A vitalist ethics and spatial imagination of compulsivity?

Beljaars, Diana 2017. A vitalist ethics and spatial imagination of compulsivity? Presented at: Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research Congress, Durham, UK, 14 - 15 September 2017.

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Abstract

This provocation explores the idea of imagining compulsivity as both producer and product of an emergent relationship between the human body and its surroundings. Compulsivity can be understood as the performance of an act with an unknown origin: a response to an urge which is felt, and experienced as beyond rationality, purpose, meaning and even reflexivity; an act that feels as witnessed rather than as intended. What if we think compulsivity as the enactment of a vital force that does not only happen in the brain and the nervous system, but in a violent assemblage that also enlaces the remainder of the body and its constituencies. Can we analyse compulsivity on its own terms and as a sensibility in itself, outside the rigid categories of medical pathologies, and beyond immediately imposing an ethics of suffering? Can we instead adopt a vitalist ethics to trace the elements that drive this compulsive assemblage? Would it be helpful to shift the focus from the compulsive human being to the compulsive act, to render the bodily surroundings knowable anew and as emergent from the compulsive act assemblage? Herewith, this provocation hopes to incite new ways of understanding and alleviating the suffering purported by compulsivity.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Subjects:	A General Works > AZ History of Scholarship The Humanities B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) R Medicine > RB Pathology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 September 2017
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2019 09:02
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/104758

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