ABSTRACT
Chapter 13, the final chapter, develops a “compulsive process” as spatial organisation of desire. It interrogates how the compulsive process helps understand the configurations of the State and its citizens in ways similar ways to those that Deleuze and Guattari used to develop the schizophrenic process for this same purpose. It does so by employing compulsivity as corporeal emergence that challenges ideas of a humanity defined by its pursuit of and reverie in meaning, rationality and reason. Such a kind of humanity seems most articulated in civic spaces dedicated to remembrance of State wars, showcasing a morality of a higher order. Following a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology of desire, Chapter 13 demonstrates what a humanity affected by and emergent with the non-human might look like. This is based on empirical research on the touching, ordering and gathering of objects and spaces in the absence of a reason, as performed by people diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. The chapter then imagines a compulsive corporeality as intimately intertwined with the non-human in Alexandra Gardens, a park in the civic centre of Cardiff (Wales). Tracing how the affective resonances of human and non-human materialities, emergent with compulsive performance, breaks the State’s affective capture of its citizens in these spaces. Upon this crumbling of State power a new citizen–State configuration emerges. The chapter concludes by arguing how the corporeal as an increasingly preferred mode of State capture might then precisely arise as its escape.
