Lise Charles

This article reads Lise Charles's novel "Paranoïa" (POL, 2025) through the moralistic lens of La Rochefoucauld (who appears in the novel as Prince Marsillac) and through El-Mafaalani's sociological diagnosis of modern "communities of mistrust" (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2025). From this perspective, Charles's work emerges as a literary laboratory of post-truth, in which seventeen-year-old Louise Milton exemplifies that "excessive self-perception" which can be described both moralistically and in a sociologically systemic way. Here, Louise's paranoia is not read as an isolated pathological disorder, but rather understood as a structural experience of a modernity deformed by media feedback: her constant fear of surveillance, the dispossession of her self by her mother, the media, and even the author herself, and the disintegration of her identity within the novel's dualistic system are interpreted as a literary condensation of a fundamental societal mode. The novel's inherent metafictionality—Louise as a "heroine pursued by an author who wishes her harm"—becomes the most powerful image for a present in which loss of control, loss of self, and loss of reality intersect. At the same time, the article demonstrates how Charles transposes 17th-century moralism into the heart of her poetics of paranoia. The Prince de Marsillac functions as a literary reincarnation of La Rochefoucauld, structuring the second half of the novel as a hermeneutic regime of suspicion. His doctrine of amour-propre provides Louise with a system that does not pathologize mistrust but rationalizes it—thus connecting to El-Mafaalani's description of modern communities of mistrust: mistrust becomes a functional condition for agency in an unwieldy, overly complex world. The review argues that in this fusion of Baroque unmasking and late-modern crisis of trust, Charles lays bare the core of a new paranoid aesthetic. “Paranoia” is thus not only in dialogue with classical French moralism, but can also be interpreted as a key work of contemporary diagnosis, which transforms the identity crisis of the present – ​​between surveillance, performance and moral dogmatism – into a literary experiment in which the boundary between truth and deception has finally become porous.