Introduction: the secret of the state `` Is not the secret of the state, hidden because it is so obvious, to be found in space?'' Henri Lefebvre (2003, page 87) The spatiality of the state is indeed one of its most obvious attributes. As John Agnew (1994) argued in his `territorial-trap' thesis, powerful, territorial assumptions have come to undergird international relations and state theory since the mid-20th cen- tury. The state is supposed to be a sovereign power, a self-enclosed political unit, with control over a bounded territory. Its boundaries are understood to fix a binary opposition between `domestic' and `foreign' realms, and thereby to establish the national scale as a `container' of political, economic, social, and cultural life. In its territorialization of political power the state is naturalized within an international system comprised of unitary state actors, which though they may vary in form, maintain a general family resemblance that is based not least on the control of territory. If the territoriality of the state has thus become `obvious', this very obviousness, as Lefebvre suggests, works to obscure everyday epistemologies of state space. In order to subvert this obviousness, and thereby to interrogate the `secret' in full view, my study of Between longing and despair: state, space, and subjectivity in Turkey À Anna J Secor Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 1457 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506 ^ 0027, USA: e-mail: ajseco2@uky.edu Received 10 January 2005; in revised form 30 June 2005 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2007, volume 25, pages 33 ^ 52 Abstract. This paper begins as an investigation of the spatiality of the state in Turkey. In everyday life the state is experienced and recognized through a multiplicity of sites, agents, institutions, techniques, and regulatory capacities. Given this fragmentation, I ask how it is that the state is conceptualized as having a reality beyond its incoherence. Through a discursive analysis of focus-group discussions with lower-class and lower-middle-class men and women in Istanbul, I trace the spatial ^ temporal techniques through which state power is enacted. I argue that this power operates through referral and deferral, circulation and arrest; it is the power both to set in motion and to suspend the circulation of people, documents, money, and influence that marks out the space ^ time of the state. Further, my reading of focus-group texts suggests that it is through the operation of the space ^ time of the state that individuals both submit to state power and become subjects of rights öthat is, citizens. At once establishing the authority of the state and the self-recognition of the subject, the Althusserian turn towards the law is a gesture of conscience or guilt. However, I argue that not all subjects are equally guilty in their imagined relationship to the state, some are more guilty than others, and, in this inequality, difference enters into the process of subjection. Focus-group partic- ipants discuss how acts such as showing identity cards or performing labor function both to assert their innocence and to mark them as guilty. By tracing out how spatial techniques of power and processes of subjection are discussed among particular groups of people in Istanbul, I hope to speak in an alternative voice to the usual top-down narration of the Turkish `strong state'. Finally, this paper is an attempt to wrap an argument around the secret of the state, around the desire, despair, and guilt that infuse the relational production of citizen and state. DOI:10.1068/d0605 { The title phrase comes from Silvan Tomkins: ``Man is not only an anxious and a suffering animal, but he is above all a shy animal, easily caught and impaled between longing and despair'' (1994, pages 148 ^ 149).