Ashis Nandy introduced the concept of the “politics of paranoia.” I hope that this afternoon we will be able to address specific social examples of this issue. Let's start asking in what way paranoid anxiety is manipulated by the media and in what way it influences our legislation.
Noah Feldman: I think it is appropriate that we held our theoretical academic discussion this morning at the university and now we are discussing politics here, in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union, which has been home to so many important moments in American history.
I want to suggest that the question of the relationship between media expressions and paranoid anxiety here is one that can be expressed well in terms of an economy of paranoia that is exchanged among different elites in different parts of the world, who are interpenetrated, but nevertheless, distinct.
Each exchanges its own account of paranoia through its
own media outlet, aimed primarily at its own audience. So let me be very specific and describe a few instances of this phenomenon. We might start with September 11, just because it's a convenient place to start.
The towers, just a few miles from here, were almost knocked down when the U.S. media began to play the role of trying to explain to an American audience what had just happened. And in that moment, the attempt to give sense to the event that just occurred necessitated attributing intentionality to, at the time, unknown but quickly identified people.
To start, with Al Qaeda itself, and its membership. An