‘The object of power is power’: tautology, paranoia, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

ABSTRACTBuilding on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that paranoid modes of reading are ‘strongly tautological,’ this essay begins its exploration of the relationship between tautology and paranoia by suggesting that tautological forms of expression can be read as symptomatic of paranoia. Following a comparison of Lacan's description of the paranoiac's linguistic dysfunction with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Roland Barthes's, and Immanuel Kant's analyses of tautology, the relationship between tautology and paranoia is then developed through a reading of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). While in Orwell's novel tautology appears symptomatic of paranoia insofar as the Party's rejection of old systems of meaning – produces new systems that are tautological, the fact that Winston Smith's specific form of paranoia burgeons following a refusal to accept the tautological irrationality of the new symbolic order suggests that tautology might also operate in the precipitation of paranoia. Turning finally to a comparison of Winston's psychosis with Eric Santner's reading of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's paranoia, which, similarly to Winston's, also results from a confrontation with tautological symbolic lack, this essay reveals such lack as an unnerving point of convergence between the totalitarian state envisioned by Orwell and the modern democratic social structures Santner studies—a claim that I exemplify by examining British Prime Minister Theresa May’s tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit.'