Willful Subjects 9780822376101

Citation preview

Willful Subjects

sara ahmed

Willful Subjects

duke university press Durham and London

2014

© 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Westchester Book Group

Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data Ahmed, Sara, 1969– Willful subjects / Sara Ahmed. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5767-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5783-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Will. 2. Will—Philosophy. 3. Will—Social aspects. I. Title.

bf611.a294 2014 153.8—dc23 2014007340

Cover art: Fred Tomaselli, Bouquet, 2002. Mixed media, resin on wood. 28 × 22 in. © Fred Tomaselli. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai. On page 293: Rhiannon Williams, Wall of Arms, 2014.

Contents

Ac know ledg ments vii Introduction:

Willing Subjects

One: Two: Three: Four:

A Willfulness Archive

The Good Will

23 59

The General Will

97

Willfulness as a Style of Politics Conclusion: A Call to Arms Notes 205 References 257 Index 277

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173

133

Ac know ledg ments

I have written this book with many women behind me, including my aunties, mother, and sisters. My heartfelt appreciation to my partner Sarah Franklin, who traveled with me on this willful journey, and inspired me to pick up many of the trails. I am grateful for feminist friendships and queer collegiality: thanks especially to Lauren Berlant, Sienna Bilge, Lisa Blackman, Ulrika Dahl, Natalie Fenton, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Jonathan Keane, Sarah Kember, Elena Loizidou, Angela McRobbie, Heidi Mirza, Nirmal Puwar, Sarah Schulman, Beverley Skeggs, Elaine Swan, Isabel Waidner, and Joanna Zylinska. Thanks to Judith Butler and Audre Lorde for your words and wisdoms. My appreciation to my department, Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, for providing a home for waifs and strays, and to Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers, and Gender Studies at Cambridge for proving me with alternative intellectual homes while I started this project in 2009 and completed it in 2013. Thanks to my publisher Duke University Press, especially Ken Wissoker, for supporting this willful work, whichever way it went. I also want to acknowledge members of audiences for my talks on will and willfulness, who helped me in the project of causing trouble by sharing anecdotes and stories of willful subjects of various kinds. It is the best kind of help! This book is dedicated to the many willful women fighting to keep feminist hopes alive.

Introduction

A WILLFULNESS ARCHIVE

There is a story called “The Willful Child.”

O

nce upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground. (Grimm and Grimm 1884, 125)1

What a story. The willful child: she has a story to tell. In this Grimm story, which is certainly a grim story, the willful child is the one who is disobedient, who will not do as her mother wishes. If authority assumes the right to turn a wish into a command, then willfulness is a diagnosis of the failure to comply with those whose authority is given. The costs of such a diagnosis are high: through a chain of command (the mother, God, the doctors) the child’s fate is sealed. It is ill will that responds to willfulness; the child is allowed to become ill in such a way that no one can “do her any good.” Willfulness is thus compromising; it compromises the capacity of a subject to survive, let alone flourish. The punishment for willfulness is a passive willing of death, an allowing of death. Note that willfulness is also that which persists even after death: displaced onto an arm, from a body onto a body part. The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up,

acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part. Willfulness involves persistence in the face of having been brought down, where simply to “keep going” or to “keep coming up” is to be stubborn and obstinate. Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience. In the story, it seems that will and willfulness are externalized; they acquire life by not being or at least staying within subjects. They are not proper to subjects insofar as they become property, what can be alienated into a part or thing.2 The different acts of willing are reduced to a battle between an arm and a rod. If the arm inherits the child’s willfulness, then what can we say about the rod? The rod is an externalization of the mother’s wish, but also of God’s command, which transforms a wish into fiat, a “let it be done,” thus determining what happens to the child. The rod could be thought of as an embodiment of will, of will given the form of a command. And yet, the rod does not appear under the sign of willfulness; it becomes instead an instrument for its elimination. One form of will seems to involve the rendering of other wills as willful; one form of will assumes the right to eliminate the others. How can we account for the violence of this story? How is this violence at once an account of willfulness? The story belongs to a tradition of educational discourse that Alice Miller in For Your Own Good (1983) describes as a “poisonous pedagogy,” a tradition that assumes the child as stained by original sin and that insists on violence as moral correction, as being for the child (see chapter 2). This violence is a visible violence, one that it would be very hard not to notice. In this book I aim to show how the Grimm story is pedagogic in another sense: it teaches us to read the distinction between will and willfulness as a grammar, as a way of ordering human experience, as a way of distributing moral worth. This story, “The Willful Child,” is a finding. I found it because I was following the figure of the willful subject: trying to go where she goes, trying to be where she has been. It was another figure, related, or perhaps even a relation, a kind of kin, that of the feminist killjoy, who first sparked my interest in this pursuit. Feminist killjoys: those who refuse to laugh at the right points; those who are unwilling to be seated at the table of happiness (see Ahmed 2010). Feminist killjoys: willful women, unwilling to get along, unwilling to preserve an idea of happiness. I became interested in how those who get in the way of happiness, and we call these those killjoys, are also and often attributed as willful. In witnessing the unruly trouble making of feminist killjoys I caught a glimpse of how willfulness 2

Introduction

can fall, like a shadow on the fallen. This book is an attempt to give my glimpse of a willful subject a fuller form. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss gave me an initial glimpse. I offered a reading of this novel in The Promise of Happiness (2010) as part of a genre of female trouble-making fiction. In reflecting on trouble in Eliot’s text, I wrote a footnote on willfulness: “Writing this book on happiness has sparked my interest in theorizing the sociality of the will and the ways in which someone becomes described as willful insofar as they will too much, or too little, or in ‘the wrong way’ ” (2010, 245). It was the character Maggie Tulliver, a willful heroine, who inspired this note and thus this subsequent book Willful Subjects. Maggie Tulliver has been the object of considerable feminist desire and identification over time. We might share affection for Maggie as feminist readers, as we might share affection for the many willful girls that haunt literature. Simone de Beauvoir identified with Maggie so strongly that she was reported to have “cried for hours” upon her death (Moi 2008, 265). Lyndie Brimstone in her personal reflections on literature and women’s studies similarly relates her own experience to Maggie’s: “Maggie with her willful hair” who “made one dash for passion then went back to rue it for the rest of her truncated life” (2001, 73). Maggie’s willful hair comes to express her willful character: her refusal to be straightened out by the fashions of femininity. The assumption of Maggie’s willfulness seems to explain the unhappiness of Maggie’s situation. My hunch (how often do we start on a trail with a hunch; if we tend to write these hunches out as we acquire confidence in our arguments, we can write them back in) in moving from the figure of the feminist killjoy to that of the willful subject was that willfulness and unhappiness share a historical itinerary. We learn from our traveling companions. To be identified as willful is to become a problem. If to be willful is to become a problem, then willfulness can be understood as a problem of will. And it is the will that points us back in the direction of happiness, which has been consistently understood as the object of the will. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal argued: “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves” ([1669] 2003, 113, emphases added). Even suicide is an expression of the will to A Willfulness Archive

3

happiness. The implication of this rather extraordinary description is that happiness should be thought of not as content but form: if in tending toward something, we tend toward happiness, then happiness provides a container for tendency. Happiness must be emptied of content if it can be filled by “whatever” it is that we are tending toward. One of our tasks might be to ask what happiness does as a container of the will, however empty. Does happiness lead us “willingly” in a certain direction? For Augustine, the fourth-century theologian often credited as the starting point in the history of the will, that is, as the scholar who first gives the will the status of an independent power (see chapter 1), happiness is not simply what motivates will, but is what follows for those who will in the right way: “Those who are happy, who must also be good, are not happy simply because they will to be happy—even the wicked will that— but because they will it in the right way, whereas the wicked do not” (On Free Choice of the Will, 1.14.23).3 Happiness follows for those who will right. Those who will wrong still will happiness. To quote again from Augustine: “To the extent that someone strays from the path that leads to happiness— all the while insisting that his only goal is to be happy—to that extent he is in error, for ‘error’ simply means following something that doesn’t take us where we want to go” (2.9.47–48). The unhappy ones are the strays, those who in leaving the path of happiness are going the wrong way. Unhappiness is thus understood as an error of will; to err is to will wrong, to err is to go astray. An error message is the message of unhappiness. Willfulness too has been understood as an error of will. Let’s take a typical definition of willfulness: “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse.”4 Willfulness is used to explain errors of will— unreasonable or perverted will—as faults of character. Willfulness can thus be understood, in the first instance, as an attribution to a subject of will’s error. Willfulness and unhappiness seem to meet at this point, a stray point. This intimacy of willfulness and unhappiness remains to be thought. And to think that intimacy is to queer the will.

A History of the Will I turned toward the category of “the will” because the figure of the willful subject took me there. The timing of this sequence matters. Following the figure of the willful subject, making her my priority, is another way of 4

Introduction

proceeding, another way of writing a history of the will.5 If the problem of willfulness cannot be separated from the problem of will, then willfulness returns us to the will.6 We will need to ask: what does it mean to write a history of will? For some philosophers, to write such a history would be to write a history of a ghost; after all Gilbert Ryle ([1949] 2009) famously calls the will “a ghost in a machine.”7 There are those who doubt the existence of such a thing called “the will” understood as a faculty of a subject, as something you or I might have. Even if the debate over free will and determinism continues to be rehearsed as, or in response to, the development of new sciences of the mind,8 the vocabulary of “the will” is not exercised with much regularity in either of its historically privileged domains: philosophy and psychology. But of course even ghosts have histories, even objects that are understood as illusions or fancies have a story to tell, a story that is not independent of the story of those for whom such illusions and fancies are tantalizingly real. A ghostly history may be no more or less real than any other. In writing a history of the will, are we writing the history of an idea? Peter E. Gordon observes that a historian of ideas “will tend to organize the historical narrative around one major idea and will then follow the development or metamorphosis of that idea as it manifests itself in different contexts and times” (2012, 2). Can we approach the will through its metamorphosis as an idea? But as Brad Inwood notes, “there are few words in the philosophical lexicon so slippery as ‘will’ ” (2000, 44). The will might be too slippery to be treated as a single idea with different manifestations. The will has indeed moved around: associated by some with activity, others with passivity, some with mind, and others with body. If the will comes up most often in a restricted debate about human nature and action (usually with the adjective “free” and with its sparring partner “determinism”), the will has also been understood as what connects humans to all other things, from atoms to amoebas and stones. The will could even be described as one of philosophy’s most promiscuous terms. It is thus not surprising that there are few attempts to offer a history of the will. Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind is singular in its explicit aim to offer such a history.9 It is noteworthy that Arendt defines her own task in terms of writing a history of the will that is not the history of an idea. For Arendt the task of writing the history of will as an idea (which she translates very quickly, possibly too quickly, into a history of the idea of freedom) would be “rather easy” because it would be A Willfulness Archive

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premised on a false separation of ideas as “mental artefacts” from the history of the human subject as “the artificer” (1978, 5). She argues that she “must accept what Ryle rejects, namely, that this faculty was indeed discovered and can be dated. In brief, I shall analyze will in terms of its histories, and thus of its difficulties” (5).10 To discover something implies that thing already existed. But I think the more important implication is that once discovered, the will acquires a certain hold. For Arendt, given that the will is an idea of a subject, the history of will is also the history of the transformation of the subject who has that idea. Arendt’s history of the will can thus be related to Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the subject. Foucault describes a genealogy as a history of what is usually felt as without history, including a history of the felt. A genealogy, Foucault suggests, “must record the singularity of events outside of any monstrous finality: it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history: in sentiments, love, conscious, instincts” (1977, 139). For Foucault the will might have been too unpromising to have been made an explicit object of inquiry. He notes in an interview, “What Is Critique?,” how the thematic of power should have led him to the question of will. Foucault admits: “One cannot confront this problem, sticking closely to the theme of power without, of course, at some point, getting to the question of human will. It is obvious that I could have realised it earlier. However, since this problem of will is a problem that Western philosophy has always treated with infinite precaution and difficulties, let us say that I have tried to avoid it as much as possible” (1977, 74–75).11 Perhaps it is the difficulties that Arendt mentions (“I shall analyze will in terms of its histories, and thus of its difficulties”) that makes Foucault bypass the question of will, even though his genealogical method was indebted to Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals ([1887] 2003) which could, and indeed has, been understood as a “genealogy of the will.”12 And it is Nietzsche who offers us not only an account of how the will becomes an idea of the subject, but how this idea does things. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche suggests that the error of will is part of the general error of causality. As he describes: “We believed ourselves to be causal agents in the act of willing; we at least thought we were there, catching causality in the act” ([1889] 1990, 60, emphasis in original; see also Nietzsche [1887] 2001, 204). Perhaps we catch nothing but the sight of ourselves catching. Nietzsche offers more than a critique of the error of will. He suggests that the error of will has a purpose: the “free will” is “the 6

Introduction

most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind ‘accountable’ in his sense of the word” (64). An account of will is an account of becoming accountable, of becoming guilty: “the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, of finding guilty” (64). Not only does the will allow actions to be referred back to a subject, but it is through the will that the subject is unified as an entity. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche notes that although “philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it were the bestknown thing in the world,” the unity of will, “is a unity only in name” ([1886] 1997, 12).13 In following the will as a unity, we are following a name, one given to a subject. It is not simply that we need to account for this subject but that, after Nietzsche, we might need to track how this subject is held to account by being given a will. It is this model of the will that allows a philosophical idea to be translated into a social or cultural diagnostics. The will is transformed in contemporary culture into “willpower,” into something that a responsible and moral subject must develop or strengthen. When the will becomes will power, then the fate of the subject becomes “in its power.” And when social problems are narrated as problems of will, they become a consequence of the failure of individuals to will themselves out of situations in which they find themselves. Lauren Berlant notes: “In the new good life imagined by the contracting state, the capitalist requirement that there be a population of poorly remunerated laborers-in-waiting or those who cobble together temporary work is not deemed part of a structural problem but rather a problem of will and ingenuity” (2004, 4, emphasis in original). When a structural problem becomes diagnosed in terms of the will, then individuals become the problem: individuals become the cause of problems deemed their own.

A Queer History of Will What would it mean to offer a queer history of will? Given that the will becomes a technique, a way of holding a subject to account, it could be understood as a straightening device. If we have this understanding of will, we would not be surprised by its queer potential: after all, you only straighten what is already bent. Even when error is treated as what must be corrected, error might be the ground covered by a queer history of will. Recall the etymology of error: from err, meaning to stray. The landscape A Willfulness Archive

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of will might appear differently, might appear queerly, if we notice how it is littered with waifs and strays. Rather than tracking the history of the will as an idea, which would assume that idea as having a consistency that it may or may not have, I offer a history of willing associations. A queer history of will might foreground the association between will and error and explore its myriad forms.14 We have already noted how Augustine makes this association; and others have followed. René Descartes, for example, contrasts the object of the will to the object of perception. The latter appears before a subject: “The perception of the intellect extends only to the few objects presented to it and is always externally limited.” The horizon of the will is not limited by this before: “The will, on the other hand, can in a certain sense be called infinite, since we observe without exception that its scope extends to anything that can possibly be an object of any other will— even the immeasurable will of God. So it is easy for us to extend our will beyond what we clearly perceive; and when we do this it is no wonder that we may happen to go wrong” ([1644] 1988, 171, emphasis added). According to Descartes, it is given this contrast between the finite faculty of the intellectual and infinite faculty of the will that subjects tend to err. As Stephen Menn explains, “The juxtaposition of these faculties does not of itself produce error, but it gives me occasion to err, since the will extends beyond the bounds of my understanding” (1998, 316). For Descartes, if to will is to will what is beyond the reach of the subject, then willing easily amounts to going wrong. Perhaps in this “easily amounts” is a firmer argument: the will is errant. We might note the spatial and temporal aspects of the argument: we tend to will what is not present, in the sense of here as well as now. It is the futurity and distance of will that seems to render will faulty. We go wrong when we try and gather what is not within reach. Descartes’s account of will and error could usefully be compared to John Locke’s empirical psychology. For Locke it is will that can carry the subject away from what it wants. Even if we know what we want—happiness—we don’t always aim wisely: “though all men desire happiness, yet their wills carry them so contrarily” ([1690] 1997, 246, emphasis added). The contrariness of the will, for Locke, is that it can carry us away from a desired future. To be carried contrarily by will is to be carried away from happiness. We can again hear the echo of Augustine: to leave the path of happiness is to be willing wrong, or going the wrong way. Willing is how we end up deviating from the right path, as well as the means for directing 8

Introduction

ourselves along that path. Perhaps if we follow the will we might in turn leave this path, we might even wander away from the path of the willing subject. A queer history of the will might allow the will to wander away from such a subject. To wander away we must first recognize the path we are asked to follow. Arendt addresses Augustine as “the first philosopher of the will.”15 She is not assuming that concepts such as deliberation or preference began with Augustine (after all, these are key ethical themes in classical Greek philosophy), but rather suggesting that until Augustine, and the development of “a Christian ethics of interiority” (Ferrarin 1991, 339), the will was not understood as an independent human faculty. One might pause here and note how a queer history of sexuality might cover some of the same ground as the history of the faculty of the will. Augustine has figured prominently in queer histories, for example, in Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (1991). Augustine calls upon the will in his confessions of desire, allowing us to reflect on will and desire as sharing a historical itinerary. Indeed, Dollimore shows how in Augustine there is an intimate relationship between free will and the privation and perversion of desire. A queer history of will might proceed by investing the entangled emergence of will and desire. I have no doubt of the queer potential of Augustine’s work, and he remains a key figure in my own willful history of will. But if we are not assuming the subject of will as the only way that will becomes a subject, we might begin elsewhere. We might start with Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher, whose poem The Nature of the Universe we can inherit because of the queer thread of history, as Stephen Greenblatt has shown in his book The Swerve (2011). The Nature of the Universe is a queer poem, no doubt, queer not only for its content but queer in the very matter of its survival. A poem assumed lost for centuries only to be found again because of the dedicated wandering of a medieval humanist, a poem that survived on parchment, a material made out of the skin of sheep and goats because parchment is matter that can survive the “teeth of time” (2011, 84);16 a poem hidden in a monastery, concealed under the mark of another’s signature.17 Greenblatt notes how the “reappearance of his poem was such a swerve, an unforeseen deviation from the direct trajectory—in this case, toward oblivion—on which that poem and its philosophy seemed to be travelling” (7). For the poem to exist for us, it must have persisted. Remember our Grimm story: mere persistence can A Willfulness Archive

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be an act of disobedience. Perhaps there is nothing “mere” about persistence. Persistence can be a deviation from a trajectory, what stops the hurtling forward of fate, what prevents a fatality. The swerve of history helps us to find the swerve in history. We can ask: how does making Lucretius a turning point in the history of will turn that history? Jane Bennett writes of Lucretius in Vibrant Matter (2009) and although this book has a section on the willing subject, Lucretius is not addressed as a philosopher of the will. If we address Lucretius in this way, we can bring to the foreground the perversity of will. In The Nature of the Universe Lucretius offers an account of the will precisely not as a faculty of a human subject separated from the world, one whose work is to work upon the world. The will for Lucretius is understood as the swerve, also described as the clinamen (this word is invented by Lucretius but derives from the Latin clīnāre, to incline) in order to mount a philosophical defense of Epicurean atomism. The will makes human beings continuous with atoms, made from the same stuff; stuff understood neither as shaped by a preordained purpose and design, nor as lifeless and inert, but as motion and deviation. In his descriptions of the physical universe, Lucretius offers an account of will in the form of swerving atoms: “when the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change of direction” (2.66, emphasis in original). To swerve is to deviate: it is not to be carried by the force of your own weight. What better way of learning about the potential to deviate than from the actuality of deviation. The swerve is just enough not to travel straightly; not to stay on course. Oh the potential of this not! The beauty of Lucretius’s account of the universe is that swerving atoms are a point of continuity with all living creatures, which makes continuity into discontinuity: “If the atoms never swerve so as to originate new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?” (2.67). To swerve or to deviate can snap the bonds of fate, understood as the forward trajectory of a straight line. It is will that allows humans too not to be pushed in a certain direction, not to travel straight by their own weight. The will is understood here as the capacity or potential to enact a “no,” the potential not to be determined from without, by an external force. The “no” is what makes humans on a

10

Introduction

deviant line with atoms: “There is within the human heart something that can fight against this force and resists it,” he suggests and “in the atoms you must recognise the same possibility” (2.68). Teresa Brennan’s description of free will as “the ability not to go with the flow” (2004, 56) recalls the poetry of Lucretius’s swerving atoms. Some have challenged the way Lucretius has been interpreted as an account of the will of a conscious human subject, for example, by Karl Marx in his early Hegelian work on ancient materialism. Jane Bennett describes Marx’s “too-quick translation of atoms into human beings” (2001, 121). We need to slow down if we are to be enchanted by matter. To find only the human in Lucretius would certainly be to miss the point. The point is not at the same time to expel the human from the possibility named by the will. The human subject becomes part of the will story: just a part, not the start. And indeed we learn from the continuity of humans with atoms that there is another way of thinking of will: “the will” is a name given by or in history to the possibility of deviation. How queer is this will! As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has elaborated, the word “queer” derives from the Indo-European word “twerk,” to turn or to twist, also related to the word “thwart” to transverse, perverse, or cross (1994, viii). That this word came to describe sexual subjects is no accident: those who do not follow the straight line, who to borrow Lucretius’s terms, “snap the bonds of fate,” are the perverts: swerving rather than straightening, deviating from the right course. To queer the will is to show how the will has already been given a queer potential. Without doubt for Lucretius this potentiality is valorized: but for others, the same potentiality is narrated as a problem or threat, the problem or threat that subjects might not follow the right path. Willfulness might be a conversion point: how a potential is converted into a threat. If we reread Augustine through the lens of Lucretius, we discover how for Augustine too willing is what keeps open the possibility of deviation. Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will suggests that even if “the movement of the will” is similar to “the downward movement of the stone,” the stone “has no power to check its downward movement” (3.1.72). Of course for Lucretius the stone would have its own inclinations: the stone would not be understood as without power, even a checking power, as the power not to be moved straight down in a vertical line. But we can put the matter of the stone to one side, at least for now,18 and note how the will matters as an idea for Augustine. He seeks to explain how evil can exist in the world

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despite the goodness and sovereignty of divine will. He does not describe will simply as the potential to do evil: rather he describes will as the potential to do good. If humans did not willingly follow God, goodness would not refer to humans but to God. Humans must be free not to be good in order to have the possibility of being good; humans must be free to “turn away” from the right path if that path is to become their own. This means for Augustine it is better to leave the right path than to stay on that path because you have no will: “A runaway horse is better than a stone that stays in the right place only because it has no movement or perception of its own” (On Free Choice of the Will, 3.5.81).19 In some translations this runaway horse is a “wandering horse.” The will signifies that it is better to leave the right place than to stay in the right place because you are unable to move on your own. The will might even describe the relative value of not staying in the right place. It is not simply that Augustine suggests that to will wrongly is to deviate from the path of happiness. If the will names the possibility of deviation, then that possibility becomes intrinsic to will. The will is thus called upon to resolve the problem of the will: not being fully determined from without becomes the requirement to determine from within. The will might even be willful before it becomes the will; before it can fulfill its own requirement. It is worth noting here that Jane Bennett’s own appreciative reading of Lucretius uses the language of willfulness: “A certain willfulness or at least quirkiness and mobility— the ‘swerve’—is located in the very heart of matter, and thus dispersed throughout the universe as an attribute of all things, human or otherwise. The swerve does not appear as a moral flaw or a sign of the sinful rebelliousness of humans” (2001, 81). There is a clear hesitation in Bennett’s use of the word “willfulness,” a hesitation that takes the form of simultaneously using and replacing the word (“at least quirkiness or mobility”). My arguments in Willful Subjects explain this hesitation. What happens if we assume that the word “willfulness” is the right word? If Lucretius teaches us that the will does not belong to the subject (if will names a potential that matters to all matter) then willfulness too might not reside within a subject. Willfulness is the word used to describe the perverse potential of will and to contain that perversity in a figure. Our tendency to associate willfulness with human flaws and sin would become a symptom not only of the desire to punish the perverts but to restrict perversion to the conduct of the few. If willfulness provides a container for perversion, my aim is to spill this container.

12

Introduction

A Willful Method In following the figure of a willful subject, I assemble a willfulness archive. This assembling is my method: a willful method. What do I mean by a willfulness archive? We could hear in the oddness of this expression a stretching of the meaning of archive, or even an evacuation of the archive. There is no building in which the documents of willfulness are deposited. Or is there? Perhaps a document is a building, one that houses or gives shelter. A willfulness archive would refer to documents that are passed down in which willfulness comes up, as a trait, as a character trait. Even if the documents are not contained in one place, they could be described as containers. We could draw here on Jacques Derrida’s reflections on archives as domiciliations, where the documents are guarded, are put under “house arrest” (1996, 2). If documents can be buildings, they can be where an arresting happens. Perhaps it is the willful subject who is under arrest. To arrest can mean not only to “cause to stop” but can also be used figuratively in the sense of to catch or to hold. The willful subject is under arrest in coming to appear to a watchful eye, to the eye of the law, as the one who has certain qualities and attributes. To be arrested is not to be stationary. She moves around; she turns up by turning up in all the wrong places. The willful subject led me to where she came to appear. In following this figure, I thus came across materials I had not previously encountered. The Grimm fable, “The Willful Child,” is one such example. Even as the figure of the willful child became familiar, I was still surprised by the “how” of her appearance. Research involves being open to being transformed by what we encounter. This fable redirected my thinking and became a pivot, or a table, that supported my travels. It was thinking through this fable that led me to reconsider how the the part/whole distinction relates to the will/willfulness distinction. I had already begun drawing on descriptions of the general will in Pascal’s Pensées, discussed in chapter 3, in which the image of a body and its parts (the foot as well as the hands) is so powerful. Once I found the Grimm story, this image from Pascal made a much stronger impression. The arm that keeps coming up began to haunt me. I began to notice other wayward body parts. This book is full of them and the promise as well as terror of their agency. The Grimm story has allowed me to attend to the part of other parts. I situate the Grimm story within a wider body of work that can be described

A Willfulness Archive

13

as “education of the will” in which the will becomes the object as well as method for teaching a child. It is in this body of work that the figure of the willful child appears most frequently and is called upon with the greatest urgency. In the history of education of will, the willful child has been hard at work.20 The function of the will as a pedagogic tool is hard to separate from its function as a moral organ (see chapter 2). All texts in which the figure of the willful child is “at work” could be described as part of the history of the education of the will, which includes literary as well as philosophical materials concerned with moral character. I have already noted the significance of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss to the development of this project, a novel that could be described as bildungsroman, focusing on the moral and psychological development of a protagonist. In going back to my starting point, I ended up working through all of Eliot’s novels, which eventually came to form a key part of my willfulness archive, even though this book is not itself a book on Eliot.21 I decided to work with George Eliot’s novels not only because they were crucial to how I embarked on the willfulness trail but also because Eliot can be thought of as a novelist of the will: she exercises the language of will in her description of character. As Michael Davis has noted in George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Psychology, Eliot was engaged in the intellectual debates of the time which “dismissed the notion of the will as free or spontaneous” (2006, 120; see also Bonaparte 1975). Within her novels, the will appears not simply as something characters have but as part of a moral and affective landscape. Davis concludes that Eliot “maintains a sense of the will as a psychologically and ethically significant category” such that “her awareness of the problems attached to the concept of will” provides “the basis of a subtle and complex redefinition of that concept” (2006, 120). Working closely with Eliot’s texts has helped give more coherence to my own. Perhaps, in returning to the same body of work, I have found a respite from wandering. Eliot’s texts have also helped me to think of how will works as an idea that converts into narrative, creating a world in which will as well as willfulness become assignments that pertain not only to persons but also to things. As Moira Gatens notes, George Eliot can be thought of as a philosopher as well as a novelist, or we could approach her novels as a “new form of philosophical writing” (2009, 74). Eliot’s works could be described as a novel form of philosophy. My choice of Eliot as a willful companion reflects my own interest in reimagining the relationship of philosophy to 14

Introduction

literature. In reading Eliot as a philosopher, I also read philosophy as literature. In this book I engage with a wide range of “philosophies of the will” and treat these philosophical works as strands of a willfulness archive. In other words, I read philosophies of the will not simply for the content of arguments about will, but with a reflection on how the will (sometimes but not always in relation to willfulness) takes form and is given form within the works themselves. I do think of the arguments of this book as philosophical arguments even if the book does not inhabit in any “straightforward” way the house of philosophy. The philosophical project of the book could even be described as not philosophy. What do I mean by this? To be doing not philosophy is a way of framing one’s relation to philosophy albeit in apparently negative terms. Not philosophy is practiced by those who are not philosophers and aims to create room within philosophy for others who are not philosophers. Not being a philosopher working with philosophy can be understood as generative: the incapacity to return texts to their proper histories allows us to read sideways or across, thus creating a different angle on what is being reproduced. Not philosophy aims not to reproduce the body of philosophy by a willful citational practice: if philosophers are cited (and in this book many philosophers are cited) they are not only cited alongside those who are not philosophers but are not given any priority over those who are not. This is how I come to offer as my final hand a rereading of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as a companion fable to the Grimm fable. By not philosophy I am not, however, only referring to the philosophy produced by those who are not philosophers. Not philosophy also attends to “the not,” making “the not” an object of thought. Not philosophy is also a philosophy of the not. In this book I argue that the will can be rearticulated in terms of the not: whether understood as possibility or capacity, as the possibility of not being compelled by an external force (I have discussed this understanding of will in Lucretius), or as the capacity to say or enact a “no” to what has been given as instruction. Indeed, willfulness as a judgment tends to fall on those who are not compelled by the reasoning of others. Willfulness might be what we do when we are judged as being not, as not meeting the criteria for being human, for instance. Not to meet the criteria for human is often to be attached to other nots, not human as not being: not being white, not being male, not being straight, not being able-bodied. Not being in coming up against being can transform being. This statement can be heard as aspiration: not philosophy, in A Willfulness Archive

15

reinhabiting the body of philosophy, queers that body. Willfulness: philosophy astray, a stray’s philosophy. A queer body can be a queer body of thought. Thinking through the relationship between will and willfulness has allowed me to reorientate my relation to the will as a philosophical idea. The arguments offered in this book could be read alongside the work of scholars such as John Smith (2000) and Peter Hallward (2009) who have both argued that the critique of the volitional subject within poststructuralist thought does not mean volition as a concept no longer has its uses. Smith argues that some readers of “contemporary theory” might assume that “the will is an outmoded concept” (2000, 12). He suggests that for feminist readers the will might be understood as a “masculinist concept,” as belonging to the subject that has been the subject of feminist critique (12).22 Smith also notes how the will has become difficult to disentangle from Nazism, with its triumphant “triumph of the will.”23 Hallward in turn reflects on the tendency within poststructuralist theory to “dismiss the notion of will as a matter of delusion or deviation” (2009, 20). Against these dismissals of will, Smith and Hallward argue for a revised and dialectical concept of will as a praxis or activity. I agree that the concept of the will is not exhausted. I am not interested, however, in rescuing volition from the established critiques (not all of which I would describe, as Hallward does, as dismissals)24 even though in chapter 4 I reflect on the importance of political will, and even if by the end of the research I began to feel a certain commitment to the possibilities left open by will. But I am not arguing for the will, even if I draw on its utility. One of my aims in Willful Subjects is to deepen the critiques of voluntarism by reflecting on the intimacy between freedom and force. I respond to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for us “to resist simply re-propelling the propaganda of a receding Free Will” by drawing on willfulness to rethink the relationship between “voluntarity and compulsion” (1994, 138). Power relations can be secured “willingly.” When willing is secured, a will project is a security project. Once secured, the will is not easy to apprehend as will. Phenomenology has been an important resource in developing this argument by helping me to reflect on how willfulness “comes up” given how what has been “already willed” (chapter 1) or “generally willed” (chapter 3) tends to recede or become background. The willful subject might be striking in her appearance not only because she disagrees with what has been willed by others, but because she disagrees with what has disappeared from view. 16

Introduction

To bring materials together as a willfulness archive might create an even stronger impression of the willful subject. There are risks in strengthening an impression. We might presume she is the impression she leaves. We might think we have found her there like that. It is important that we do not assume that willfulness simply describes a disposition: although as a description (of disposition) willfulness might have certain effects (on disposition). We are following a depositing rather than finding what is deposited. This book thus asks not, what is willfulness, but rather what is willfulness doing? To ask what willfulness is doing is also to ask what we are doing when we are being willful: this is how the question of doing does not pass over the question of being. With these questions come others. Where do we tend to find willfulness? When does willfulness come up? Who is attributed as willful? A key aspect of the argument is that willfulness is not only deposited in certain places but that through this depositing the will is unevenly distributed in the social field. The reverse mechanism is the same mechanism: the uneven distribution of the will is how a figure can appear as willful (some wills appear as too full of will, a fullness that is also narrated as an emptying or theft of will from others). No wonder that the figure of the willful subject—often but not always a child, often but not always female, often but not always an individual— has become so familiar. It is the depositing of willfulness in certain places that allows the willful subject to appear as a figure, as someone we recognize, in an instant. It is this figure that explains why we might hesitate in using the language of willfulness to describe the potential of the swerve. She is a powerful container. I aim to make this familiar figure of the willful subject strange by reflecting on the familiarity of her form. And it is thinking of the status of the willful subject as a figure that allows us to open up the concept of the archive. Donna Haraway (1997) has shown how figures are semiotic and material. If figures mean; they matter. If figures matter; they mean. A willfulness archive assembled around a figure does not only include documents or texts. Or we could say that when we assemble an archive (and to assemble is an action, a gathering of materials that would otherwise remain dispersed or scattered) we do not need to approach those materials only as texts. When figures are exercised, they move; and we are moved by them. Just think of the Grimm story; a written text certainly, although one that no longer appears in official editions of Grimm stories (perhaps the violence of this story is too visible though of course the violence of the Grimm stories is never far from the surface); a written A Willfulness Archive

17

text that might and can be read as just one translation of the oral stories gathered by the Grimm brothers; stories in which the child’s arm or hand coming out of the grave was a common motif.25 But I am not just thinking of the histories that are at stake in the arrival and passing around of a given text. How else can we describe “The Willful Child” other than as a text? We get further with our descriptions if we include the affective realm. How do these words affect the reader? If the story is intended for a child, how would it reach that child? Does it touch her because it is touching? The figure of the willful child is saturated with affect. The word “willful” is an inheritance in how it is affective, which makes willfulness effective or efficient in its result. Words can smother us, enrage us; they can leave us full or empty. When they touch us, they create an impression. I write this book as someone who has received a willfulness impression. It is perhaps because I too was called a willful child that this figure caught my attention. I have heard the intonation of this call, how it can fall harshly, as accusation. This call is often a calling out to a child, to someone who can be addressed in this way, who, at least at this time or in my time, was assumed not to have the right to return the address. The willful child can be part of our own history, embodied as memory: someone we might have been or someone we might have been thought to be, someone we became in the face of having been thought to have been. I became interested in this figure, a ghostly figure, perhaps, a trace or impression of a person, as someone, or as somewhere, I have been. In including myself within this text I am, as it were, laying my cards on the table. I am giving you my hand. I have no doubt that some would conclude that my hands cannot be impartial. They are not; and I fully intend this not. I write this book with partial hands.26 Impartial hands would leave too much untouched. In assembling a willfulness archive, I am also working with concepts, and I hope to return concepts to bodies. Concepts can be sweaty: a trace of the laboring of bodies. Willfulness becomes a sweaty concept if we can reveal the labor of its creation.27 If we hear the definition of willfulness, cold and dusty from being lodged in a dictionary, as a call, as an address to someone, we can think of how words and concepts leak into worlds. To recall: “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse.” To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reasoning of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before? 18

Introduction

When willfulness is an attribution, a way of finding fault, then willfulness is also the experience of an attribution. Willfulness can be deposited in our bodies. And when willfulness is deposited in our bodies, our bodies become part of a willfulness archive.28 To follow willfulness around thus requires moving out of the history of ideas and into everyday life worlds. If we inherit this history, it leaves an impression on the skin. I could not have worked with these impressions on my own, even if the experience of being called willful can feel like being cast out. I needed the hands of others, virtual and fleshy others, to support my own effort to make willfulness the sustained object of theoretical reflection. The book is organized as threads of argument that are woven together and tied up somewhat loosely. I have used echoes and repetitions across the chapters (the same things come up in different places). I have relied on the sound of connection to build up a case from a series of impressions and have thus imagined the writing as poetic as well as academic. This is not to say there is no reason in the rhyme. In structuring this book, my aim has been to thicken gradually my account of the sociality of will. After all, the judgment of willfulness derives from a social scene: how some have their will judged as a problem by others. The first chapter draws on examples of individuals who are “willing together” in actualizing a possibility; the second reflects on how the project of eliminating willfulness from will becomes a moral imperative that is binding; the third reflects on how some wills are generalized in a social or institutional body; and the fourth considers how willfulness is required when you come up against what has been generalized as will. One of my key aims is to explore how the will becomes a question of time by thinking through how will relates to the past as well as the future, and how the will is thus never quite present or in the time we are in: the subjective time of will is thus described as non-spontaneity and the social time of will as non-synchronicity. The question of will becomes a question of precedence, and in the book I explore specific figures including the guest (chapter 1), the child (chapter 2), and the stranger (chapter 3), who can be thought of as sharing a condition: that of coming after. In chapter 1, “Willing Subjects,” I consider willing as an everyday experience and social activity. I explore willing as a project form, as how subjects aim to bring certain things about. I begin in this way to depersonalize willfulness (which as a judgment can often feel too personal, as if it is about a person) by showing how willfulness can be attributed to whatever A Willfulness Archive

19

gets in the way of an intention, including objects as well as subjects. In chapter 2, “The Good Will,” I return to the figure of the willful child and consider how she becomes a tool in the history of the education of will. The chapter also explores how the will itself becomes a project, as what a subject must work upon, and offers a critique of the universality of the good will by reflecting on the gendering of the will as well as willfulness. In chapter 3, “The General Will,” I analyze the distinction between will and willfulness as it relates to the distinction between the general and particular will. I explore how parts that are not willing the preservation of the whole are charged with willfulness, including nonproductive and nonreproductive parts. The book then offers a recharge of the charged term of willfulness by thinking through how we are in this charge. In chapter 4, “Willfulness as a Style of Politics,” I reflect on how willfulness has been actively claimed. If willfulness involves a conversion point (how a potential is converted into a threat), this chapter explores another conversion point, what we might call a counter-conversion (how a threat can be converted into potential). However, the mood of this chapter is not simply or only celebratory. I reflect on experiences that are difficult and do not wish to resolve that difficulty (to resolve difficulty would be to lose proximity to what is difficult). In the conclusion if I do celebrate, at least in part, willful parts (perhaps in the original sense of “celebrate” as to frequent in numbers or to crowd), I also acknowledge that willfulness does not provide our action with a moral ground. Being less supported might also mean being willing to travel on unstable grounds even if (or perhaps because) our aim is to find support. In writing about willfulness, I concede the possibility that my own writing will be judged as willful: as too assertive, even pushy. One of my arguments is that some bodies have to push harder than other bodies just to proceed; this argument might be true for arguments as well as bodies. The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) describes the meaning of willful as strong willed “in the positive sense” as both obsolete and rare. The negative senses of willfulness (or even willfulness as a negative sense) have become so deeply entrenched that to open up a history of willfulness one might have to insist on other more positive senses. I might have become rather insistent about the potential of being insistent. Sometimes you might even have to “over-insist” to get through a wall of perception; it is a reflection of what we have to get over. At the same time, I am conscious that a book on willfulness needs willing readers; by which I mean those who are willing to keep reading, to stay with the text, whether or not they 20

Introduction

agree with it. I have thus taken as much care as I can in how and when I have introduced willful subjects. And I have taken my time; indeed, it is not until the last chapter of this book that I describe the world from their point of view, from the point of view of those who receive and are shaped by this judgment. I use the third person plural here even though I include myself within a willfulness archive. I often address this book in this way, thinking of it in terms of what they are doing. When I came to rewrite it, I wondered whether they would agree. Over time I began to reimagine the project of the book as lending my ear to willful subjects. Although some of the stories of willfulness are individual, the project of the book is collective: it is not only about bringing individual stories together, but hearing each as a thread of a shared history. Strays, when heard together, are noisy. Perhaps the book itself has become plural in being filled with willful subjects. It might even have become like what it has been filled with; willful subjects who insist on their separation, who refuse to be subjected to my own will. Has Willful Subjects become a willful subject? I will answer this question with a firm yes. It is an affirmation that leads me on another willfulness trail. Feminist, queer, and antiracist histories are full of rather willful books. Gloria Anzaldúa describes Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza as follows: “The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. It is a rebellious, willful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly” ([1987] 1999, 88).29 The book as a “whole thing” can become a willful girl-child, the one who insists on getting her own way, who comes to you with her own explanations of what it is that she is doing. In making this connection between the willful subjects in the book and the book itself, I was becoming a point on the genealogical line of feminist and queer of color scholarship. This line is not a straight but a wayward line, as it must be if we are to find each other in the puzzle of what unfolds. In wandering away we might even reach the same places. As I explore throughout this book, the willful subject is often depicted as a wanderer. When you stray from the official paths, you create desire lines, faint marks on the earth, as traces of where you or others have been.30 A willfulness archive is premised on hope: the hope that those who wander away from the paths they are supposed to follow leave their footprints behind.

A Willfulness Archive

21

Chapter One

WILLING SUBJECTS

I

knew that I had a will, as surely as I knew that there was life in me” (Augustine, Confessions, 7.3.136). In Augustine’s Confessions the will becomes a property of a subject, something it has, as surely as it has a life. Before the cogito “I think therefore I am,” before, that is, the certainty of a subject established in thought or as thought, there is condensed in Confessions a certainty of a subject established in will or as will.1 To speak of the will as certain might be how the will becomes a certainty. Simon Harrison (2006) has suggested that Augustine, in asking the philosophical question of how I know I have a will, does not assume the will in a straightforward way, even if his answer seems certain: the question provides a “way into” the will. Perhaps self-certainty is not how the will becomes what is given to a subject, but how a subject can become itself: “I have a will” understood not only as a sign of existence, “I will therefore I am” but as an impulse to existence: “I will then I am.” The subject of will in philosophy becomes difficult to separate from the will of the subject, what we might call the metaphysical will. This will finds its most perfect articulation in the German idealists including Hegel and Schelling. The latter describes the will in the following terms: “In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will. Will is the primordial Being, and all predicates apply to it alone—groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation! All philosophy strives only to find this highest expression” ([1809] 1936, 24, emphasis added). All predicates end up belonging to the will: if philosophy culminates in the will, then the will cancels out the other predicates, including predicates, one might speculate, that were not even assumed to belong to a subject; the world becomes will.

We have before us strong critiques of the metaphysical will including those offered not only in Nietzsche’s work, but also in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche.2 In the introduction to this book I suggested that an alternative way of telling the story of will, one in which willfulness is given priority, would be to allow the will to wander away from this subject. So why start with this subject? To wander away from a path does assume that this path provides at least a starting point for a journey. To leave something, we must first start with something. Perhaps the question is to find a way of starting on a path that can allow us to leave that path. When we wander away from the subject of will, we could then take the willing subject with us. This chapter explores the willing subject not by assuming the will belongs to the subject, but following the “assumption” that it does so. It is tricky to follow an assumption without seeming to make it. But we regularly speak of the will as a way we speak of ourselves. Public culture is saturated by “will talk” not only in the specific genre of self-help but more widely in how subjects are addressed or address themselves as having wills. We do not need to universalize this assumption to follow the assumption. Given that we routinely describe certain experiences by exercising the language of will, the will comes into existence, whether or not something called “the will” exists independently of these modes of address. In this chapter, I reflect on the will as experiential not as something we already have, but as something we come to experience ourselves as having. An experience can mean to apprehend an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind, as well as an active participation in events or activities. An experience might also be an event or a series of events participated in or lived through, and, more systematically, the totality of such events in the past of an individual or group. Taking these related meanings together, I reflect on how we come to apprehend ourselves as having a will over and in time. I ask how it is that an apprehension of will allows subjects to experience themselves as participating in events, as “going through” them willingly, or even as experiencing events, or the totality of events, as if they are “brought about” by volition. When we use the word “will” or “willing” it implies then an experience a subject has of itself as bringing something about, whether or not the subject is bringing something about.3 It is possible then to experience oneself as willing something that one does not bring about. From this opening description, it should be obvious that I am bracketing the question of whether or not something called “the will” exists as a faculty; or, again, in phenomenological terms, I am suspending my 24

Chapter One

own belief in its existence. My descriptions in this chapter contribute to the development of a social phenomenology of will. It is worth asking how this phenomenological method can “sit” with the genealogical critique of the will offered by Nietzsche that I evoked affirmatively in my introduction. How can phenomenology and genealogy be seated at the same table? After all, the phenomenological method of the epoché, which requires we bracket our presuppositions of a given object, might also require we bracket our knowledge of the history of that object. In Queer Phenomenology, I combined phenomenological and genealogical approaches (in this case to tables, and yes, tables will return) by reflecting on the temporal as well as spatial aspects of “the behind.” As Husserl showed in the first volume of Ideas, we cannot see the object from all sides; the object is viewed in profile. If I walk around the table, the “one and the self-same table,” my perceptions change but the table does not ([1913] 1969, 130). As such, the table as a self-same object can only be intended by consciousness: an intentionality I redescribed in queer terms, as a conjuring of a behind (Ahmed 2006, 36). What is behind the object in a temporal sense also involves secrecy or withdrawal: it is not available from a viewing point. Just as it involves time and labor to see more than a profile (to reveal an object, however partial this process of revelation remains, since we never quite “catch” the whole thing at once); so too it involves time and labor to recover an object’s historicity (to reveal what is behind an object, its conditions of arrival).4 An object can be a material thing in the world. Or an object can be what we apprehend; what we turn toward, or what is created as an effect of turning. It follows that a subject can be the object we are apprehending. To relocate the will as an object of thought, as what we are apprehending, requires the use of phenomenological and genealogical methods. We need simultaneously to suspend our commitment to will as what is behind an action and to give a history of how the will comes to be understood as “behind.” In other words, it is the very normative assumption of a faculty of will that creates the impression of a subject that is behind an action. When we give a history of this assumption, we are putting it out of action; we thus achieve an ability to describe willing as a mode of experience. Nietzsche and Husserl allow in different but related ways a reorientation toward willing. As I have already noted, Nietzsche offers a critique of the faculty of the will as part of the general error of causality. This disbelief in “the will” allows him to offer a phenomenological redescription of Willing Subjects

25

willing.5 In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, willing becomes described in terms of bodily sensations as well as orientations: “Let us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality of sensations, namely the sensation of the condition ‘away from which we go,’ the sensation of the condition ‘towards which we go,’ the sensation of this ‘from’ and ‘towards’ itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting into motion ‘arms and legs,’ commences its action by forces of habit, directly we ‘will’ anything” ([1886] 1997, 12–13, emphases in original).6 Willing is redescribed here as a process of being affected that involves orientations toward and away from things. Indeed, what is being sensed in willing is not the will as such but a “from” and “towards,” that is, a body in action. Nietzsche’s account of willing in terms of bodily orientations (that might not be noticed when we assume a will as behind an action) involves a reorientation not only toward the faculty of will, but also to the limbs of the body, which might be assumed to be lagging behind, obeying a command given by a will.7 In turn, Husserl teaches us how phenomenology offers not only a critique of empirical psychology but also a theoretical attitude to and thus “reorientation” of an already existing attitude ([1936–54] 1970, 280). Husserl also describes an existing attitude in terms of habits of the will: “Attitude, generally speaking, means a habitually fixed style of willing life comprising directions of the will or interests that are prescribed by this style, comprising the ultimate ends, the cultural accomplishments whose total style is thereby determined” (280). Phenomenology provides an important resource for thinking about willing as a purposeful activity, as a way of being directed toward certain ends or goals whose value is given within what Husserl describes here as a “historical situation” (61). Furthermore, phenomenology offers a set of critical and reflexive methods for investigating not only consciousness, but the relationship between the voluntary and involuntary aspects of experience.8 I draw on Husserl, among other phenomenologists, to consider willing as a way we experience inhabiting a world with others.

Calling upon Will How does the will become a form of address?9 I want to reflect here on Augustine’s Confessions as a style of self-writing or autobiographical writing that gives voice to will. Richard Freadman in Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will treats Confessions as the locus classicus of reflective 26

Chapter One

autobiography, showing the inseparability of the genre of autobiography from the emergence of the genre of the will (2001, 23). A line of inheritance can be drawn from Augustine to Husserl, who concludes his Cartesian Meditations with a quote from Augustine: “Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man” ([1931] 1999, 157). We can note the continuity between Husserl’s phenomenological method and the method of self-investigation used by Augustine in Confessions. Husserl notes: “I must lose the world by epoché in order to regain it by a universal self-examination” (157). This “losing” of the world is temporary: going back is a way of returning to oneself, or turning into oneself in order to return to the world. Augustine’s Confessions could thus be read as a “phenomenology of the will” as Robert Bernasconi (1992) suggests. To read the book in this way is to make a methodological point, which is to say, to point to the method of the book as central to its depiction of will as a phenomena. The book is written as an address to God, such that “the will” takes the form of an address. It is in the context of such an address that Augustine speaks of his certainty about will: “One thing lifted me up into the light of your day. It was that I knew I had a will, as surely as I knew that there was life in me. When I chose to do something or not to do it, I was quite certain that it was my own self, and not some other person, who made this act of will, so that I was on the point of understanding that herein lay the cause of my sin” (7.3.136). Here the certainty of will is not simply about self-certainty but also about being the cause of one’s actions, and in particular, being the cause of one’s own sin. If will is narratable as freedom (to will freely is to be one’s own cause) then freedom is affectively registered as guilt. This sentence does more than assign guilt: it creates a subject who can receive the assignment. The “I” that is speaking is an “I” that is spoken. The split between the I that speaks and the I that is spoken is a split that has been much reflected upon within poststructuralist thought and is a key component of Lacanian psychoanalysis (as the split between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the énoncé), marking the advent of the subject into language. We might develop a different angle on this theme by considering how “willing” is involved in the scene of splitting: the split between the willer and the willed is a split within the subject. If in willing I am willing myself, then willing creates a distinction in self. The will appears on both sides of an address, on the side of a subject and the object: who is willing, what is willed. Willing Subjects

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Throughout Confessions, Augustine in calling upon this will creates a will that can be called upon. The will in being called upon is not given “a unity” even in name (Nietzsche [1886] 1997, 12). In addressing his own will, Augustine talks of having more than one will, and of an internal war as a war between wills: I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. The enemy held my will in his power and from it he had made a chain and shackled me. For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist the habit it became a necessity. These were the links which together formed what I have called my chain, and it held me fast in the duress of servitude. But the new will which had come to life in me and made me wish to serve you freely and enjoy you, my God, who are our only certain joy, was not yet strong enough to overcome the old, hardened as it was by the passage of time. (8.5.164) A struggle between old and new wills is a struggle between good and evil, but where good and evil are represented as forces within oneself rather than forces simply coming from the outside. One can be self-shackled if one’s will is in a state of imperfection. Note an imperfect will is associated for Augustine with desire and lust, which have become transformed from will into habit, from freedom to necessity. The passage gives an account of an internal war with oneself. Although an enemy can be identified as the one who has one’s own will “held in his power,” enmity cannot be eased by being projected onto a stranger. An enemy can be one’s own will: a will that in being older is a trace of where a subject has been.10 To struggle with will is here a struggle against oneself and one’s own history. When one’s wills are at war, one is at war with oneself. This internal war is represented as war not only between wills but between body and mind. Augustine contrasts willing the body, where “to will it was to do it” (in cases when what is willed is within one’s bodily competence), with willing the mind, where one can will and “not do it” (8.8.171).11 Augustine introduces a command structure: to will is to order oneself to will. An order to will is a willing to do, and willing to do is a sign of not having done: The mind orders itself to make an act of will, and it would not give this order unless it willed to do so; yet it does not carry out its own 28

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command. But it does not fully will to do this thing and therefore its orders are not fully given. It gives the order only in so far as it wills, and in so far as it does not will the order is not carried out. For the will commands that an act of will should be made, and it gives the command to itself, not to some other will. The reason, then, why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with the full will. If the will were full, it would not command itself to be full, since it would be so already. (8.9.172) Accounting for this rather extraordinary passage is one of my tasks in this book. If willing is to command to will, then willing by virtue of the command is not or not yet to carry out what is willed. A full will is that which does not need to will itself to be full. Willing is thus what a subject does—or even must do—when a command has not been obeyed. A command is when a subject wills itself to will. We can note Nietzsche’s own redefinition of the will as the “emotion of the command” ([1886] 1997, 12). He suggests “we are at the same time the commander and the obeying parties” (13). Perhaps we cannot quite be both parties at once. In commanding, we have not carried out what is being commanded; in obeying, we are dependent on a command having already been given. I will be returning to the question of the relationship between will, commandment, and obedience in the following chapters. Suffice to say here that willing as an activity rests precisely on a subject that is out of time with itself. The subjective time of willing could even be described as an experience of non-spontaneity; a willing subject is always behind or ahead of itself. As Hannah Arendt describes in her reading of Confessions: “the price paid for the Will’s Omnipotence is very high; the worst that, from the viewpoint of the thinking ego, could happen to the two-in-one, namely, to be ‘at variance with yourself,’ has become part and parcel of the human condition” (1978, 83). Self-variance even if it is represented in Augustine as the agony of not willing what one wills oneself to will is also an opening: the experience of not obeying what has been given as a command. It is possible to give a different inflection to this warring scene: the price of Will’s omnipotence—self-variation—could be retheorized as an escape valve, a way of not carrying out what has been given as command. A willfulness archive is an archive of will’s incompletion.12 One could extend the dramatic scene of Augustine’s warring wills to a more everyday sense of willing (and we would be following Augustine’s lead here, as Confessions is an account of willing in an everyday sense): we Willing Subjects

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will ourselves to will, we will to will, when our will has not been carried out. The will then is what is addressed by the subject when it addresses its own failure to carry out a command. In hearing will as a command, we might imagine the will as externality, as another, one who says: keep going! The personal trainer as “will enforcer” might make explicit what is implicit in our relation to the will: a tendency to think the will’s externality, as if the will is coming from the outside. This sense of will’s externality has an audible component: the voice of will can be heard as the voice of an outsider (is it more “commanding” when a command is given by another?). One wonders whether the externalization of the will makes external what is already external; in other words, that the subject imagines the will as if it is coming from the outside in order to preserve a fantasy of interiority (as if I had myself put the trainer “there” to express my own will, as if without the trainer, the will would be mine). It might be easier to imagine the will as externality than to face ourselves as the giver of a command that is not full (easier in the sense of heightening one’s readiness to obey). That will is experienced as an internal barrier, or an internal wall, offers us another way of thinking about will in relation to freedom. Consider the feeling of fright, when there is no barrier between one’s body and an approaching train; you might step back, as if without that barrier, you could step forward into that train, that lurching figure for the alarm of futurity. As Søren Kierkegaard suggests, fear can be experienced as “the alarming possibility of being able” ([1844] 1957, 40), a fear of not having a constraint between oneself and what lies ahead. We can understand how the word we often use for freedom becomes the word that is invested with the power of checking that freedom: the will. The potential to fall into the abyss of the not yet becomes the requirement that the subject stop itself from falling. In other words, to exercise will is to negate the potentiality the will names, understood in negative terms, as the potential to compromise the very ground of one’s own existence. Perhaps it is by exercising will that “the will” acquires coherence. The futurity of will—the sense that our future depends on being willing to will—is thus retrospective. A present (“I willed myself”) can happen because the subject can recall the will (calling upon will is thus a recalling). We might in calling upon the will in situations of difficulty not only bring the will into the existence by giving it an existence, but also give the will a certain character (as friend, as foe, as whom we need, as who drives us, and so on). We could think of the sensible will as memory: a 30

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memory of willing as an activity undergone in certain situations is how the will acquires coherence. A memory of will might be not only how the will persists as an idea (as an idea of persistence), but also how the will is charged with affective value: in remembering willing, we might also be remembering situations in which willing seemed necessary. Over time, we come to have a sense of the “protracted continuity of the will,” as Judith Butler describes in her reading of Nietzsche (1997b, 71). The experience of will as an activity, as something that happens in and over time, thus creates a sense of the longevity of will. Willing over time and in time creates the very impression of “the will.” If calling upon will is what creates the impression of continuity, then recalling the will is also an affirmation. Edmund Husserl in Experience and Judgment reflects on willing in relation to acquisition ([1948] 1973, 201–2). An acquisition is not “mere memory” of will: It is reproduced otherwise than in a mere memory: a modification of the will is present, as with every acquisition. This gives it the character not only of something which has been voluntarily apprehended earlier, but of an acquisition which still continues to be valid, which we still hold in our will, not simply repeating the act of will, but willing in the form of reproduction, which is that of the “still”: I, the present ego, as belonging to the particular mode of the present am still willing: therein it is implied that I am in accord with the past act of will, that I am also willing it, holding it as conjointly valid—I, the present ego, presently willing. (202, emphases in original) If to be willing is to be still willing, then willing is not only in accordance with the past but affirms that accordance. In willing, there is an agreement not only with what is being willed, but with the past that has been willed, and that is being reproduced in will.

The Will as Project Even when “the will” is called upon by a subject, and thus called into existence, it describes a complicated situation rather than a unity. We call upon the will in situations when will is required to carry out a command, one that is heard as directive: what ought to be followed but has yet to be followed. The timing of will thus seems crucial: if one “wills to will” then willing seems to operate in the future tense, although of course the future becomes tense in the present. In other words, if the will makes Willing Subjects

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itself into an object, the object is not present: if the will is willing itself, then the will is bringing something into existence that does not yet exist, which includes in some way “the will” itself. The futurity of willing seems at one level self-evident. Will has both verb and noun forms. I will focus on the former. The verb “will” can be used as a simple auxiliary verb to express the future tense (“the party will take place tomorrow”), or can carry the implication of intention or volition (“I will bake a cake for the party”). It derives from the Old English word willan, wyllan,13 which also suggest wish and want, and can be contrasted with “shall” deriving from sceal, which implied must or ought (Smith 1996, 142).14 If the words “will,” “wish,” and “want” are related, then one history of will could be understood as the evacuation of wish and want from will. The will acquires meaning and force as that which can eliminate desire from human intention. This history begins with Augustine and culminates most obviously in Kantian ethics, which invests in the will as a moral faculty that must be distinguished from the pathological nature of all inclinations. I will return to the moral status of the faculty of the will in the following chapter. Assuming the kinship of these terms for the moment, we can note that to wish for something, to want something, and to will something all register a “good intention” in relation to something that does not exist at present. I use the expression “good intention” in the sense that wishing, desiring, and willing imply a positive evaluation of something: they are positings of the positivity of the not yet thing. Wishing, desiring, and willing thus all are activities that face a future in a certain way in or even as the aim to bring something about. The history of the word “will” also implies a different kind of relation to futurity than do “wish” and “want.” Although the words “wish” and “want” can imply intention, they do not tend to be used in the same way to denote a subject’s commitment to a future action. You can wish and want without doing anything; you can even withdraw from the immediacy of action by becoming wishful. Indeed, it is the relation between willing and action that seems specific to will (although recalling Augustine willing might point to action insofar as we are willing when we are not doing). Whether or not we assume there is faculty of the will, the language of will is the language of intention: the will as a verb allows us to make promises as well as to break them. It is understandable why Nietzsche’s genealogy of will focuses on the creation of a subject who is “competent to promise” ([1887] 2003, 36, emphasis in original). 32

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It is not that all comings and goings imply or involve willing, but that willing describes how some comings and goings are “carried out.” It is this relationship between will and intentionality that explains why a phenomenological approach is well suited to address the will. We can begin with Paul Ricoeur’s observation that willing is a form of intentionality. Indeed, Ricoeur suggests that volition is “intention par excellence,” as to will something is to aim at something (1967, 16). Will thus “places us at the heart of the intentional function of consciousness” (17). We could argue that willing makes “literal” the aim of consciousness. Husserl might help us to develop a more precise argument about the intentionality of will by not making will into an expression of intentionality. As Ullrich Melle suggests with reference to Husserl’s essay, “Valuing and Value,” Husserl offers an understanding of intentionality as twofold: firstly, in the usual sense of consciousness; and secondly, in the sense of striving or tendency (2005, 75). My interest here will be to think about how the first sense of intentionality as “of-ness” or “aboutness” can be related to the second sense of intentionality as striving. It is important to recognize that Husserl did not offer one thesis that could be called a phenomenology of the will. And yet we can track in his intellectual genealogy a genealogy of thinking about the will. In the first book of Ideas, Husserl describes “the sphere of the Will” in the following way: On the one side we have the resolution we make at any moment, with all the experiences which demand it as a basis, which indeed it includes within itself taken in its concreteness. A variety of noetic phases belong to it. Volitional affirmations presuppose affirmations in regards to values, positing of things, and the like. On the other hand, we find the resolve as a unique type of absorption into the object, belonging specifically to the domain of the will, and obviously grounded in other and similar noematic absorptions in the object. If then as phenomenologists we suspend all our real affirmations, the phenomena of will, as a phenomenologically pure intentional experience, retains its “willed as such,” as a noema proper to the will; the “will’s meaning (Willensmeinung), and in this precise way in which it subsists as “meaning” in this will (on its full essentiality), and with whatever is willed “in all of its ramifications.” ([1913] 1969, 278, emphases in original) Husserl begins if you will with the “natural attitude” implicit to willing: in a particular moment you might resolve to do something. Such a resolution Willing Subjects

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has a concreteness (it has something “in mind”), and in its very concreteness, it cannot simply be separated from other noetic acts. If to have a resolution is to resolve to do something, it is also to make a value judgment about that thing. The resolution is also an affirming of something, even if that thing does not exist in the present.15 One cannot will, without also positing and valuing the willed. Although resolution cannot be separated from other noetic acts, there is also an implication that willing is a specific kind of act, which is described here as “unique absorption.” Perhaps because a resolution is to bring about something that does not yet exist, it requires a particular effort or striving. And in the method of the epoché, in bracketing our affirmations, Husserl suggests we can find the noema proper to will, the “willed as such,” which is not to say the concrete object that we resolve to bring about, but the essential meaning of this willing about, in all of its ramifications. In the second book of Ideas, Husserl offers a more elaborate phenomenological description of the kind of activity of willing, or what we can think of as a “willing about” that attends to its object in the effort to bring it about. In his description of willing, he sets a scene: I am first of all engaged in setting the scene; the action which now unfolds is constituted as having happened according to my will, as happening through my agency as a freely willing being; I am constantly there as bringing about the strived for, as aiming in will. And every phase of the aiming itself is such that in it the pure willing subject “attains” the willed as such. The pure Ego not only lives in singular acts as accomplishing, as active and as passive. Free and yet attracted by the Object, it goes forth from act to act, and it experiences excitations from the Objects constituted in the “background,” without immediately giving in to them, it allows them to intensify, to knock at the door of consciousness; and then it surrenders, perhaps even “completely,” turning from the one Object to the other. ([1952] 1989, 104–5, emphasis in original) The scene of willing hesitates between a past tense (“having happened” is an accordance with will), present tense (singular acts that are accomplishing), and future tense (turning toward that which is not fully present). We can think of willing as between tenses. The will in moving from object to object is not bringing something about that did not exist beforehand: the will permits what already exists to come forth to consciousness (“bringing about” as “allows them to intensify”). To turn 34

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toward something in willing is to move something from the back to the front; to bring about is to bring forth. A willing subject leans toward what is being willed. To get behind something is to orientate the body that way. Think of those situations when your own body has nothing to do with an event but participates as if it is “right there.” You are a spectator at a sporting event, and you are watching your favorite team. You might “will” the ball into the goal by leaning that way. You are getting behind your team by the direction in which you lean, even when you know leaning that way has nothing to do with what happens. Or think of those situations when you “will something on” knowing that your willing is not a switch that turns something on. You might be waiting for someone to come home, and be willing the plane to go faster as if the weight of your desire for the arrival of the plane could carry the plane forward, even though you know it cannot. The feeling of getting behind something is a bodily feeling that is not necessarily always intended to influence an outcome. The feeling of influencing might be a satisfying feeling even when it is separated, or perhaps because it can be separated, from being influential. Otherwise, we might need to exercise a more cautionary refrain: be careful what you will for. However, this is not to say that willing is always separated from the possibility of being influential. The separation “makes sense” insofar as it borrows from the possibility implied by willing. The body moves as if it is contributing to making something possible because it recalls prior acts of willing. We can think of the impressions of willing as bodily impressions. For Husserl willing is corporeal: a willing is a bodily turn. Indeed it is noteworthy that Husserl describes the body as “an organ of the Will” ([1952] 1989, 159) insofar as the body is the object, even the “one and only Object” for “the will of the pure ego” that is “moveable immediately and spontaneously” (159, emphases in original). This is why for a willing subject possibility is practical; a subject “can do” this or that because of how they are orientated, this way or that, what they are already near. A faculty is “not an empty ability” but “a positive potentiality” (267, emphases in original).16 Something can only become a thematic of the will insofar as it has already achieved the status of being practically possible: “It is only between practical possibilities that I can ‘decide,’ and only a practical possibility can (this is an other theoretical ‘can’) be a theme of my will. I cannot will anything that I do not have consciously in view, that does not lie in my power, in my competence” (270). To bring something Willing Subjects

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about thus requires something to already exist within a horizon, as the determination of what is within reach. We can thus understand why it is important that willing is not simply seen as “intentionality” par excellence, but is a specific mode of intentionality. As Husserl himself argues in Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, the meaning of the will has been taken up “too broadly.” He suggests that the will should be used to refer to a “special mode of activity which spreads over all other regions of consciousness insofar as all activity can occur in the form of voluntary activity” ([1966] 2001, 282). I want to describe the special nature of will intentionality by thinking of it as “end orientated.” What do I mean by this? A conventional (but not universal) formulation is that in willing we are always willing something. Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, argues that “when a man wills, he wills something: his will is always directed toward an object and can be thought of only in relation to an object” ([1839] 2005, 14). We can contrast this idea of willing as directed toward objects with Hannah Arendt’s description: “In order to will, the mind must withdraw from the immediacy of desire, which, without reflecting and without reflexivity, stretches out its hand to get hold of the desired object; for the will is not concerned with objects but with projects, for instance, with the future availability of an object that it may or may not desire in the present. The will transforms the desire into an intention” (1978, 76). For Schopenhauer to will is to will an object; for Arendt, to will is to suspend your relation to an object, at least in the present tense, which is at once the intuitive sense of an object’s presence.17 Willing might be directed toward an object, to the point of absorption, but that object in becoming an object of will is simultaneously a project: not simply what consciousness aims at, but what it aims for. An experience of willing might be bound up with how a subject experiences itself as being for. You get behind what you are for. We can describe such experiences as projection. Heidegger’s account of projection would be an obvious reference point here.18 In Being and Time, Heidegger suggests that projection “has nothing to do with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out,” but rather as being what “throws possibility before itself as possibility” ([1927] 1962, 185). Following Heidegger, we can recall that the word “project” (“throw forward”) shares its origin with the “object” (“throw against”): both derive from the Latin jacere, “to throw.” Perhaps there is a jostle between a forward and against. The will might throw what it comes up against forward. If willing something is to 36

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be involved in a project in the present, then the project itself can be an object, a “what” that is thrown forth. Husserl allows us to attend to how the “throwing forth” of projection takes us back. As I have already suggested, for Husserl something can only be a thematic of the will if it is already practically possible. To become absorbed can be to allow something to make an appearance. This appearance is a bringing forth, where something that was background becomes foreground. A project can be rethought as a bringing forth. The subject experiences itself as actively involved in this bringing. We can thus put the “plan” back into project by returning to Husserl: thinking of the plan not simply as a program of action, but as an idea of a future possibility that a subject is willing to actualize. The object of will is thus simultaneously an end: if to will is to will this or that, then willing has a particular end in sight, a realization of a future possibility. We might describe the work of willing as accomplishment (to accomplish is to fulfill, fill up, complete). To will is to put one’s energy into becoming accomplished in this way or that. This sense of will as energetic, as getting the body “behind” an action is important. It is not that the will is behind the subject but that willing might describe the feeling of getting behind something. If willing is an energetic relationship to a future possibility, not all possibilities become an object of will, not all possibilities require energy to become actualized. So I might will myself to write not only because I have an end in sight (becoming a writer, becoming one who has accomplished writing), but because I am blocked, or because I encounter myself as being blocked (the obstacle that gets in the way of the will can be myself and my own body). Willing might be how we encounter an obstacle as that which is to be overcome: we might perceive the will as a resource insofar as it is bound up with a scene of overcoming. We do not have to give power to the will to suggest that how we experience willing is involved in how we experience power (understood here as capacity or competence). This is not to say willing is necessarily confident. Willing can be anxious: we might be anxious that what is willed will not be accomplished or even that “without will” we would not be able to accomplish our aim (if we feel we need will for an accomplishment, will is given the power to prevent an accomplishment). No wonder willing is moody. Arendt suggests the normal mood for willing is anxious: “The normal mood of the willing ego is impatience, disquiet and worry (Sorge), not merely because of the soul’s reacting to the future in fear and hope, but also because the will’s project presupposes an I-can that is by Willing Subjects

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no means guaranteed” (1978, 37). But perhaps even if willing admits the anxiety that what is willed might not happen, it is possible that there are different willing moods depending on the subject’s own “sense” of what can be reached. When a subject is willing something, reaching for what is not yet reached, it would experience a gap. A willing mood might fill this gap by judging the gap: when hopeful and confident, the gap seems to be shrinking; when worried or anxious, the gap seems to become larger. A willing mood might, in other words, not simply attribute an object with feeling (all willing, we might assume, gives that object the “content” of an aim or end, in other words, estimates something as a desirable thing)19 but is a judgment of the relative proximity or distance between a subject and what is being aimed for. How we feel about what we are for is affected by how close we feel to that what. When will seems necessary for an accomplishment, the will becomes the object of consciousness. We tend to the will as a way of attending to what is not yet reached, as a way of reaching what is not yet. Edith Stein describes willing as a relation to tiredness or fatigue: the subject calls on its will, when the achievement of its aim seems to be receding from a horizon of possibilities. To give way to tiredness is for Stein a giving up of will and its objectivity ([1916] 1989, 55–56).20 This is how it becomes possible that the will itself can be an object, something that one is conscious of as will, as that which is being called forth; we might even, in willing this or that, have our will “in sight” as what we need to complete an action. Rather than assuming the will as a faculty of the subject, the will would be an object of experience, as what we experience when we experience ourselves as willing. At this moment, when will glimpses itself willing, the object of the will is a project, and the object of consciousness is the will. To anticipate what is to come is to inhabit a sphere of possibilities that are not only present but also behind us. Husserl’s own emphasis on time consciousness, on the relation between the now and the just past and the barely glimpsed future, might help us to think the complexity of willing as present tense. When willing something I might even have to keep the idea or value of that thing present to myself, where “keeping present” (keeping something intense, or “knocking at the door of consciousness” to draw on Husserl’s earlier description) involves an effort of attention. We could thus think of will as a struggle to avoid what is being willed receding as a possibility from the present, or receding in advance of actualization. William James describes how an act of will is required 38

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in situations where an object would otherwise slip away: “Everywhere then the function of effort is the same: to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip away” ([1890] 1950, 565).21 If willing is a valuing of a future possibility, then willing might be required when we perceive a possibility slipping away, or even more simply, in the perception of slipping. When willing is required for a possibility to become actual then willing is a relation to that which has not yet arrived, as what we can glimpse (and must glimpse in order for it to come more fully into view) insofar as it is “not now.”22 Perhaps once it is now, we no longer need to will it at least in the active or conscious sense. An arrival appears as a will cessation; or perhaps the cessation of willing is an arrival (the already willed). Willing might involve protention, which Husserl describe as the “intuitive effective” way of inhabiting the present by “fore-seeing” what lies just ahead, where to foresee is at once to retain what has happened just before ([1966] 2001, 614; also see Rodemeyer 2003). Or willing might involve the most active form of protention: to will is to protend (“to hold out, to stretch forth”), when we have to aim for a “not yet” to become now. The project form of the will is how a body comes to stretch out, in the very process of actively converting a possibility, or at least of feeling itself as involved in this conversion. This stretchiness is well described by Paul Ricoeur: “If we call ‘project’ in the strict sense the object of a decision—the willed, that which I decide—we can say that to decide is to turn myself towards the project, to forget myself in the project, to be outside myself in the project, without taking time to observe myself willing” ([1950] 2007, 43). A decision is willed, and is thus how possibility acquires “a consistency and almost physical density: it is on the way to actualisation” (54). As a possibility comes within reach, a density of experience is acquired. Willing might be an experience of being “on the way” to actualization.

The Will Sphere I have suggested willing as an activity might refer to a sense of accomplishment. In willing, we feel we are accomplishing something. Our aim to become accomplished might be how willing not only points toward a future, but is the feeling of the future coming closer. For Nietzsche when the will encounters the past, it can only be frustrated as the will cannot “will backwards” ([1883–85] 1961, 114). Indeed, Heidegger, drawing on Willing Subjects

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Nietzsche, puts the argument in stronger terms: “The ‘it was’ becomes a stumbling block for all willing. It is the block which the will can no longer budge. Then the ‘it was’ becomes the sorrow and despair of all willing, which, being what it is, always wills forward, and is always foiled by bygones that lie fixed firmly in the past. Thus the ‘it was’ is revolting and contrary to the will” ([1954] 1976, 92). The description of the “it was” makes the past into a willful object: what is not movable by the will is contrary to the will.23 An alternative angle would be to reflect on how it is by having willed that a subject is surrounded with the scenes of accomplishment. The writer can write because she can take up the equipment that is already “there” as she has this intention, whether or not she writes. The objects that surround her are objects of hope. If a project becomes what is behind you, then it can place objects in front of you, as things that can be taken up again. An accomplishment might, in other words, be how a will approaches the past not with frustration but friendliness. We might rely on the past as how we can be prepared to take things up again. Frustration happens: for instance, if something is missing, something we expected to be there (because we had put it there), we are unable to complete an action we thought we were prepared for. When an expectation is frustrated, then frustration is directed toward a future (as that which has not been brought about). To actualize a potential is to create a horizon. If you will something, then certain things must be around, those things necessary to accomplish something. Things are within reach, because they have already been gathered. It is not simply a subject who is becoming accomplished in an accomplishment. What is “here” is also accomplished. The risk of assuming “here” as accomplished is the risk of assuming a will behind that accomplishment. At the same time, a political reorientation to what is “here” often works through suggesting that what is “here” does not have to be “here.” As Hannah Arendt describes (in reference to Henri Bergson’s work), once an action is accomplished “it loses its air of contingency” (1978, 30). To think of “here” as an accomplishment is to restore an air of contingency. The distinction of “here” and “there” reminds us too of the orientated nature of space. A “there” can also be the product of “willed human work.” This expression “willed human work” is one of Edward Said’s definitions of Orientalism (1978, 140). The suggestion is not simply that the Orient is brought into existence, or made to exist, but also that the very labor of creating the Orient, the land of the stranger; the land 40

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far away, is what establishes a direction. Once the Orient has come to exist, there is a willing of its existence; to keep going that way is to keep that way going. Willed work is work that in willing that way creates a way that can be willed. It is not as the old cliché says—where there’s a will there’s a way—but that to will is to way. We can think about willing as a way by returning to the matter of the table, or how tables matter.24 Willing might be a way of being occupied by, as well as orientated toward, the table. The writer might be facing the table. Around the writer are objects that support the action of writing, not only the table, but also the paper and the inkwell, or the computer and the keyboard. What surrounds or gathers around the writer are objects that in being signs of tendency point toward certain actions. What Husserl calls “the near sphere” or “the core sphere,” “a sphere of things that I can reach with my kinestheses and which I can experience in an optimal form through seeing, touching etc” ([1946] 2002, 149)— could thus also be described as “a will sphere.” A will sphere is dynamic: if you reach for what is already within reach, reaching can also extend what is within reach. The will sphere is also worldly: showing us how we are involved in our surroundings. The looseness of this gathering (think of the objects lying around) gives us a pointer on the nature of this involvement. If we can reach for certain things without thinking, the already willed has receded into the background. This recession is temporary: if the already willed denotes a sphere of activities, then objects come to the foreground and recede into the background in a dynamic way. Even when objects gathered are foregrounded (when the writer sits at the table, or takes up her pen), these objects might be ready insofar as they are willing to recede. An object of will can be thought simply as a willing object. The relation of subjects to objects as a relation of will, or as a willing relation, has most often been thought in terms of property. For example, Hegel defines property as “a person putting his will into an object” ([1820] 2005, 10). Marx suggests that “commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force: in other words, he can take possession of them. In order for the objects to enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent” ([1867] 1990, 178, emphasis added).25 Objects are Willing Subjects

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emptied of will by being given the content of a subject’s own will.26 Marx demonstrates how property relations depend on objects “being willing” in such a way that they would be forced if they were not. Will and force can thus amount to the same thing: if not willing, then forced. When willing is a way of avoiding the consequence of force, willing is a consequence of force. How quickly willfulness becomes part of this picture. If becoming an object is to receive the will of a subject, then an object that does not allow a subject to carry a will would be described as “willful.” Willful objects would be objects that do not allow subjects to carry out their will. Willful objects are means that demand to be ends rather than means to an end.27 In other words, we attribute willfulness to objects when they are not willing to be means. Objects that are not willing to be means might even be given the affective quality of being mean (in the other sense of mean as being stingy or unkind): remember the moodiness of will judges the relative proximity of subjects to their own ends. The object might be broken. The subject might turn to the object in frustration. The friendliness of a gathering would cease. In Heidegger’s analysis of the hammer in Being and Time, it is when the hammer is “too heavy,” that is, too heavy to hammer with, that we become aware of the hammer as an entity ([1927] 1962, 200). This is how a theoretical judgment about the hammer (about, say, its property of heaviness) becomes a circumspective concern, which registers a transformation of how the object is given. What is not ready-to-hand or handy is obtrusive: “it ‘stands in the way’ of our concern” (103).28 When something is not readyto-hand or handy, we have lost something, not necessarily an object but a capacity to make use of it: “In conspicuousness, obtrusiveness that which is ready-to-hand loses its readiness-to-hand in a certain way” (104). A circumspective concern is the concern that would look at the object, as well as what is around, one that might lead to an awareness of one’s surroundings (after all if the hammer is broken we might look around the hammer for something else that could take its place). We might turn to the world. A concern with things once they are broken, once they are not working (and we are not working), could thus be thought of as a worldly concern: no longer absorbed in a task, we look up. We might have more than an object revealed to us at such a moment. The hammer we might say is a willing object, if or when the hammer allows us to complete a task, such as building something. It “points” in the right direction. What is handy? More than an object, we might say. 42

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Handiness refers not only to being skillful with hands but to what is convenient and thus in agreement with a specific purpose. Everything that is “going on” would be pointing the right way in hammering. The hammerer is also in agreement: not too tired, not too distracted, preoccupied with the task of hammering. The hammerer can also recede from the hammerer’s view. How would the argument in Being and Time be different if the thumb of the hammerer broke: if the body rather than the object stopped working?29 A body can become a willful thing, when it gets in the way of an action being completed. Or we can be more specific: a sore thumb is what sticks out, getting in the way. Willfulness might be bound up with this process of revelation. Arthur Schopenhauer argues that we tend to notice what disagrees with the will: “Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates, and resists our will, that is to say, all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses upon us, instantly, directly, and with clarity” ([1850] 2004, 3). When something is agreeable to our will, we tend not to notice it, which is to say the impression created is not as distinct. When something resists will, an impression becomes more distinct. If the hammer breaks, it would create quite an impression, as would the thumb, if it broke. Even if we learn from breaking points, we don’t always know what breaks at these points. I want to take as examples two accounts of objects breaking in George Eliot’s novels; the first from Silas Marner; and the second from Adam Bede. This novella is Silas’s story: the story of a wanderer, who settles, a stranger in this place of his settlement. In many ways this novella is a story of the loneliness of the wanderer, for whom settling is experiencable as being apart, not being part (see chapter 3). But in this story, before Silas finds a child (and becomes a member of the community through “kinning”) we do have a love story, a love story between Silas and a pot: Strangely Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. . . . It was one of his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and for this purpose, he had had a brown earthen ware pot, ever since he came to Raveloe, Willing Subjects

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which he held as his most precious utensil, among the very few conveniences he had granted himself. It has been his companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having fresh clear water. One day as he was returning from the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with force against the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken in three pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him anymore, but he stuck the pieces together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial. ([1861] 1994, 17, emphasis added) Silas is touched by his pot. Silas is not only shaped by the objects in his life he even takes their shape.30 The pot lends Silas its handle, and in turn his palm receives the warmth of an impression. The will sphere is thus a sphere of mutual or reciprocal impression. The intimacy of body and pot is not here about losing awareness of the pot; the pot has not receded from Silas’s view. We learn that you can be conscious of what is willingly helpful, where this consciousness takes the form of appreciation and affection. Perhaps we “zoom in and out” of consciousness of things, depending on what we are doing. This passage offers a different angle to the pot’s readiness: we can be attentive to things, how they can matter, because they allow us to complete an action.31 When the pot is filled with the content of its agreement, its expression becomes that of willing helpfulness. At the same time, it is not simply Silas’s conscious appreciation of the pot’s “potness” that registers the pot’s significance as company, or as a “companion species” to borrow Donna Haraway’s (2003) helpful expression for describing helpful encounters. Whether or not Silas is conscious of the pot, of its thingness; the pot matters. The intimacy body and pot takes the form of projection: the pot allows Silas to carry out his task, to carry the water from the well. If they actualize a possibility together, they are thrown together. The pot’s mattering is at least in part how it too points to an action; how it too is mingled with other things that share this direction, the fresh clear water that the pot helps to carry; the body carrying the pot, the path taken in the carrying of the pot from the well to the house. The pot matters not only in how it appears to the body that 44

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carries it, but in the matter of its form, what gives it the capacity to hold and to pour. And yet, when an object breaks, it is no longer experiencable as “willing helpfulness.” It is not that we attribute objects with qualities as such (it is that objects have qualities that explain why we turn toward them for this rather than that). Rather we attribute to objects the qualities of a relation: if they resist our will; they are no longer quite so agreeable, no longer willingly helpful.32 When the pot breaks, it is no longer in use, of use; it can take up its place by becoming memorial; a holder of memories, not water. In the case of the broken pot, it is Silas who in stumbling breaks the pot. But he does not stumble on his own; just as he does not carry on his own. He stumbles against something: the step of a stile. Just as the will can be distributed in the completion of an action, so too a disturbance can be distributed: the step of a stile that trips a body; a body that falls against a stone; a pot that shatters. A worldly encounter transforms the world encountered. It is noteworthy that Silas does not himself offer an explanation of the cause of the breakage. If he did, I would speculate that willfulness would come up. I want to take as an example another account of an object breaking from Adam Bede: in this case, a jug breaks, or to be more precise, two jugs break. Here the setting is more obviously social: we are at home with a family. The child Molly breaks a jug when completing a task for her mother, Mrs. Poyser: she is drawing the ale, but she is taking her time. “What a time that gell is drawing th’ ale” says Mrs. Poyser ([1895] 1961, 220). Molly here we could say is “too slow,” she is lagging behind an expectation. Molly then appears, “carrying a large jug, two small mugs, and four drinking-cans, all full of ale or small beer—an interesting example of the prehensile power possessed by the human hand” (221). Perhaps a handy hand is like a willingly helpful pot: it is filled with the content of agreement. But then Molly has a “vague alarmed sense” (there is a storm; her mother is impatient). When she “hastened her step a little towards the far deal table” she caught “her foot in her apron” and “fell with a crash and a smash into a pool of beer” (221). It is perhaps not a coincidence that a rebellious foot gets in the way of the prehensile hand (see chapter 3). But whatever makes Molly fall, by falling she breaks the jug; leaving her “dolefully” to “pick up the fragments of pottery” (221). Molly’s clumsiness gets in the way of her completion of an action. This connection between clumsiness and willfulness is one I will return to, perhaps as a way of picking up the shattered pieces of a broken jug. Willing Subjects

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Once the jug has broken, what happens? Mrs. Poyser remarks: “Ah,” she went on, “you’ll do no good wi’ crying an’ making more wet to wipe up. It’s all your own willfulness, as I tell you, for there’s no call to break anything if they’ll only go the right way to work” (222). Molly is too easily affected: her tears create another spillage, something else to wipe up. Mrs. Poyser suggests Molly’s willfulness is what causes Molly to be wrong footed. Willfulness is here a stopping device: it is how a chain of causality is stopped at a certain point (for the child to become the cause of the breakage we would not ask what caused the child to fall). Recall my suggestion in the introduction to this book: the willful subject is under arrest. We can witness here how an arresting happens. And yet willfulness seems catchy. Perhaps we should say that willfulness is an attempt to stop something from catching, an attempt that seems, in this case at least, to fail: “Mrs. Poyser had turned around from the cupboard with the brown-and-white jug in her hand, when she caught sight of something at the other end of the kitchen; perhaps it was because she was already trembling and ner vous that the apparition had so strong an effect on her; perhaps jug-breaking, like other crimes, has a contagious influence. However it was, she stared and started like a ghost-seer, and the precious brown-and-white jug fell to the ground, parting for ever with its spout and handle” (222). Mrs. Poyser, we might say, catches Molly’s alarm. It is as if she sees a ghost, an apparition, so that the jug “in her hand” falls. The jug in falling is not a willing part: it breaks apart; it loses “its spout and handle.” The broken jug: a sad parting. We might note that when Mrs. Poyser breaks this jug, she does not blame herself. She offers a kind of fatalism: “What is to be broke will be  broke” (222, emphasis in original), a way of using will seemingly as a simple future auxiliary verb, but one that acquires a certain predictive force (what happen will happen, whatever will be will be).33 The will becomes, in Mrs. Poyser’s hands, a bond of fate, such that even the snap of a break is fate. Mrs. Poyser then attributes the cause of the breakage to the jug itself: “ ‘Did ever anybody see the like?’ she said, with a sudden lowered tone, after a moment’s bewildered glance round the room. ‘The jugs are bewitched, I think. It’s them nasty glazed handles—they slip o’er the finger like a snail.’ . . . ‘It’s all very fine to look on and grin,’ rejoined Mrs. Poyser; ‘but there’s times when the crockery seems alive an’ flies out o’ your hand like a bird’ ” (222, emphasis in original). The jugs appear with a life of their own, flying “out o’ your hand” as if bewitched, as full of a spirit. The handle of the jug is interpreted as causing the hand to drop 46

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the jug, such that the handle becomes willful, what resists being helpful (“them nasty glazed handles”), as mean rather than a means to a happier end. When the jug appears willful (in the precise sense of too full of its own will, as not empty enough to be filled by human will), it not only causes its own breakage, but breaks the thread of a social connection. We might note the beginning of another connection, between the girl and the jug, a willful connection, possibly even a queer kinship, between those assumed to cause a breakage. In the previous section I discussed how will is experienced as “on the way” to actualization. If we think of a hand holding a jug that holds the ale, then we learn that willing involves a moment of suspension: the hand has left its resting place; it is carrying something toward something, but the task has yet to be completed. The hand has not yet reached its destination.34 Willfulness might strike in a moment of suspension: what gets in the way of what is on the way. Willfulness: that which is striking. If we follow some philosophers and assume that happiness is what “the will” aims for (I have observed the rather remarkable consistency of this assumption), then to be judged willful is to become a killjoy of the future: the one who steals the possibility of happiness, the one who stops happiness from becoming actual, the one who gets in the way of a happiness assumed as on the way. When the judgment of willfulness converts a potential into a threat, willfulness comes up as the theft of potential.

Willing with Others If the attribution of willfulness sticks, something becomes a willful thing, what prevents a will from being completed. There is agency in this becoming; there is life. The attribution of willfulness shows us how objects (and objects can includes those we would ordinarily call subjects, those who we bequeath with a “who,” a bequeathing that thus far has been restricted) have lives other than the ones we give to them. And, given this, willfulness represents a moment of crisis in the system of property: willful objects are unwilling to provide residence for will. This is not to say that willing objects are simply those that provide residence. I explored Silas Marner’s companionship with his pot as a willing companionship. A human response might be to gloss this companionship as sad: that it is sad that Silas’s affections are given to a mere pot.  And in a way, the text itself gives us this gloss: eventually Silas’s broken pot is replaced by a child, a more appropriate being upon whom to Willing Subjects

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bestow one’s affections (see chapter 3). But we do not have to respond humanly to the matter of the jug. We do not have to restrict our sympathy. We do not have to make things matter as if they are only there to inhabit the place left empty by the vacation of humans. When we think of the will sphere, we might think of how we inhabit the world willingly with others. Perhaps we can think of social willing not then simply as what we accomplish when we will together but how we become proximate to objects and others in being orientated toward ends that have been agreed. In the case of Silas and his jug, they share the project or the task of carrying the water from the well to the house. Perhaps we could agree that the end of the action is Silas’s: after all, it is Silas (and not the pot) who will be drinking the water. But even if the point is to fulfill Silas’s needs, to give sustenance to his body, he cannot accomplish this point alone. Carrying matters even if the water is carried in order that Silas can drink it. We could turn at this point to a body of literature we could call “the sociology of the will,” which is a rather thin body probably because “the will” has primarily been understood as a psychological rather than social phenomenon.35 The key sociologist whose work falls under this rubric would be Ferdinand Tönnies. He uses the language of will to redescribe social conventions, which he calls a “simple expression of the general will of Society” ([1887] 2001, 63). What does it do to our understanding of conventions to think of them as expressions of will? I will turn to the concept of the general will in chapter 3. But we might think here of a convention as an activity: after all to convene is to assemble, to meet up (see Ahmed 2010, 64). Perhaps willing allows us to think of meetings more explicitly in terms of projects: we might aim to meet up, and in meeting up, we might aim to reach an agreement. Tönnies uses the term “concurrence of wills” ([1887] 2001, 58).36 To concur can mean to happen at the same time. It derives from the Latin verb concurrere, “to run together, assemble hurriedly; clash, fight.” The word joins “con,” “together,” and currere, “to run, move quickly.” A concurrence is a shared current or flow. Social willing could also be thought of in terms of movement: when two bodies move in the same way, they are willing together. A social model of willing might rest on the concept of a shared project. Margaret Gilbert, for example, has described social willing as “will pooling.” Will pooling occurs when subjects are willing to will the same way, that is, when they are ready to take up the same projects: “Joint readiness can be described as involving a pool of wills constituted in a specific way 48

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in relation to what may happen” (1989, 200). To be ready is to be directed in the same way, to have a sense of willing together: “Our wills are now properly regarded by both of us constituting a pool of wills dedicated to whatever is in question” (222). To introduce willing into our understanding of sociality is to suggest that social experience can operate between tenses: willing together depends on having reached this point (the already willed as a horizon of shared experience), and reaching for something that is not yet (a possibility becomes a shared horizon). A social experience might be how we are thrown by contingency. The experience of willing together might depend upon a preexisting openness to others; a capacity to be affected and directed by an encounter. As Medard Boss describes, drawing on Heidegger, “the prevailing attunement is at any given time the condition of our openness for perceiving and dealing with what we encounter; the pitch at which our existence, as a set of relationships to objects, ourselves and other people, is vibrating” (1979, 110). A vibration can be the sound of bodies in tune. There is a rich intellectual tradition for thinking through the mechanisms of attunement or what William H. McNeill (1995) calls “muscular bonding.” As Lisa Blackman describes, muscular bonding refers to “the somatically felt dimensions of rhythm and keeping in time which literally make people feel good and propel them to potentially invest in particular practices” (2008, 134). McNeill is interested in how muscular bonding is crucial to human evolution: how the capacity to walk together, to keep in time, to be coordinated with others, is essential to welfare as well as progress. At some points this capacity becomes instrumentalized (for example, in the coordination of human labor and effort deemed necessary to accomplish monumental tasks such as the building of monuments—or in the determination of collective will as or in alignment with the will of a party or leader in fascism) but we need not let the reduction of capacity be our reduction. Capacities might exceed the ends to which they have been directed. Perhaps then we can think of willingness in terms of being open to being influenced or receiving the will of others. In becoming attuned to others, it is not that we lose our boundaries. Rather we refuse to secure those boundaries by closing ourselves off from the worlds we inhabit. In Lisa Blackman’s evocative terms a “somatically felt body” is one that is alive to the world (2008, 2012). If this could be described as a relatively happy picture of social willing, it helps to dislodge some of the more sinister accounts of social will (happy not just in the sense that willing in time can “feel good” but in the Willing Subjects

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picture of social will as being the good it feels). Happiness should indeed be part of the picture. But we can still ask: when happiness is a picture, what recedes from view? Attunement can be understood as active: as a process of bringing something into a harmonious or responsive relationship. We could say that Silas was perfectly attuned with his pot (until it broke). The word itself is thought to have not only derived from “tune” but also from “atone” suggesting “one” or to “make one.” Attunement is often used to refer to what has already been understood as separate or apart coming together to become one. We do not have to assume separation as the starting point to understand that separation can be part of a social experience. The meaning of attunement might imply what was previously experienced as separate is no longer being experienced as such (“to come into a harmonious and responsive relation”). Separation might even be experienced as that which is gradually lost in a becoming relation. And this “becoming relation” suggests “harmony,” a sense of peace, joining, reconciliation, and oneness. It is noteworthy that the word “harmony” implies joining and has an etymological connection with “arms.” Perhaps social willing is an army experience, being arm in arm.37 If arms are joiners, then they can be joined by willing the same things. I will be returning to the arminess of social willing in the conclusion of this book. Willing together can be an experience of being in time. Things run smoothly; we might be walking in unison. What happens when we concur but we do not achieve this unison? When we are out of time, we notice the other’s timing and pace; in noticing the other, the other might appear as awkward or clumsy, as not willing to be helpful (remember the point of the pot’s “willing helpfulness”). Or we might turn toward each other in frustration, as we bump into each other yet again. Clumsiness can be how a subject experiences itself: as being “in the way” of what is “on the way,” as being in the way of itself as well as others. A body can be what trips you up, catches you out. Indeed, the feeling of clumsiness can be catchy: once you feel clumsy, you can feel even clumsier; you can even lack the coordination to coordinate yourself with yourself let alone yourself with others. If we are in motion, clumsiness can be registered as what stops a movement or flow (the word “clumsy” derives from the word kluma, to make motionless). And if moving in time feels good, no wonder a clumsy subject can feel herself a killjoy: your own body can be what gets in the way of a happiness that is assumed as on its way.38 Perhaps the experience of willing together also involves the experience of non-attunement: of being in a world with others where we are not 50

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in a responsive or harmonious relation. The problem with attunement is not that it does not happen (it most certainly does)39 but that it can easily become not just a description of an experience but also an ideal: as if the aim is harmony, to be willing in time with others. When attunement becomes an aim, those who are not in tune or who are out of tune become the obstacles; they become the “non” attuned whose clumsiness registers as the loss of a possibility. This “non” is saturated: those who are assumed to cause the non-attunement become the non they are assumed to cause; and if they lag behind, they become this “non” quickly, so fast that it can be hard to keep up. Perhaps we could create a queer ethics out of clumsiness, an ethics that registers those who are not attuned as keeping open the possibility of going another way. Or perhaps we can think of the experience of being out of time as a way of staying attuned to otherness. Rather than the experience of bumping into each other being a sign of the failure of a relationship, or even the failure of someone in a relationship to be responsive, it can be understood as a form of relationship in which bodies have not simply adjusted to each other. When bumping is understood as a form of relationship, it is no longer experienced as that which must be overcome. The bumpiness of the ride could be an expression of the degree to which one style of embodiment has not determined an ethical or social horizon. Corporeal diversity, how we come to inhabit different kinds of bodies, with differing capacities and incapacities, rhythms and tendencies, would be understood as a call to open up a world that has assumed a certain kind of body as a norm. Rather than equality being about smoothing a relation perhaps equality is a bumpy ride. The experience of not willing with others can be understood as part of social experience. It might be the difficulty of “not willing” that is how we come to be willing with others: willing together as a way of avoiding difficulty. It is not necessarily that willing together becomes an injunction, though it can become so. An injunction can be implicit even in the seemingly innocent word “with.” “With” can be used to imply a relation: an accompanying. You are with someone, something goes with something. To be with has a temporal dimension; to happen or occur at the same time. But “with” can also carry the implication of being “for.” When I say to you, I am with you; I might mean I support you. When you ask me, are you with me, you might be asking for my support. An assumption that we are with can be a demand to be with. Perhaps we are all with all. But are we? To arrive into the world is to inherit whom we are with, those Willing Subjects

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who are deemed, family or relatives and friends, and those who are not with, non-relatives and strangers. And if we can inherit this distinction, then “with” can be a demand to reproduce that distinction: be with! Be with or else you will not be with, you might even be against or against with, where being not with or against risks not being. Perhaps we must become “with” willingly. Withness might be the very place where “the will” becomes work: will work. Think of very ordinary and everyday situations of willing: when we might feel we are out of line with others, we might (more or less consciously) make adjustments, what we might call willing adjustments. Willing adjustments (or being will to adjust) might relate to what Arlie Hochschild describes as emotional labor, when subjects “close the gap” between how they do feel and how they should feel. One of Hochschild’s examples is the bride on her wedding day, the “happiest day of her life,” a bride who does not feel right, in other words, who does not feel happy ([1983] 2003, 59; see Ahmed 2010, 41). The bride tries to convince herself that she is happy although there can be nothing more unconvincing than the effort to be convinced. Will work is not only the effort to close a gap, but to find the closure convincing. Perhaps we are convinced when the effort to be convinced disappears: willing comes to be experienced “happily” as spontaneous.40 I have already pointed out that self-willing can be the absence of spontaneity that is often assumed: an experience of being out of time with oneself. It is interesting to observe here that the word “spontaneous” which is now often used to refer to something that is without premeditation or effort, derives from the Latin sponte, “of one’s own accord, willingly.” Spontaneous is what we can call a “will word.” I noted in Queer Phenomenology the paradox of how with effort things can appear effortless (2006, 56). The appearance of willing might require the disappearance of the laboring effort. If willing can be an attempt to catch up with oneself, it can also be an attempt to catch up with others. So it might seem that we just happen to be willing in the same way, at the same time: willing as spontaneity becoming willing as synchronicity. Synchronicity obscures another history of being in time; the time of precedence, when some are required to make adjustments to be in time with others. I have suggested following Schopenhauer that we do not tend to notice what is in agreement with will. Perhaps when will work “works” we are in harmony or in agreement.41 The already willed can be understood as a history of agreement, a history that is still, perhaps insofar as it has become “stilled.” When will 52

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work does not work, we have a disagreement. Willfulness might come up as an explanation of this disagreement. Think of that grim arm: if in coming up, it causes a disturbance, we might not notice the ground being disturbed. Even when wills are in agreement, they are not necessarily willing at the same time. Social willing is willing that is never quite in time, or not quite the time we are in. Let’s take the example of hospitality. There is a relation of host to guest. The host not only was already here, or here before, but the “here” belongs in some way to the host. The host welcomes or receives the guest into the home, opens up the home. The guest can come in insofar as the guest comes after. Or perhaps hospitality can take the form of a simple address, given without the security of residence: would you like to come along with us? To accept the invitation you go along with this coming along. Such an ordinary invitation: one could accept it or not. But in being welcomed the “you” is positioned as not part of the “us,” or should we say not yet part. What does it mean, what does it do, for the participation of some to be dependent on an invitation made by others? When participation depends on an invitation, then participation becomes a condition or comes with conditions. Jacques Derrida (2000) offers an astute analysis of “conditional hospitality,” when a host welcomes the guest only on condition the guest behaves or “is” a certain way, a restriction of hospitality that is not, Derrida suggests, very hospitable. We can think of how conditional hospitality rests on what we can call conditional will. Take the word “welcome.” This word is often used as a “friendly greeting,” or to signify a friendly orientation. Welcome is another “will word.” It derives from the Old English word wilcoma, combining “will” with guest. Welcome originally implied a guest “whose coming is in accord with another’s will.” If guests are those whose coming is in accordance with another’s will, then guests might have to will in accordance. If guests are not willing to will in accord, they become willful guests, those who abuse the hospitality that has been given. In fact, the figure of the willful guest might be understood as spectre that haunts hospitality, the menace that threatens the loss of a good relation. Conditional will is when we make our will conditional on the will of others, or when we will on condition that others too are willing.42 Guests would be welcome on condition they are willing to make their will conditional on the will of those who precede them. The speech act “I will if you will” condenses the conditionality of will into a promise to will if the Willing Subjects

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other wills.43 Note how this conditional will, even if it positions the “I” and the “you” alongside each other, as bound in a willing relation, cannot make them inhabit the same time: one comes before, one after, an “if.” This temporal disjunction is a social disjunction. If certain people come first—such as hosts, but also parents or citizens—then their will comes first. This being first is not always obvious or explicit. Indeed, the hosts might say that they will “will” only if guests will, thus appearing to give guests precedence: “if you will, then I will.” A promise to be willing can become a demand given this precedence: “you will, so that I can will.” If the others won’t will, then the ones who will the others to will so they can will also cannot will “if you won’t then I can’t.” The guests must will the same way for those who are already in place to receive what they will: “you must be willing!” When you are willing, this must loses the sound of force. This is why some forms of force might not be experiencable as force, as they involve a sense, nay, a feeling of being willing. We are used to thinking of force in terms of making people do something “against their will.” Power too is often understood in these terms. In On Charisma and Institution Building, Max Weber offers the following definition of power (Macht): “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests” (1968, 15). Power involves the capacity to carry out an action despite the will of others. Resistance, in other words, is not strong enough to stop those with power doing what they will do. Weber explains that a sociological model of power will be an explanation of the probability that “a command will be obeyed (16, emphasis in original). Perhaps in explaining this probability we are showing how power goes “with the will” rather than simply “against the will.”44 In other words, power becomes the capacity to carry out will without (as well as despite) resistance. Or power could be understood in terms of the expression “willy nilly” (related to the Latin expression nolens volens) which refers to something that is done with or without the will of the person concerned.45 With or without will: freedom and force can operate in the same register. The restriction of force to what is against the will has effects on what does and does not come into view, becoming a discursive as well as moral frame. An example: one headline of a newspaper report into sex trafficking reads: “Inquiry Fails to Find a Single Trafficker Who Forced Anyone into Prostitution.”46 The report argues that if no one was forced into sex 54

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trafficking, then sex trafficking is not a problem. To claim others as being willing can be to eliminate the signs of a problem.47 A feminist account of gender as a social relation might need to include analysis of how women willingly agree to situations in which their safety and well-being are compromised. For understandable reasons, feminist work on violence against women in dealing with questions of law and legal redress has focused on consent and on the violence of men hearing no as yes. Susan Brownmiller (1976) entitled her important feminist account of women, men, and rape Against Our Will for very good reasons. There is a history whereby men give themselves permission to hear no as yes, to assume women are willing, whatever women say, a history that is central to the injustice of the law, which has historically read consent off women’s own bodies or conduct, as if by dressing this way, or by doing something that way, she is enacting a yes, even when she herself says no. We certainly need to hear the violence that converts no into yes. My additional suggestion is modest: we also need to hear the cases in which yes involves force but is not experienced as force, when for instance a women says yes to something as the consequences of saying no would be too much (loss of access to children, to resources or benefits, to residence, etc.). If being willing does not mean the absence of force, then we need to account for the social and political situations in which yes and no are given.48 Thinking through will is an invitation to think about force differently. Force can take the following form: the making unbearable of the consequences of not willing what someone wills you to will. A condition of bearability can be to will “freely” what you are willed to will. The force of a situation can be understood as social as well as political. As Marx and Engels argue: “Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will” ([1845] 1956, 129). You leave out of your own will, because staying would be uncomfortable. Discomfort becomes a polite strategy or technique of power (the capacity to carry out will without resistance, or with the will of others). A situation can be what “forces” someone to be willing (to leave), not necessarily the will of an individual subject, although the will of certain subjects can be hard to separate from a situation. Take the example of employment: the relation of employer to employee. Power can work through incentives: you might be given an incentive to leave your job (in the form of voluntary redundancy) which basically amounts to a choice between leaving Willing Subjects

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with an incentive and leaving without one. You might leave voluntarily or willingly as it would be worse to lose the incentive. Willing is not only a way of avoiding the consequences of being forced but also of “coming off less badly” given that force. Even if we can understand the position of not being able to afford to lose the incentive, we can note that to leave willingly is to leave the conditions that led to redundancy unopposed. We can understand another sense in which willfulness becomes striking.

Conclusion: Social Will and Momentum Once force and will are not assumed as belonging to different registers, we have to work out and work through how they become entangled. Tangles are messy, and accounts of the social will thus need to be messy in turn.49 Think of situations in which many bodies co-inhabit a given space. Let’s say it’s a crowd. It is not simply that an individual submits her will to the will of a crowd, as Gustave Le Bon’s theory of crowd psychology is often interpreted (Martin 2011, 137). We do not need to think of will as what a collective (or an individual) has. If an impression of collective will is acquired, then this impression can become more impressive in time. Crowds are not simply going whichever way: they tend to be orientated or directed (by the geography of a street, by following an established route or path). Feelings too tend to be directed. To become part of a crowd might involve being willing to be affected by what is near. Le Bon himself describes “the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction” ([1895] 2002, 14, see Ahmed 2010, 43). The social will would thus refer to more than the social experience of willing or not willing with others. A social will is also a will that has acquired momentum. A momentum usually refers to the force of a moving body. It can also mean an impetus or cause of an event. The gathering of momentum is how things come to happen in this way rather than that. A direction is impressive; a body can be pressed upon. In my previous work I have noted the “press” in an impression: an impression is not just a quality of an experience, but the press of one surface against another (see Ahmed 2004, 6). We might note there is a “press” in oppression as well as impression. As Marilyn Frye describes “the root of the word ‘oppression’ is the element ‘press.’ The press of the crowd; pressed into military service; to press a pair of pants; printing press; press the button. Presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk, sometimes to reduce them by squeezing out the gases or liquids in them. Something 56

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pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing’s motion or mobility. Mold. Immobilize. Reduce” (1983, 54). To be pressed is to be shaped by the force you receive. I will explore in the next chapter how the social will often takes the form of a good will, a will that speaks the language of “ought to,” or “should,” or even, as I show in chapter 3, the language of “must.” We could think of will as a pressing device: bodies are pressed this way or that by the force of a momentum. The will in having direction becomes directive. My aim in this chapter has been to develop a social phenomenology of willing by attending to “not withness” and “antagonism” as part of social experience. It is important for me to note here that I am not identifying all willing as coercive, but asking what follows when we do not assume willing as the absence of coercion. My task in the following chapters is to develop my account of what is at stake in social willing, how it is that we come to be willing in time with others. In describing a simple situation of two bodies walking together we might say that the work of adjustment is exterior work, work on a will that is given to a subject as its own rhythm or gait (although I have also implied that “ownness” might be an experience of the failure of adjustment or a refusal to adjust). But it is not the only way we can describe the social will. We need to interrogate how willing becomes “my own” through the work of adjustment. To do so we need to return to the figure I opened this book with: the willful child. We need to let her create more of an impression.

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Chapter Two

THE GOOD WILL

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ut if I had not had that murderous will—that moment—if I had thrown the rope on the instant—perhaps it would have hindered death?” (Eliot [1876] 1995, 699). I open this chapter with a question posed by Gwendolyn about whether or not she is guilty for the death of her husband, a question posed to Daniel Deronda in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda. The question of guilt is posed as a question of will: even if Gwendolyn did not murder her husband, even if she did not cause him to drown, even if her hands did not push him off the boat, she asks whether her will was still somehow implicated in his death. She had wished for, even willed, his death before his death. Perhaps we could describe this death wish as a happiness wish, for his life had compromised her happiness. And faced with the dramatic imminence of his death, she wonders, retrospectively, whether willing his death made her sluggish in pursuing an action that might otherwise have saved him. If she did not throw the rope quickly, when throwing the rope was the right thing to do, perhaps she was doing the wrong thing. The question of guilt is posed not in terms of what she did, nor even in terms of what she did not do, but in the time taken to do what she did: a will that hesitates in the pursuit of the right action might be guilty, might be responsible in the very faltering nature of how it reaches for a possibility. Deronda’s answer to Gwendolyn’s moral question seems gentle: “That momentary murderous will cannot, I think, have altered the course of events. Its effect is confined to the motives in your own breast. Within ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner or later it works its way outside us—it may be in the vitiation that breeds evil acts, but also it may be in the self-abhorrence that stings us into better strivings” (699). Deronda’s response detaches Gwendolyn from guilt by evoking the momentary nature of her murderous will. The

implication of his address is that an evil will, if given time, will come out, refusing confinement within the human breast. An evil will “will” lead to evil deeds unless a subject abhors that part of itself: rejecting evil would become a willing project, to be willing to reject one’s own ill will. Moral worth requires being willing to strive toward a good will. Not all moral discourse is a discourse of the will. However, “the will” comes up time and time again as the primary measure of the moral state of a person. I began the last chapter with Augustine’s certainty that something called the will exists. We might describe this certainty as moral certainty: not only does the will exist, but the existence of the will is required for a subject to be good, or to live in accordance with God’s will. Augustine notes in his essay On Free Choice of the Will: “It is a will by which we desire to live upright and honorable lives and to attain the highest wisdom” (1.12.19). A good will requires that an individual is willing to live a good life. Perhaps we can understand the specifically moral role of the will simply in terms of the status already given to the will as a condition of possibility for human freedom. If this is the case, it is not surprising that it is in Kantian philosophy that the will achieves its fullest status as a moral faculty. Kant writes, “A good will is good not because of what it accomplishes or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by the virtue of the volition” ([1785] 2005b, 55, emphasis added). This chapter offers an account of the meaning of this expression “by virtue of the volition.” For Kant the virtue of volition must be independent of will’s content, from what willing wills, or what willing brings about. While the strict formalism of Kantian ethics might seem exceptional, the investment in the will as a moral faculty is not. The will has been understood as essential to morality in quite different intellectual traditions. I noted in my introduction to this book that George Eliot was involved in the debates about free will and determinism central to the period in which she was writing. Many of the sciences of the mind in the nineteenth century did not question but retained the pivotal status of the will as a moral faculty even if the will came to be understood as determined and corporeal.1 For example, the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley in his Physiology and Pathology of Mind follows Baruch Spinoza in challenging the idea of free will as that which causes an action (1867, 149). He then redescribes the will as the “highest mode of energy of nerve element” that can control “the inferior modes of energy by operating downwards on their subordinate centres” (151). This is how Maudsley in Body and Will can rest his arguments about 60

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human progress on the redirecting of the will “to take the path of a higher and freer development in well-doing” (1884, 8). In the work of George Henry Lewes, the will is understood as a mechanism for choosing “subject to causal determination no less rigorously than the movements of the planets” (1879, 102). Lewes argues further that freedom “falls within the limits of determination,” and that consciousness of freedom for the “sentient organism” is the “consciousness of deliberation” between conflicting motives that are experienced as “simultaneous excitations” (108). The will does not disappear but becomes a way of thinking the sensitive nature of the history of the organism. Lewes argues that “because the will is thus an abstract expression of the product of experience, it is educable and becomes amenable to the Moral law” (109). If the will is a history of the subject, a translation of experience into a concept, then the will creates the potential for a future; historicity is amenability in this figuration. The investment in the will as a moral faculty is thus not dependent on a metaphysical understanding of “the will.” The will is reworked as something that needs to be worked upon. Scholars have already identified how during the Victorian period “weakness of the will” became an explanation of human pathologies of various kinds (see Valverde 1998; R. Smith 1992; J. Smith 1989).2 For example, Mariana Valverde’s history of alcoholism explores how Victorian science makes use of the category of “the will” as central to human pathology. Valverde refers to the work of the French psychologist Théodule Ribot whose book, Diseases of the Will, was widely disseminated and translated, suggesting that while his central category of “diseases of the will” did “not prosper,” the broader assumption that the will is essential to human welfare did (1998, 3). The will emerges in this vast and varied literature as a sphere of gradation: the will can be stronger and weaker, healthier and unhealthier, better and worse, such that the state of the will becomes the truest measure of the state of the person. The will in this conceptual horizon is understood not as something a subject has, or experiences itself as having, but as what a subject develops, or must develop, to a greater or lesser extent, over time. If in the previous chapter I explored willing as an activity that is bound up with a project, with how a subject reaches for an end that is on the way to actualization, this chapter explores how the will itself becomes a project. The will must be worked into existence in order to maximize one’s chances for living a healthy, happy, and good life. In this chapter I show how the relative strength and weakness of the will is interpreted through a moral vocabulary (often defined in The Good Will

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terms of the distinction between good will and ill will). The history of the idea of the will shows us the intimate coevolution of morality and health. The imperative to improve oneself is often framed in terms of working upon will, or strengthening the will. If the discourse of will pathology has created a lasting set of impressions despite losing its diagnostic status (or perhaps even because of losing its diagnostic status),3 so too has the related idea of the educable will. We can track the emergence of this idea of an educable will, which could even be thought of as the creation of a field of knowledge: for example, Edward John Boyd Barrett in Strength of Will describes his own project in relation to “the books which already hold the field” (1915, 8). An influential text was Jules Payot’s The Education of the Will, first published in French in 1909, which was dedicated to the earlier work of Ribot, and which presents in vivid detail “weakness of the will” as a social pathology (in particular as explaining the malaise of a generation of young educated men), and the education of the will as a social, national, as well as moral requirement. While the education of the will became a distinct field during the late nineteenth century, the idea of the educable will has a longer history. Educational philosophy from John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (first published in 1693) onward could be described in terms of the development of an education of the will. This chapter asks how it is that education in virtue took the form of an education of the will, with specific reference to the formation of moral character.

Poisonous Pedagogy Education in taking the will as an object rests on particular ideas of the child’s nature. In Literature, Education and Romanticism (1994) Alan Richardson reflects on the competing conceptions of childhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He refers to Lawrence Stone’s “influential social history of the English family,” where Stone elaborates on four different views of the child’s nature: including the “traditional Christian view” in which the child is inherently sinful, the “environmental” view of the child as a blank slate, the “utopian view” of the child as innocent, and the “biological view” of the child’s nature as determined genetically from conception (Richardson 1994, 10). This section explores the first view of the child, reflecting on how education became understood as breaking the child’s will. 62

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The figure of the willful child acquires a particular importance in the Protestant tradition. Herbert Marcuse offers a powerful analysis of the writings of Calvin and Luther. Marcuse notes how paternal authority became central to Protestantism: “A programmatic reorganization of the family and a notable strengthening of the authority of the pater familias took place in the context of the bourgeois-Protestant teachings of the Reformation” (1972, 74). For Marcuse this reinforced paternal authority rests upon the “breaking and humiliation of the child’s will” (76).4 Marcuse quotes Luther: “The commandment gives parents a position of honour so the self-will of the children can be broken, and they are made humble and meek” (76). As paternal authority acquired more importance, displacing the authority of the church, the will of the child acquired more centrality as a technique for transmitting authority. The Grimm story can be read as part of a Protestant tradition that views the child’s will as that which must be broken. The willful child, who will not do as her mother wishes, must be punished, and her punishment is necessary for the preservation of the familial as well as social order.5 The shortness of the story is not then an accidental quality: we do not need to know any other details than that the child does not do what her mother wishes; we do not need to know what the mother wishes. The point of the story is precisely the independence of the wrongdoing from the content of the mother’s wish. Whatever the mother wishes, the child must be willing to do. Willfulness, in other words, is a symptom that the child’s will is independent of the parental wish, a wish that is quickly translated in the Grimm story into God’s command. The story takes the form of a command: the child must do what her mother wishes; willfulness must be eliminated from the child. The story could be “heard” as a command to the imagined child who reads the story: obey! The story gives us a portrait of obedience as virtue. We could thus consider how the project of eliminating willfulness relates to obedience. Aquinas in his reflection on the virtue of obedience refers to the work of Gregory who argues that obedience has “more merit” the “less it has of its own will” (Summa Theologiae, 2a.2ae.104.60). For Gregory obedience becomes a virtue when persons obey commands that do not go in the direction of their own will. There is no virtue in obeying a command that is agreeable to one’s own will: “obedience requires little or no effort when it has as its own will in agreeable things.” Rather “the effort is greater in disagreeable or difficult things.” Obedience occurs when one’s “own will tends to nothing apart from the command” (63). This is how Gregory can The Good Will

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conclude that “by obedience we slay our own will” (64). To obey is to go where your will would not take you. Willfulness might refer to willing in agreement with one’s own will. Another way of putting this would be to say that a willful will is one that wills what it wants, and that has yet to eliminate want from will.6 As I noted in my introduction to this book, the Grimm story can be considered as part of the educational tradition described by Alice Miller (1987) as “poisonous pedagogy.” Miller draws on the earlier work of Katharina Rutschky who describes this tradition (problematically) as “Black pedagogy,” which has as its primary aim “the domination and control of the child for the child’s own good” (Zornado 2001, 79).7 As Joseph L. Zornado points out, following both Rutschky and Miller, this pedagogy rests on willfulness: “Because the child is willful, stained by original sin and destructive, the adult must enact decisive and punitive measures so that the child will not grow up ‘full of weeds’ ” (2001, 79). The violence toward the child is thus presented as being for the child. One of the examples of poisonous pedagogy quoted at length by Alice Miller is J. Sulzer’s An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children (1784).8 I will follow Miller in quoting this essay at length as it gives us a fuller and affective picture of what is at stake in the history of willfulness. In Sulzer’s essay willfulness is described as that which must be “driven out” before children can receive a good education. Willfulness is an obstacle to the educable will: As far as willfulness is concerned, this expresses itself as a natural recourse in tenderest childhood as soon as children are able to make their desire for something known by means of gestures. They see something they want but cannot have; they become angry, cry, and flail about. Or they are given something that does not please them; they fling it aside and begin to cry. These are dangerous faults that hinder their entire education and encourage undesirable qualities in children. If willfulness and wickedness are not driven out, it is impossible to give a child a good education. The moment these flaws appear in a child, it is high time to resist this evil so that it does not become ingrained through habit and the children do not become thoroughly depraved. (cited in Miller 1987, 10–11) Indeed driving out willfulness, Sulzer suggests, should be the “main occupation” of those concerned with the education of children. He argues that driving out willfulness must be done “in a methodical manner”; other64

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wise children “will finally become the masters of their parents and of their nursemaids and will have a bad, willful, and unbearable disposition with which they will trouble and torment their parents ever after as the well-earned reward for the ‘good’ upbringing they were given” (11). The rod makes an appearance as the proper instrument for moral correction: “If parents are fortunate enough to drive out willfulness from the very beginning by means of scolding and the rod, they will have obedient, docile, and good children whom they can later provide with a good education” (11). The rod and scolding are techniques of parental will that aim to create a docile child. Note here that docility appears an end of will, as what will, transformed into a disciplinary technique, is intended to actualize. As such the will seeks to eliminate the child’s will, understood as willful insofar as it is his own: “A child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own and his own master, since he is already accustomed not to act in accordance with his own will. Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey” (12, emphasis added). Becoming obedient is learning to act without accordance to one’s own will. If children are to act without self-accordance, their own will must be broken: It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences. Just as soon as children develop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and deed that they must submit to the will of their parents. Obedience requires children to (1) willingly do as they are told, (2) willingly refrain from doing what is forbidden, and (3) accept the rules made for their sake. (13) To eliminate willfulness is thus to eliminate not only the will defined as independence from what is willed by others, but to eliminate the very memory of this will or at least to aim for this elimination. The child’s identification with parental will would become so complete that identification The Good Will

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is experienced as willingness, as not only willingly doing what they are commanded to do, but as being this doing, as having always been this doing. Once the child is willing, any memory of having a will that was willing otherwise is eradicated. Or at least that is the idea. A subject that is willing to obey is a subject without will: a willing subject becomes a will-less subject. What is this subject required to do? Katharina Rutschky explores how the genre of poisonous pedagogy provided the psychic conditions for the emergence of Fascism within Germany in the twentieth century (creating subjects whose obedience rested on the acceptance and perpetration of cruelty and punishment). As Alice Miller shows in For Your Own Good, we can track the emergence of poisonous pedagogy across Europe and America during the eighteenth century. Take, for example, the work of John Wesley who was influenced by Arminian doctrines. Wesley writes of children: “Break their wills betimes. Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, before they can speak at all. Whatever pains it costs, break the will, if you would not damn the child. Let the child from a year old be taught to fear the rod; and to cry softly; from that age, make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. If you do spare the rod, you spoil the child; if you do not conquer you ruin him” (1811, 71). If breaking the will is painful it is understood as necessary pain. This pain must be prior even to speech. The child must be conquered to avoid damnation. Reading these literatures is difficult given how violence against children is rationalized and enacted in the works themselves. The works are implicated in the histories they enact; they are conduits of violence. In the brutish maxim “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” history is summarized as instruction. When reading about Wesley, I came across another text by the twentieth-century Baptist evangelical John Rice. He asks how John Wesley and his brother Christopher as leaders of the Evangelical movement and founders of Methodism were themselves taught. Rice notes: “Their mother Susannah Wesley taught them to fear the rod when they were a year old” (1946, 213). Rice himself then follows Wesley in arguing that “when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childhood follies and inadvertencies may be passed by. . . . No willful transgression should ever be forgiven children. . . . as self-will is the root of all sin and misery, so whatever cherishes this in children insures their after-wretchedness and irreligion” (213). After-wretchedness: this history is indeed a wretched history. To follow the figure of the willful 66

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child is to stay proximate to scenes of violence. And we learn too how those beaten by the rod become rods that beat. This becoming is not inevitable, but it is part of a history we cannot afford to forget. It is a history still with us.9 Assembling a willfulness archive is a way of attending to histories that are kept alive by forgetting. The figure of the willful child appears not only in poisonous pedagogy but also within more liberal traditions of educational and moral philosophy where the violence of accounting for willfulness is less visible. A key difference relates to how willfulness is positioned within a narrative: in poisonous pedagogy, the child is already willful and education must eliminate that willfulness; while in other models, the child’s willfulness would be an effect of being educated wrongly. Willfulness becomes then not origin but outcome; the willful child is created by spoiling the child. For example, Immanuel Kant suggests that “parents talk a great deal about breaking the will of their children, but there is no need to break their will unless they have already been spoilt. The spoiling begins when a child has but to cry to get his own way” ([1899] 2003, 48–49). Not to spoil the child is a way of not breaking their will. Spoiling children is a way that children get “their own way” (49).10 For Kant to spoil the child is to weaken the will of the adult to come: “Men should therefore accustom themselves early to yield to the commands of reason, for if a man be allowed to follow his own will in his youth, without opposition, a certain lawlessness will cling to him throughout his life” (4). Such adults would not value what Kant values: the moral law. Willfulness can thus be understood as “lawlessness” given subject form. Philosophers have written at length about the mortal and moral danger of spoiling children: no wonder that following the figure of the willful child gives a different angle on the history of ideas. Consider the work of James Mill working within the utilitarian tradition. For Mill, the child is always potentially tyrannical; the child by implication would become a tyrant without the intervention of the educator. Mill describes the tyrannical child in the following way: “There is not one child in fifty who has not learned to make its cries and wailings an instrument of absolute tyranny. When the evil grows to absolute excess, the vulgar say the child is spoiled. Not only is the child allowed to exert an influence over the wills of others, by means of their pains, it finds, that frequently, sometimes most frequently, its own will is needless and unduly commanded by the same means, pain, and the fear of pain” ([1823] 1992, 181). The child who is allowed to influence the wills of others is in turn under the command The Good Will

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of the pain and fear of pain that is engendered. Mill approaches moral training as a training in affect: the child comes to feel happiness in the happiness of others, and to feel misery in response to the misery of others (180).11 A good will is one that is “affectively” aligned. This affective alignment could be redescribed as a will alignment: to will as others will you to will. The willful child is the one who is improperly aligned. The aim of education is to bring the will of the child into line not only with parental will, but the moral law, upon which parental will is assumed to rest. The central investment in the moral danger of willfulness within poisonous pedagogy thus also pervades the history of liberal moral and educational philosophy and can even be detected in the most benevolent approaches to the nature of children such as those of Rousseau, as I will discuss in the following section. The remoteness of the tradition is thus only apparent.12

Will and Character Eliminating willfulness could be understood as a method of negation: a way of stopping a certain kind of subject from coming into existence, one whose insistence on having her or his own way is presented as waywardness, as a perversion of the right path of the will. Education of the will was also understood as a positive project: as bringing a new kind of subject into existence. If poisonous pedagogy rests on “breaking the will,” this more positive tradition could be thought of as “making the will.” I will show how “making the will” still relies on the figure of the willful child. We can understand why the will is invested with promise if we reflect on how the will is central to modern understandings of character. Théodule Ribot’s Diseases of the Will, discussed in my opening to this chapter, refers to what he calls, following John Stuart Mill, “ethnology” defined as “the science of character” (1874, 16). An oft-cited statement from the late eighteenth-century German romantic philosopher Novalis is “character is a completely fashioned will” (cited in Mill [1843] 1999, 21).13 For Novalis the achievement of character is the fashioning of a will, which is also described in terms of cultivation and application. Novalis suggests that the more character “is dependent on chance and circumstances” then “the less I have a determinate, cultivated—applied will. The more it has these qualities, the more independent it is in those respects” ([1798] 68

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1997, 78, emphasis in original). The will becomes understood here as a kind of “internal influence,” as what can influence character to be less influenced. To achieve an independence of character, that is, to be less directed by circumstance and happenstance, would require the application of will. The will is not only defined against contingency, but becomes a defense against contingency. The description of character as a “fashioned will” suggests a particular idea of character. In his essay on “Freedom of the Will” John Stuart Mill describes character as “amenable to the will,” which means that we can “by employing the proper means, improve our character” ([1865] 1979, 46). Indeed, he argues that we are “under the moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character” (46). To improve the character is an imperative of the will. An improvement would be an effect of willing the right way (in accordance with what is right), but would also be dependent on being willing to put one’s energy into improvement. If a character can be thought of as a will product, as that which is brought into existence by will, then character might even be the material, or provide the material, that is given form through will, in the sense of being given an end, shape, or purpose. The idea that education can give form to character rests on both environmental and utopian ideas of the child’s nature. For Locke the child can be understood as “white paper,” not as stained by original sin, but as yet to be impressed, as impressionable, as capable of receiving impressions. As Claudia Castañeda (2002) shows, the child is a malleable figure; and in some instances the child is figured as malleable. In Locke’s account the child is also imagined as fluid: “I imagine the minds of children, as easily turned, this or that way, as water itself” ([1690] 2007, 25). The figure of the turnable or impressionable child could be understood as a regulative fantasy, justifying the disciplinary project of education as a moral project of turning the child around. But this figure is also offered by Locke as a pedagogy of hope: the child can become virtuous if the child receives proper instruction: “Every man must some time or other be trusted to himself, and his own conduct; and he that is a good, a virtuous and able man, must be made so within. And therefore what he is to receive from education, what is to sway and influence his life, must be something into him betimes, habits woven into the very principle of his nature” (34). If education is to be woven by one’s own influences, then it is also the chance to influence what a child becomes. The character of the child is capable of being directed and can take the shape of this direction. The Good Will

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We could describe character in terms of plasticity: plastic is a material that can yield to an influence. The will is what directs matter; or what gives matter form. The idea of character being achieved by or even as the “direction of matter” was central to the work of the psychologist William James, particularly in his influential reflections on habit. His arguments rested on a thesis of plasticity as “the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once” ([1819] 1950, 105). James describes the formation of character as the gradual loss of plasticity: over time, a person becomes less yielding. As Gail Weiss describes, for James, “this initial plasticity is lost and people get more set in their ways” (2008, 81). Becoming set can be thought of as the gradual loss of the capacity to receive an influence. James cites the work of an M. Léon Dumont on habit: Everyone knows how a garment having been worn a certain time clings better to the shape of the body than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and the change is a new habit of cohesion. A lock works better after being used some time; at the outset a certain force was required to overcome certain roughness in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already. This saving of trouble is due to the essential nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is required. ([1819] 1950, 105) We can note how James’s descriptions can be understood in terms of attunement, a concept discussed in the previous chapter. A garment becomes attuned to the body that wears it. It is not just that things happen to fall this way or that: through repetition, things acquire certain tendencies. Things cling better or become clingy in time. If a shape is acquired through the repetition of an encounter, then repetition becomes direction. Although William James considers habits as socially conservative (he famously describes habit as “the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent” [121]), he also suggests that habits enable the conservation of energy. When more actions become habitual, subjects are free to attend to other matters, including those matters that might matter in a morally significant way. For James, even if habits are socially conservative, they make a dynamic psychic life possible.14 The idea that habits are “trouble savers” is particularly suggestive for a reflection on character. The acquisition of character could be understood as a 70

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means of saving trouble: to have a character is a preferred route (there is a route in routine), which allows subjects to make their way in the world without having to direct all their energy to thinking about which way. If to acquire a habit is to become relatively set in your ways, then character could be redescribed as becoming set. Given that habits are what tend to stick, the aim of moral education is to direct the subject the right way before he or she becomes stuck. If the plastic child became the object of moral education, then the will of a child provides the technique for molding a child into the right shape. In other words, pedagogic techniques are different means of making the child’s will the means. John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education, suggests that when children are in awe of the parents, then they become more compliant: “a compliance and suppleness of their wills, being by a steady hand introduced by parents, before children have memories to retain the beginnings of it, and will seem natural to them and work after wards in them, as if it were so, preventing all occasions of struggling or repining” ([1693] 2007, 34). The rod is replaced here by “the steady hand.”15 The point of willing compliance is to prevent struggling and repining. We could add that the point of willing compliance is to save the child trouble (the kind of trouble perhaps described in the Grimm story, where you might recall the only time the child has rest or is at rest is when she is beneath the ground). Although Locke’s pedagogy can primarily be understood as a positive project, in the sense that it aims to bring a certain kind of subject into the world (it says yes to what is being brought), the figure of the willful child still haunts the text: perhaps as a sign of the limits of what can be done. Locke evokes, for instance, the problem of disobedience: “Where a wrong bent of the will wants not amendment, there can be no need for blows . . . a manifest perversion of the will lies at the root of their disobedience” (63). Disobedience is narrated as the “wrong bent” of will. Indeed, this description of a manifest perversion of will that is at the root of disobedience corresponds very closely to the definition of willfulness referred to in the introduction to this book. Even if a disobedient child is not assumed by Locke, and is a child that cannot be simply amended (a child that is henceforth not the object of his address to parents), we can learn from the idea of the “wrong bent.” A willing child is bendy, or bendable in the right way; a willful child is the wrong bent. Perhaps education is a straightening of what is already bent. The “steady hand” thus becomes an agent not only for eliminating willfulness, but for The Good Will

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straightening the child out. We could thus think of education of the will in relation to orthopedics. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1997a) reproduced an image from Nicolas Andry’s “Orthopaedics or the Art of Preventing and Correcting Deformities of the Body” (1749). Andry invented the word “orthopedics” from two words for “correct” or “straight” (“orthos”) and “child” (“paidion”). In the image, a tree takes the place of the child. The straightening rod lines up against the crooked tree; and we project from the image into the future to imagine a straight trunk. Let’s think of orthopedics as a will project, a way of straightening out the body of the child so that the child, in willing right, faces the right way. When the will is the method of education, it functions like the rope that attaches the straight rod to the wayward tree. When the tree becomes straight, it would be the alignment of rod and tree we do not see. When the child becomes willingly compliant, it would be the alignment of parental will with the child’s will we do not see. I suggested earlier that the steady hand of Locke’s parents takes the place of the rod as a way of straightening the child out. The steady hand in taking the rod’s place might be how the rod keeps its place. In the work of Jonathan Edwards, a New England clergyman well known for his writings on the will (his Freedom of the Will has been described as a “monument of American philosophy”),16 the steady hand becomes a continuation of the rod by other means. In Jacqueline Reinier’s important history of American childhood, she points out how Edwards was influenced by “British enlightened child-rearing advice” and how his educational goals, following Locke, were both to develop the rational capacity of children and “to curb early signs of willfulness” (1996, 23). Reinier quotes from Edwards’s follower, the Rev. Samuel Hopkins who spoke of Edwards thus: “He took special care to begin his government of them [his children] in season. When they first discovered any considerable degree of will and stubbornness, he would attend to them till he had thoroughly subdued them and brought them to submit. And such prudent thorough discipline, exercised with the greatest calmness, and commonly without striking a blow, being repeated once or twice, was generally sufficient for that child: and effectively established his parental authority and produced a cheerful obedience ever after” (cited in Reinier 1996, 23). What is noteworthy here is the role of the positive affect: if the child’s will is still a problem (consider how will and stubborn are placed alongside each other, creating a sliding impression), then the problem can be resolved with calmness, creating an obedience that is cheerful.17 The subjection of 72

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will takes place under the sign of happiness rather than fear. We can hear in the oft-used expression “willingly and happily” the abbreviation of this history; better to be “happily willing” than not. If willing compliance is a trouble saver, then will comes to function as habit. Locke indeed suggests that the moral aim is to install the right habits in the child, which is not simply about making the child compliant, but about making the child willing to will the right thing, so that the willing right becomes habitual. The idea of “habits of will” is counterintuitive given that we tend to associate “the will” with voluntary aspects of experience. The idea here is not only that it would become a habit to will but that through habit, the will can be directed in the right way, so that it does right of its own accord. Virtues have indeed been defined as “habits of the will” (Calkins 1919, 82).18 The Grimm story can thus be translated into a more positive pedagogy: the arm must become the rod, the agent for eliminating its own willfulness, for straightening itself out. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile was crucial for how it redefined the purpose of education in relation to will. Rousseau offered what was described above as the utopian model of the child’s nature, as well as a view in which nature itself should provide the path of education. The child is described as a “young plant,” sap, or tree, one that can be directed, or tended by a human hand, but is nourished and taught by nature ([1762] 1993, 5–6). As Alan Richardson has observed, if Locke’s metaphor of the child is one of plasticity, Rousseau’s metaphor is organic (1994, 13). Both metaphors create an implication: the child’s nature can be directed by proper care and attention. Despite the focus on nature as the child’s truest teacher, the will of the child remains the object of the educator’s will. Unlike many other such treatises of the time, however, Rousseau emphasized the importance of not subjugating the child’s will: he argues that the child should “never act from obedience but from necessity,” suggesting that words such as “obey,” “command,” “duty,” and “obligation” be excluded from the vocabulary of the educator ([1762] 1993, 62). If for Locke the child’s will must become compliant through awe, for Rousseau the child must be encouraged to develop its own will more freely (although, as we shall see, the freedom of will involves another form of compliance). As Simon Dentith argues, Rousseau’s educational philosophy is “more famous for encouraging children in their own self-will than discouraging it” (2004, 55). One crucial aspect of his argument was that the child will not learn by being compelled by the will of others. Rousseau notes in a footnote: “You may The Good Will

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be sure the child will regard as caprice any will which opposes his own or any will which he does not understand” ([1792] 1993, 65). And yet, at the same time, the will of the child is presented as a problem that needs to be resolved; by implication, the will of this child would be misdirected without proper instruction. Rousseau is explicit about how the will of the child can be directed without being compelled. In one rather notorious example, the narrator in Émile describes how he took the charge of a child who “was accustomed not only to have his own way, but to make everyone else do as he pleases” (101). He calls this child “capricious” (this rather charming word derives from a wild goat, an appropriate animal figure for willfulness). The narrator describes how whenever the child wanted to go out, his tutors would take him out. The child’s will thus determines what happens; it is the ruler of the house. Rousseau offers a model of how to deal with a child that has become willful through bad instruction. The narrator, who becomes the child’s temporary instructor, does not use the rod or the steady hand. We can almost imagine the withdrawal of the hand. When the child insists on going out, the narrator does not go with him; and nor does he forbid the child from going. When the child goes out (exercising his own will), the narrator then arranges for people to oppress and tease the child (although he also arranges for a stranger to follow him and ensure the child’s well-being—the implication is that he does not want to harm the child even if there must be severity in the lesson). The narrator arranges for the child to experience firsthand the unpleasant consequences of insisting on his own will (experience is treated here as an alternative to the tutor’s hand, though of course the tutor’s hand shapes the experience). The child comes to make an association between following his own will and unhappiness. The aim of education is thus to teach the association between willfulness and unhappiness. The narrator comments rather triumphantly that he had “succeeded . . . in getting him to do everything I wanted without bidding him or forbidding him to do anything” (105). The child thus comes to will what the narrator wants him to will, without that will being made the subject of a command. Rousseau suggests the child must come to will freely what the child should will: “There is no subjection so complete, as that which preserves the forms of freedom: it is thus that the will itself is taken captive” (100). The child should be obedient or subject to parental will, but in a way that does feel like obedience, as it involves a sense of freedom, that sense of being willing. The subjection of 74

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will can thus take place under the sign of freedom. It is quite clear from the example how freedom of will is preserved as an idea that works to conceal the work of its creation. Although we can differentiate poisonous pedagogy that rests on breaking the will of the child from models such as Rousseau’s that encourage self-will, we can also note their shared investments. While poisonous pedagogy justifies force as necessary for the child’s moral development, Rousseau’s model shows us that freedom of the will can be force by other means. I argued in the last chapter that force can shape what is “with the will.” We can now understand these processes as pedagogic mechanisms. The child is made to will according to the will of those in authority without ever being conscious of the circumstances of this making. This is how will becomes central to the formation of not only moral character but also social harmony: the child becomes willing in a way that agrees with how the child is willed to will, without becoming conscious of this agreement. Schopenhauer suggested we do not become conscious of what is in agreement with will. We can now add: we become willing by learning not to be conscious of an agreement.

Strengthening the Will It is important to note that the will became central not only to educational treatises and philosophy, but also within the more popular domain of self-help. Indeed, Novalis’s own description of character as a “completely fashioned will” is picked up by John Stuart Mill (to whom it was falsely attributed by William James) and from Mill, enters into the writing of Samuel Smiles, the writer of the first self-help book in English in the nineteenth century, which was also the one of the best-selling nonfiction books of that century. Smiles’s work is a precursor to the self-help tradition we are familiar with today that exercises the language of “willpower.” Smiles defines the relationship between character and the will as follows: “When the elements of character are brought into action by determinate will, and, influenced by a higher purpose, man enters upon and creatively perseveres in the path of duty, at whatever cost of worldly interest, he may be said to approach the summit of his being” ([1871] 2006, 7). Will is how a subject can be elevated above a situation. Will is treated as an internal resource. It is by attending to one’s own will that one can help oneself; one can strengthen one’s own resolve; one can set oneself right.19 The will as a resource can thus justify the unequal distribution of The Good Will

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external resources: those who are under-resourced in terms of external goods must become more resourceful. The literature on weaknesses of the will gives us a fuller picture of how the will becomes an internal resource that can be more or less depleted. In Ribot’s Diseases of the Will, the idea of the free will or metaphysical will, which he argues rests on the assumption of the will as first cause, is dismissed or excluded from the science of psychology. A new psychology of will is a psychology of action: “The fundamental principle which dominates the psychology of will under its impulsive form, in the healthy as well as morbid state, is that every state of consciousness always has a tendency to express itself, to manifest itself by a movement, or act” (1874, 3). Ribot also dismisses the idea that ideas can cause movement: indeed, he describes such an idea of ideas (which you might recall Nietzsche attributes to the psychology of the will)20 as having “embarrassed the old psychology” (5). Ribot concludes: “One does not have to ask oneself, like Hume and so many others, how an ‘I will’ can make my members move” (133). Rather willing “is the natural tendency of feelings and images to express themselves in movement” (134). For Ribot an idea and a movement are two aspects of the same process: consciousness accompanies (or perhaps is even a “companion” of) the ner vous process.21 Willing could be described as consciousness of willing: willing might be described as consciousness of an action as willed. Thus to will is a “conscious act more or less deliberate, in view of an end simple or complex, near or remote” (9). Ribot presents willing more in relation to “affective states” than “intellectual activity.” Indeed, he argues the origin of willing is the biological property that all living matter has of irritability or “reaction to external forces” (124). Willing is a matter of how we are affected. Ribot suggests that ideas as impulses are expressed through movement; an idea is something that is carried out by a body. The dilemma is clear: if ideas are impulsive, or tend to express themselves in action, how can a person be willing (according to an idea) and yet not act? The concept of “diseases of the will” becomes a resolution of the dilemma. Ribot differentiates between two primary classes of will weakness (not all of which are morbid, but may be “frequent” given that people often say they will do what they do not do) which can be related to the two effects necessary to accomplish something: impulse and coordination (134). In one class of will weakness, the impulse is “insufficient” and, in the second, the impulse is “exaggerated” but the organism lacks the coordination necessary to complete the action (134). 76

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Cases of weakness of the will in which impulses are insufficient are typically described as “abulia.” In “abulia” an “I will” is not followed by action (49). Abulia is often characterized as a paralysis of will. Ribot’s case descriptions of patients diagnosed with abulia are suggestive.22 In the case of Mr. P he has the will (or at least seems willing) to sign some papers that sign over the deeds to a house (33–34). Ribot suggests that Mr. P has a “healthy judgment.” That is, the action to be completed is judged by both Mr. P and others to be a justifiable and sensible action. Mr. P also has the physical ability to carry out the action: the obstacle is not “in the hand” but rather in “the will,” which is “unable to command the finger to apply the pen to paper” (34). Mr. P we could say is not willing and able. When a subject becomes the obstacle to the action, then the problem is deemed one of will: “the will—the power by which the hand should be set to performing the act conceived and judged necessary by the intellect—is evidently wanting” (34). A will that is “found wanting” is a will that does not allow a subject to complete an action whose intention it is assumed to be behind. The diagnosis of weakness of will is clearly judgmental: something is wrong, if the will is wanting. In Mr. P’s case, the judgment that he is suffering from a weakness of the will is a judgment that the patient is willing and should be willing to carry out the action of signing over the deeds to his house (as readers, we can only assume the patient is willing because we are assured the patient is willing). A will is weak in pursuit of an end assumed as right. Are we also tracking a history of this assumption? As a pre- as well as non-Freudian psychology of will,23 Ribot’s account does not consider the possibility of ambivalence: that the patient’s own desires do not correspond with conscious will or that the resistance to will might be an expression of another will. Or perhaps what is being described is consistent with what Freud called in his early work “counterwill.” In his reflections on impotence, Freud suggested “sometimes he has the feeling of an obstacle inside him, the sensation of a counter-will which successfully interferes with his conscious intention” ([1912] 1975, 179).24 If an obstacle can be an internal feeling, then willfulness can also be an experience a subject has of itself, when one part of itself seems to “get in the way” of a conscious intention. Recall my description from the last chapter: willfulness is striking; it is “in the way” of what is “on the way.” Willfulness can be how a subject experiences itself as in the way of itself. Even if the account of this psychic life offered by Ribot seems to be one that excludes ambivalence, by assuming a subject is willing what The Good Will

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is willed, the picture offered is more complex: weakness of the will as a diagnosis might reveal the ambivalence it aims to resolve. I will return to Mr. P in the conclusion of this book, as I think there is something rather queer about the case. Note that it is at this point, the point that the will is found wanting, that the history of will crosses the history of sexuality. The very term “abulia” is a meeting point. John Smith (1989, 1995) and Jennifer Terry (1999, 47–49) both explore how sexological writings exercise the language of will in general, and the term “abulia” in particular, in reinterpreting homosexuality as a perversion. John Smith offers us a detailed history of how the concept of the will became “central to the sexological enterprise” (1995, 9).25 He notes the significance of the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, who included in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation a chapter on “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” one of the few philosophical treatments of same-sex love. According to Smith, what is important is not the specific argument Schopenhauer makes,26 but the mode of explanation that renders sexuality a matter of will (Smith 1995, 9). What is opened up is a new discursive subject: the sexual subject as a willing subject. Smith refers to the work of the Hannover jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs who published a series of tracts under the title Investigations into the Enigma of Male-to-Male Love, which quotes from Schopenhauer and has the following epitaph from the influential sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing: “Where the exercise of free determination of will is hindered by abnormal psychical processes, there the individual is psychically not free” (cited in Smith 1995, 12). The implication is that it is only under certain conditions that “the will” can be free. The will is wanting when it fails to meet these conditions. In these sexological literatures, then, it is not that perversion is a perversion of will, a willing deviation from the right path, which is the straight path from one sex toward the “other sex” (see Ahmed 2006, 78). It is not even the case that the pervert willingly goes the wrong way. The pervert is not willing: in suffering from a weakness of will perverts are not free to pursue the right end. Sexual perversion is redescribed through the language of will in order to make a case not for freedom but unfreedom. If this is not what we would expect the introduction of the will to do, perhaps it is not clear what willing is doing. Implicit in the diagnosis of weakness of will is an idea or ideal of a strong will: if a strong will is what is required for a subject to be able to complete an action that is willed, then a strong will might be necessary for self-completion. It is here that Ribot engages with the work of 78

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William James whose model of will as “the feeling of effort” I referred to in the previous chapter. For Ribot, following James, “there is effort when the volition follows the line of greatest resistance” (1874, 50, emphasis added). A strong will is thus not required when “natural tendencies” and the “I will” go “in the same direction,” or when what is “immediately agreeable” to a subject is the same thing that has been chosen.27 If a stronger will is not required for those whose tendencies are experienced in the same direction as the will, then weakness of will as a diagnosis would reflect the unevenness of the requirement. We could think of these “natural tendencies” as “natural will” which could be contrasted with what I called the social will in the previous chapter. This contrast can be experienced as a gap between how one might will with and without direction from others (the speech act “I will” can be understood in some contexts as “the social will,” an “I will” can be what is borrowed from others), which might also be experienced as a gap between will and desire. Perhaps a weakness of will is what accommodates the natural tending of those who have unnatural tendencies (if you are weak of will you can “happily” follow your unnatural tendencies): in other words, to be weak of the will can be required not to tend in the direction of the “I will” when given as command. Strengthening the will is how subjects come to resist their own inclinations or tendencies. We can reflect on how such capacities for resistance relate to what I called in chapter 1 “the will sphere.” Our tendencies in shaping what we tend toward also shape what is within reach (although, as I suggested in Queer Phenomenology [2006], our tendencies can also be understood as an effect of this “tending toward”). Strengthening the will can require a willingness to put certain things out of reach. Just think of our own everyday sense of the risk of proximities.28 I might say, for instance, don’t put that cake near me, if my tendencies are such that I would tend to eat the cake. I am concerned that I might find my hand reaching for the cake, as if my hand has a will of its own, as if my hand is my mouth; as if my hand is eating. But I can exercise the will to command someone to take the cake away, or even put it further away, an exercise of will that is simultaneously an anticipation of the failure of will; if you do not have the will to resist proximity, you might acquire the will to avoid proximity. Willing can thus be about removing the wrong objects from the will sphere. Of course we can develop many tactics when we face a gap between what we want and what we want to want, and what we will and The Good Will

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what we should be willing to will (this “should” points to the intimacy of the moral and the social will, the will of others is often audible in the form of a commandment whether or not another person explicitly makes a command). Can a weakening will also be a tactic? Or as Lauren Berlant suggests, if strengthening the will is a project that can add to the exhaustion of living a life, then perhaps the will can be something you could interrupt or take “small vacations from” (2007, 779). A “weak will” could even be imagined as a queer friend: allowing queers to reach for objects that they want but are not supposed to have (or will). Or if a weak will is a queer will (one that wavers or is perverted) a queer will might be what you want to have if you are to have what you are not supposed to want. We can will ourselves not to want something; but willing not to want that thing can confirm we want something. Or we can try and persuade ourselves that we do not want something by converting a happy object into an unhappy one, by removing that object from our field of preferences, by associating it with the unhappiness we anticipate it might cause (the cake is filled with fatness,29 as what would lead to an undesirable end). We might do this while knowing the very removal of the potential of happiness from an object can heighten the appeal of something: the forbidding of the object adds to, rather than subtracts from, our libidinal investment in that object (psychoanalysis has taught us how repression heightens a libidinal attachment). If we inherit from psychoanalysis a working knowledge of the intimacy of prohibition and desire, it does always seem that we can do much with this knowledge: perhaps we want not to have our cake and eat it too. Or perhaps we learn to shield ourselves against proximity by encountering these very proximities as willful impositions. When a desired thing is near, if it is perceived as the wrong thing, I might attribute that thing with willfulness (as if the cake was insisting on being eaten, as if the cake was willing me to eat it). Proximities can be experienced as willful impositions, as getting in the way of our good intentions. We can also reflect on how “the will” is bound up with our sense of capacity to survive the danger of our own desires. Recall Hannah Arendt’s description that in willing we must withdraw from the “immediacy of desire,” as desire is what “stretches our hand” toward an object (1978, 76). Willing might be what is required to stop our hand from stretching. This is how in willing we do not just have a project but the will itself becomes a project. The will becomes what is required to resist the things that are around us, which seduce us in their proximity, so that we aim for something that is not 80

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yet. And what is being aimed for is then imagined as health and happiness, as if we need the will in order to do what is good for us. A weakness of will is offered as an explanation of how subjects “willingly” compromise their own welfare: in contemporary moral philosophy this is exactly how weakness of the will is used as a formulation (see, for example, Mele 2012). A judgment of weakness of will is dependent on a prior judgment of what is good for us, of what is necessary for a body to flourish in a biological as well as moral sense. Remember my reading of the Grimm story: willfulness is what is deemed to compromise the health of a body. A judgment of willfulness might also be how a body is judged as healthy. The concept of a strong will is bound up with a normative decision about what directions are forces that should be resisted (and thus require resistance). Ribot does in building up a psychology of will also offer a portrait of a strong will. He suggests: “We call that will strong whose end, whatever be its nature, is fixed” (1874, 91). We can note the ways in which strong will leads to what we can call moral character: a strong will describes the acquisition of form; in pursuit of an end, a character is given form. A weak will is one where the nature of the will gets in the way of the achievement of form; a lack of purpose leads to disunity and disintegration. What is especially interesting in these descriptions is the account of a healthy organism as self-accordance: intellect, emotion, and the will are all going in the same direction, leading to a resolution of purpose. What I called “will alignment” in the first section of this chapter can thus be thought of not only in terms of aligning one’s own will with others but also in terms of aligning oneself with one’s own will. Not only does self-alignment refer to a will that is in line with feeling and thought, but the will is also understood as behind that very alignment: a stronger will is what brings one’s feelings and thoughts into line. A strong will is what can overcome misalignment such that the distinct faculties of a subject are “going the same way.” This idea of the strong will as a way of unifying impulses is widely articulated from writers working in quite distinct intellectual traditions: for example, Adorno describes the will as the “centralizing unit of impulses, as the authority that tames them and eventually negates them” ([1966] 1973, 214). Although Nietzsche calls the idea of weakness of will “misleading,” he describes “weak will” in terms of “the multitude and disaggregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them” and a strong will as “their coordination under a single predominant impulse” ([1901] 1968, 28–29). James Rowland Angell in turn argues The Good Will

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that “as consciousness is a systematising, unifying activity, we find that with increasing maturity our impulses are commonly coordinated with one another more and more perfectly. We thus come to acquire definite and reliable habits of action. Our wills become formed. Such fixation of modes of willing constitute character” ([1904] 1973, 434). The weak of will are thus not only not impulsive enough, or too impulsive, they are those whose impulses are not coordinated or unified. The weak of will are thus out of line with themselves; they lack the integration or consensus of faculties. Will alignment—the alignment of will with thought, feeling and desire—is thus a method and measure of strengthening the will. Ribot offers reflections on how the will can be strengthened, pointing out that a strong will is achieved rather than discovered: “An end is chosen, affirmed, carried out” and “all or most of the elements of the ego concur in it,” he describes (63). But Ribot also suggests that a will orientated toward an end has to be achieved: “Such is the will in its complete or typical form; but this is not a natural product. It is the result of art, of education, of experience. It is an edifice constructed slowly, piece by piece” (64). In Payot’s The Education of the Will (1914) “this edifice” takes form as methodology. Payot’s text is addressed to a generation of young European middle-class men he argues are suffering from weakness of will, offering a set of practical instructions on how they can strengthen their wills and become upright citizens of their nation (I will explore the will as a technology of citizenship in the next chapter). It is again noticeable how much weight is given to the will: “There is only one cause of almost all our failings and of nearly all our misfortunes. This is the weakness of our will, which shows itself in our distaste for effort especially for persistent effort” (3). Payot describes laziness as a key moral weakness: “Lazy people inflict upon themselves the emptiest lives possible” (7). The judgment of weakness of the will is certainly one that has a moral force, implying that human failure is simply because of not trying. Following Ribot, Payot considers will primarily in relation to affect rather than intelligence: “The will is not fond of carrying out cold orders it receives from the intelligence. . . . It wants emotional orders tinged with passion” (77). The aim of will training is thus not to dampen the moodiness of the will but to cultivate feelings in the right direction (will becomes here the director of feeling or might be how feelings are orientated toward objects that are simultaneously ends). We can note how the intentionality of will described in the previous chapter now appears as a pedagogical instruction; it is not simply that the will is directed toward 82

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ends that must be within reach, as Husserl shows, but that through will, we learn to be directed in the right way toward the right things. Weakness of the will for Payot is defined primarily in terms of a lack of effort—the weak don’t try hard enough—but also a lack of attention: the weak willed have a wandering attention; the weak willed are the wanderers. He says at one point, an anti-Semitic point, that the weak of will are scattered and that “like another wandering Jew we are compelled to keep on the move” (18). A strong will thus settles, thus attends by stopping, by being held in place or held in one place, directing thought toward that thing in pursuit of an aim. We might even describe the strong will as a straight mind: you are able to keep your thoughts on a straight line by not being distracted by what comes near. Work, Payot argues, simply “means attention.” The danger of the wanderer appears here in a distinct form; the “willful wanderer” is the one who is not willing to settle down, who keeps moving around, scattering thought and feeling like half-glimpsed objects that keep disappearing, by being turned around. I will return in the following chapter to the significance of the figure of the willful wanderer in my reading of George Eliot’s Romola. Of course if the will matters as the organ that can direct feeling, then this begs the question of how the will can be directed in this direction. This paradox—that acquiring will requires will—is discussed at length in Edward Boyd Barrett’s Strength of Will (1915). Boyd Barrett notes: “Strange to say, in order to train the will, will is needed. Will is selftrained. Will works on itself and perfects itself. For the will is called on in every step in will-training” (16). The will trains the will; the will works on the will. I noted in the previous chapter how the will might will itself, becoming the subject and object of a command. In Strength of Will this self-commanding is transformed into a disciplinary technique: subjects “build up will by willing” (138) or “by willing will, the will builds up the will” (165). Boyd Barrett gives examples of the kind of work that can be done to strengthen the will, which he describes in terms of “gymnastics of the will.” There are exercises that can teach the subject of will to “toe the line” including the “tread-mill.” Willing training is thus rendered comparable to body training. If with body training, you acquire “well developed muscles and finely shaped limbs,” so with will training, “little by little the will is built up” (15). The will becomes like a muscle, the muscle of the voluntary, which is strengthened by being exercised. It is in the work of William James that we can encounter exactly what is meant by “will exercises.” In his influential essay “Talks to Teachers” The Good Will

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James suggests the following: “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by means of a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic every day in little unnecessary points; do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the cruel hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test” ([1899] 1992, 756). Note here how the faculty of making effort is strengthened by being made independent of will’s aim or content: to learn to attend to what is useful exercises the muscle of the will, such that “the will” acquires shape in advance of being necessary for the pursuit of a specific end, or in advance of becoming what Leslie Farber calls “the utilitarian will” (2000, 78). The will takes the form of a future ally: in willing what seems useless, what is deemed as having no value for the subject, the will prepares itself so that it can become useful in the moment it is required. Utility is here a mode of self-preparation. William James after all suggests that the task of education is to make our “ner vous system our ally instead of our enemy” ([1890] 1950, 22): a strong will might also be a friendly will, one that is ready to help a subject in the “cool hour of danger.” To strengthen the will can thus be to empty the will of content: the “strong will” acquires its form in its independence from an end, without an end being “in sight.” Once formed, such a will can then pursue the right end.

Willing Right How does the strong will become the good will? And what is the right end? The twentieth-century psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli who draws on the earlier work of Boyd Barrett in developing his approach to will training suggests that “it is not enough that the will should be merely strong, such a will is liable to errors and excesses which may lead the individual astray” (1966, 2). A subject must acquire a strong will in order to pursue a right end, which requires that strength of will does not become its own end. In the next chapter I will focus on how the good is associated with the general (and opposed to the particular). What I want to consider in this section is how “willing right” is given narrative form. To explore these questions I offer a reading of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, showing how willfulness and weak wills, understood as character flaws, participate in the creation of a moral landscape of the will. In particular, through this novel we can explore how “spoiling the child” leads to morally weak adults, those who cannot ward away impulses that are contrary to the moral law. 84

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As I pointed out in my introduction to this book, George Eliot could be described as a novelist of will: she exercises the very language of will in her description of character. That character description can proceed as will description becomes a point of interest. If, as I have argued, character is understood as the fashioning of will, then literary characters can be given form through will (we could consider, after all, that the word “character” derives from Latin for fingere, “to shape, form, devise, feign,” originally “to knead, form out of clay”). George Eliot’s portrait of the character Gwendolyn is a portrait of the willful child. The title of the first book is “The Spoiled Child.” The book itself thus takes on the attribution of Gwendolyn as spoiled; this character trait is given as if it is just another feature of an unremarkable social and moral landscape. The attribution of character takes the form of assertion. A character trait appears as the quality of an object, what is tangible, perceivable by others, given and thus shared. If the book gives form to this attribution so too do the other characters in the book. Gwendolyn is repeatedly characterized with reference to her will: her mother says to her, “Your will was always too strong for me—if everything else had been different” (Eliot [1876] 1995, 96). An excess of will easily stands in for an excess of character: “too strong” as “too much.” The description of Gwendolyn’s character as “spoiled” evokes a moral economy of will: even if her will appears as “too strong” in profile, it is also represented as a form of moral weakness, determined by what is agreeable: “Gwendolyn was kindly disposed to anyone who could make life agreeable for her” (45). The kindness of this disposal is a weakness in disposition. As Felicia Bonaparte notes, in Gwendolyn “we have a diagram of the ‘sick will,’ the will so furiously intent on asserting itself that it happily concedes self-gratification” (1975, 98). Gwendolyn’s character could be read in terms of the profile of both the willful child and the weak-willed adult: as being too impulsive, too oriented toward self, or to what is agreeable to self. Willfulness as an attribution refers to subjects who not only insist on their way, but will only what is agreeable, that is, whose will is in accordance with their own desire. Spoiling provides an explanation of this insistence: the willful character is the one who has been allowed to have her way. The presentation of Gwendolyn’s will is thus key to the presentation of her character: “Gwendolyn’s will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway; but it was the will of a creature with a large discourse of imaginative fears: a shadow would have been enough to relax its hold. The Good Will

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And she had found a will like that of a crab or a boa-constrictor which goes on pinching or crushing without alarm or thunder” (423). The use of will analogies is a central technique of characterization: if the will of someone is like x (and “like x” as we can see from this example can take the form of a dramatic description), then we can decipher or tell what they are like. In Gwendolyn’s case, her will is represented as swaying and easily swayed, ruled by passion, as giving way, as easily bent. The narrative bends according to the bends of Gwendolyn’s will. The failure to become a subject of will rather than subject to will is presented as behind the plot, in particular behind the disaster of her marriage to Grandcourt. She marries him even though she knows he has a mistress and children, even though she has been visited in secret by a mistress whom he keeps secret. The drama unfolds as a consequence of her swayable will: she lacks the firmness of resolve required to do the right thing. Indeed, she willingly does wrong and in being accused as such is cursed as such: “You took him with your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse” (359). Evoking the pedagogic style of Émile in which the tutor arranges circumstances so that the student can identify the apparently “natural” consequences of self-will (see Dentith 2004, 41), the artifice of the novel is to arrange circumstances so that Gwendolyn as a character is forced to confront the unhappy consequences of her own will. The weakness of her will, in other words, is what leads her down an unhappy path, into combat with a husband whose strength of will is determined as a social strength: “Grandcourt had become a blank uncertainty to her in everything but this, that he would do just what he willed, and that she had neither the devices at her command to determine his will, nor the rational means to escape it” (426). Indeed, Grandcourt embodies the moral and mortal danger of a strong-willed character, one who does not will the right thing, whose will is directed toward its own end. The moral risk of weak wills in Daniel Deronda is that it leaves the subject vulnerable to being swayed and influenced by those who will strongly but wrongly. The moral lesson is given as the impossibility of Gwendolyn’s situation: she cannot will her way out. That her will does not mature, that it has the fragility of being whim-like or wish-like, is what allows her to become the object of another’s will: “He had not repented of his marriage; it had really brought more of aim into his life, new objects to exert his will upon; and he had not repented of his choice” (584–85). 86

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In Daniel Deronda the fragility of the female will is given a case history.30 So even if Gwendolyn’s will causes her own unhappiness, the novel explores how the unhappiness of her will is caused. After all, the very implication of the description of her will as “girlish” is to make her will expressive of the character of femininity. To become woman is to submit to a weakening of the will. The novel thus offers a social diagnosis of will distributions as gendered distributions. In the ending, as I discussed in my introduction, Gwendolyn’s will acquires the status of a moral event: in a moment of crisis, she is presented with the possibility to will her way out of her unhappiness (by killing Grandcourt). Though she does not follow her will into action, though her hands are not commanded by will to an act of murder, she experiences guilt that her hesitation in this moment of crisis allows her wish to be externalized.31 Following Kant, we might give a different answer to Gwendolyn than Daniel Deronda’s sympathetic one I opened this chapter with: we might separate the morality of her action from what it accomplishes by agreeing with her questioning of her own volition. For Kant, the will is only a moral faculty if it is emptied of all desire and inclination including the desire for happiness. Perhaps Gwendolyn’s wavering will expressed her desire to be freed from the cause of her unhappiness. The weakness of Gwendolyn’s will could be a sign of its fullness; her will is too full of her own desire. To act out of duty would be to act quickly, to act without hesitation, to save another human being. The temporality of will is crucial, not in terms of the impact on the likeliness of accomplishing an end, but as the truest measure of the virtue of volition. That would be one reading. One discovery we make by reading through will is that contrary readings of the same scene become possible. Is female resistance expressed here in the negativity of an inactive but murderous wish? For some, to have a life might mean that the command to be good has to be resisted; to hesitate in reaching for the rope might open up the possibility of life. The very achievement of a good will for Gwendolyn would be a kind of death sentence: she would “agree” with the very place assigned to her by a moral as well as a social order. If moral norms are also gendered norms then to challenge them is to risk being assigned as wrong rather than right no matter what happens. Political and sexual liberation might require a willingness to be wrong by being affected wrongly by the right things. Eliot does not make a judgment about the wrong of right: Gwendolyn does not follow any such line of flight. The novel does not waver in The Good Will

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conviction about the right of right: if this is a rather wandering text, it could be read as performing the straightening of the will. So by the end of the novel Gwendolyn gives up her desires, which lead her astray; in the ending she is depicted as “on the way” to achieving moral character through effort, the effort to become a good woman, however much that effort is inspired by her desire not to be forsaken by Daniel Deronda. Gwendolyn ends her plot with renunciation: “At least, I want to be good—not like what I have been,” she says to Daniel (767). Giving up one’s own will by willing what is good according to others becomes a moral lesson, experiencable as the gradual lessening of agitation: “She was experiencing some of that peaceful melancholy which comes from the renunciation of demands for self” (795). Even if wanting to be good falls short of being good (to want such a will is not to have a will that is empty of want), the narrative implies that Gwendolyn is moving in the right direction. In the previous chapter I described “will work” as being willing to adjust your will to the will of others. We can now consider how “will work” can be experienced as the renunciation of will. To renounce will assumes one has a will to begin with. I mentioned earlier the paradox that to acquire will requires will. Renunciation can also be understood as a paradoxical task: it might exercise what is being eliminated. It is the spoiled child who is called upon to express the paradox of the situation: it is the child who has had her own way who must give up a way of her own.32 I would suggest that renunciation of will becomes central to George Eliot’s presentation of femininity. I have already introduced Maggie Tulliver, a willful heroine from George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss. I imagine Maggie and Gwendolyn in conversation, a conversation between willful girls. A key moment in the text is when Maggie reads Thomas à Kempis’s An Imitation of Christ and has an epiphany.33 The answer to her troubles is to give up her will, as an act of giving up desire and inclination: “It flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure as if that were the central necessity of the universe” ([1860] 1965, 306). From the point of view of the parents, their daughter has become good because she has submitted to their will: “Her mother felt the change in her with a sort of puzzled wonder that Maggie should be ‘growing up so good’; it was amazing that this once ‘contrary’ child was becoming so submissive, so backward to assert her own will” (309). The mother can thus love the 88

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daughter, who can support the family by staying in the background: “The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown girl, the only bit of furniture now in which she could bestow her anxiety and pride” (309). When you treat someone like furniture you put them into the background. To recede into the background requires giving up a will other than the will of others. It is widely reported that George Eliot admired the work of Thomas à Kempis. It is certainly the case that the novel does not present Maggie’s emptying herself of will as a wrongful submission. If anything, giving up a will of one’s own is presented as an ethical ideal that Maggie fails because she is willful, as Sally Shuttleworth has suggested (1984, 104). We can hear this judgment of willfulness in the very description of Maggie’s reading of Kempis: “that renunciation means sorry, though a sorrow born willingly. Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key for it” ([1860] 1965, 307). Although Maggie thinks she has found the key in renunciation, her finding is represented as born out of inclination, and thus contradicts in form the content of what is found. The narrative gives us a profile of Maggie’s character as willful from which we conjure a behind: “From what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some exaggeration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation; her own life was still a drama for her in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity” (308). Of course as readers we can come to different views of Maggie’s action: if we bring willfulness to the front, we have a different view of the behind. In one rather extraordinary scene, Maggie cuts her hair in defiance of her mother. That her hair is the object of struggle matters. I noted in my introduction how Maggie’s hair comes to express Maggie’s own willfulness: her hair is represented as wayward, as if it has a will of its own.34 When she cuts her hair, Maggie is left looking rather like “a queer thing,” to use Tom’s description, and bitterly regrets her action: “Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly of her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action: she didn’t want her hair to look pretty— that was out of the question— she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl and not find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her and say she was like the idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect” (72).35 The action is presented as impulsive and The Good Will

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immature. Maggie suffers, yet again, the consequences of her own weakness of will. Her aunt comments that she looks “more like a gypsy” than ever (75).36 To become willfully estranged from femininity is to become a stranger to the family. If renunciation can be thought of as will work then you have to work to recede, or work to become part of the background. Recession, we learn from George Eliot’s plots, is a hard lot. You can be diagnosed as willful even when you try and escape the diagnosis. The gendering of will thus also implies the gendering of willfulness. It is not that only girls and women are called willful; gendering is not always about such stark differences. But it might be that certain actions are permitted for boys precisely because they are more encouraged to acquire a will of their own. Similar actions made by differently gendered subjects thus have different consequences. The contrast between Maggie’s and her brother Tom’s experiences is partly achieved through the suggestion that although they both act in ways that might ordinarily be designated as willful, Tom escapes the consequences of being judged in these terms: “Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful distinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage; and so it happened, that although he was much more willful and inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him naughty” (59). When willfulness sticks, you become the trouble you cause: “It was Mrs. Tulliver’s way, if she blamed Tom, to refer his misdemeanour, somehow or other, to Maggie” (114). Perhaps in becoming the reference point for other people’s misdemeanors you become not only aware of injustice but willing to speak out about injustice. And indeed, when Maggie speaks out about the injustice of her extended family’s lack of compassion in response to her father’s loss of the mill, she is heard as bold and thankless. Speaking out against injustice becomes “yet another” symptom of willfulness; and being heard as such is dismissed as such. I would argue that feminist history involves a history of becoming conscious of how troubling attributions such as willfulness fall, unevenly, on subjects. It is not simply that you are charged with willfulness; you become conscious of the violence of the charge. I will return to the relationship between feminist consciousness and the attribution of willfulness in chapter 4. Let’s just note how if femininity becomes a problem of will, then femininity is to be resolved by will. To abbreviate: femininity is a willing resolution.37 But to be willing one’s femininity, even to be willing not to be willful, can be to fail the resolution. Both Gwendolyn 90

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and Maggie are portrayed as too willing not to be willful, as willfully willing: even their efforts to will right, their willingness to adjust, become symptoms of willfulness, of having or being “too much,” or even having or being “too too.”38

Conclusion: Moral Law and Social Precedence The entanglement of social norms with moral norms in Daniel Deronda could be translated into a critique of moral universality even if the novel does not offer such a critique. Let’s turn again to Kant. While Kant’s formalist ethics might seem rather emptied of character in its bracketing of motivations other than doing one’s duty from ethics, Kant nevertheless wrote on education as central to virtue, as being necessary for the development of the kind of character who could act in consistency with moral law. As Thomas E. Hill notes in his reflections on Kant’s concept of will: “Effort, practice and time are needed to turn what is basically a good will into a strong and effective will that chooses the right thing even in the presence of contrary inclinations so intense that they might sway a weaker person” (2012, 117). Inclination becomes contrariness: given the content of what disagrees with the moral norm. It is interesting to note the difference on the status of the moral law between Kant and Johann Friedrich Herbart, a German philosopher who wrote on both aesthetics and education and who is often described as the founder of pedagogy. As the translators of Herbart’s Science of Education note: “For Kant, the binding nature of duty was a universal law, and as such, harmony or disharmony with it, constituted the moral or immoral will” (H. M. Felkin and E. Felkin 1893, 25). In contrast, Herbart makes the idea of duty secondary: “If the notion of duty is to be the first principle of ethics, a direct certainty of the validity of the original command must exist, but it does not” (25, emphasis in original). In other words, Herbart suggests that duty cannot be a first principle because the command “obey” cannot possess originality: “For to command is to will, and if a command as such be possessed of original certainty, then one act of volition as such must take the precedence of others, which are subservient of it. Since no will, as will, is superior to any other no command as such has an original right to command” (H. M. Felkin and E. Felkin 1893, 26).39 Kantians might reply that Herbart misreads Kant, as no person embodies the moral law; the command to obey this law is beyond a temporal chain of precedence or antecedence (this is why for The Good Will

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Kant the temporality of the good will is “spontaneity”), and this is why practical reason requires a reasoning relation to law rather than blind submission.40 But what if the abstraction of the moral law comes in the form of a command given by those with precedence? We have examined precisely how parental will is assumed to rest on moral law; we have also noted the entanglement of moral and social norms. Is the moral law how those with precedence acquire legitimacy? This is and must remain a difficult question. For history has taught us how a Kantian model of duty as obedience to the moral law can be used to justify obedience to the will of a leader. Hannah Arendt in her reflections on the Eichmann trial notes how the German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann fairly successfully evoked Kant to justify his obedience to Hitler’s commands. Eichmann’s understanding of Kant might have been limited but he does not simply get Kant wrong. Arendt notes: “He suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his life according to Kant’s moral precepts and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty” ([1963] 1994, 135). According to Arendt, Eichmann defines the categorical imperative as “the principle of my will must always be that it can be general laws” (136), a definition that is then translated as: “Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action would approve it” (136). Arendt makes explicit that this translation loses the meaning of the Kantian imperative: “For the household use, all that is left of Kant’s spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience, and identify his will with the principle behind the law, the source from which law springs. In Kant’s philosophy, that source was practical reason, in Eichmann’s household use of him, it was the will of the Fuhrer” (132). As Judith Butler describes, Arendt attempts to “reclaim Kant from the Nazi interpretation and to mobilise the resources of his text against the conceptions of obedience that uncritically supported a criminal legal code and fascist regime” (2012, 156).41 Arendt does note how Eichmann’s “household” use of Kant is “to the surprise of everybody” an “approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative” ([1963] 1994, 132). Can we think more about the surprise of this approximation? I would suggest that Arendt’s own description of Eichmann’s definition of the categorical imperative as approximating Kant’s definition implies some recognition of a problem with the definition being approximated. I am tempted to think of practical reason as a parallel in the domain of ethics to Locke’s “steady hand” in the domain of pedagogy: a technol92

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ogy of will that requires a willing submission, a willingness to be under the moral law, an act of submission that is explicitly narrated (and justified) as an act of volition. However, this argument would be too easy to dismiss as mistranslation (although in writing of my temptation I have managed to make it). Perhaps we could just question the safety of this distinction between practical reason and obedience to the will of a leader or of those who come first. If the universality of the good will remains open to being mistranslated, then mistranslation is a structural possibility of the good will. If willfulness is attributed to some (it is not that they are that, but they come to be experienced as that), then so too is the good will. The separation of the good will from those to whom it is attributed can be understood as a technique of attribution: after all those who are not encountered as “swayed by will,” as embodied and impulsive, as capricious, are those whose attributions already tend to be outside themselves (as forms of value that have been made independent of personhood). I am suggesting here that we need a social critique of this moral distinction. Pierre Bourdieu offered a vulgar critique of Kantian aesthetics by showing how aesthetic ideals correspond to social distinctions ([1979] 1984, 485–500). Perhaps what I am offering is a vulgar critique of Kantian ethics. Kant differentiates respect as a moral emotion from other emotions that are pathological. Respect is moral as respect for the moral law. Kant specifies: Respect applies always to persons only—not to things. The latter may arouse inclination, and if they are animals (e.g. horses, dogs, &c.), even love or fear, like the sea, a volcano, a beast of prey; but never respect. . . . Fontenelle says “I bow before a great man, but my mind does not bow.” I would add, before an humble plain man, in whom I perceive uprightness of character in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows whether I choose it or not, and though I bear my head never so high that he may not forget my superior rank. Why is this? Because his example exhibits to me a law that humbles my self-conceit when I compare it with my conduct: a law, the practicability of obedience to which I see proved by fact before my eyes. ([1788] 2004, 81, emphases in original) Kant shows here how respect as a moral emotion can be directed toward a man of a lower rank, one who is morally upright. Moral emotion thus seems separable from social rank: a man of higher rank can be humbled The Good Will

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by the humble man. But note the implication the head keeps the height. Respect for the moral law is thus in accordance with social rank. The moral subject, the one who gives respect, appears to be of a certain class even if, or perhaps through, how the respect is given to a person of another or subordinate class (the subaltern). This is why when Kant ends with a question “why,” he is asking why the mind bows; the question that remains unasked is why he must bear his head so high. Indeed, Kant describes respect as a tribute that cannot not be given inwardly but is “outwardly with[e]ld” (82). Now Kant is not arguing for the accordance of moral feeling and social rank, in fact quite the opposite. But by describing how respect as moral feeling can be given without compromising rank (as a withholding of what is inwardly felt) that accordance is affirmed. Consider also Kant’s writings on education in which he describes the moral costs of spoiling children. The distinction between the good and ill will does not simply rest on the question of the child’s education. Kant himself uses this contrast as the basis of a social distinction between the disciplined nature of willing Europeans compared to savage nations: “Undisciplined men are apt to follow every caprice. . . . We see this also among the savage nations, who, though they may discharge functions for some time like Europeans, yet can never become accustomed to European manners” ([1899] 2003, 4). A caprice is defined as an impulsive change of mind, or as an inclination to change one’s mind impulsively. Capriciousness is a close sibling of willfulness: they belong to the same family. Willfulness becomes a way of characterizing those who are not Europeans, or not like Europeans: an explanation of how they cannot become accustomed to European manners. Kant contrasts the class of the upper ranks to those of lower ranks in similar terms: “the children of the working classes,” he suggests, are more spoiled than the children of higher ranks “for the working classes play with their children like monkeys” (51). The spoiled child comes to figure; she offers a way of making as well as distributing social and moral value. The civilized and educated subjects remove themselves from the very signs of willfulness, from the capricious and the impulsive, as a way of distancing themselves from the lower ranks, from those who are not European, not bourgeoisie, and not male. The less civilized adults (working class, racial others, women, and of course some embody more than one than category of less) are thus figured not only as childlike but as willful children. The distinction between good will and ill will, between strong willed and weak willed becomes in very stark terms a social dis94

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tinction. Once we recognize this, we have given the good will a genealogy in Nietzsche’s sense: a history or coming into being of subjects who can receive values as if they correspond to things in the world. If the aristocrats define happiness or the good life as what they have, then those of a higher social rank can define the good will as what they are. It is “the others” who are willful and capricious. Throughout this chapter, I have shown how the acquisition of good will, as the will in pursuit of the right ends, becomes a way of creating social harmony: a good will is in agreement with other wills. Willfulness as ill will is often understood as a will that is in agreement only with itself: a willing of what is agreeable to the self. This idea of willfulness as selfagreement can be related to how willful subjects do not will in agreement with others. I would suggest that the diagnosis of willfulness allows the good will to appear as if it is a universal will, as a will that has eliminated signs of itself from moral agreement. To give a genealogy of the good will is to restore the traces of this elimination. As Emmanuel Levinas asks: “Does the will contain an incoercible part that cannot be obligated by the formalism of universality? And we might even wonder whether, Kant notwithstanding, that incoercible spontaneity, which bears witness to both the multiplicity of humans and the uniqueness of persons, is not already pathology, and sensibility and ‘ill will.’ . . . The universality of the maxim of action according to which the will is assimilated to practical reason may not correspond to the totality of good will” ([1987] 1993, 122, emphasis in original). Practical reason is a technique whereby social precedence is concealed and exercised under the guise of a moral law. The spontaneity of the good will is not a secure foundation for ethical judgment; even to suggest this is to question the distinction between will as a moral faculty and desire or inclination. It is to imply an antagonism within the totality, an ill will right at the heart of the good will.42 In Daniel Deronda, it is Daniel himself who comes to embody the mature ethical subject: the one who wills in accordance with the moral law, whose will is “obedient to the laws of justice and love” ([1876] 1995, 749). He is addressed as such by Mordecai, the Jewish brother of Mirah who is to become his wife: “It was your loving will that made a chief pathway and resisted the effect of evil” (749). The path created by Daniel’s loving will is defined against the paths created by “the erring and unloving wills” of others (749). If Daniel has wandered, if he was cast out from his family, his good will has led him along a straight path. It is important to note here that the novel is also a story of Daniel’s discovery of his own The Good Will

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Jewish origins. The significance of good will being embodied by a Jewish man who has lost sight of his own history remains to be thought. Where do we end up by ending with Daniel’s good will, a will that is in accordance with duty? Where do we go with this will, or where does this will allow us to go? The novel ends with Daniel announcing his own departure, saying to Gwendolyn: “I have purposes that will take me to the East” (802); “I am going to the East” (803). We can recall here Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as “willed human work” (1978, 140). The East becomes what is “there” by the repetition of a shared direction. If the will goes that way, it keeps that way going. And if the East is where Daniel is going, his duty is defined in terms of Zionism: “The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. This is a task which presents itself to me as a duty: I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own” ([1876] 1995, 803).43 How is it possible then, that the moral duty, the virtue of volition, leads us here, to the idea of a national home? Perhaps the universality of the good will remains predicated on certain particulars. What is implicit here is an alternative account of the agreement at stake in the good will, one that creates a “we” that, even if predicated on the movement of other minds, still restricts the very form of that movement. A people is “my people”; a “we” is the unifying of a diaspora into a nation. We cannot understand this problem—of how the good will becomes a technique for gathering a disparate population into a coherent body—without reference to the general will. And it is to the general will that I now turn.

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hoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free” ([1762] 1998, 18). This sentence from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract is somewhat notorious. Surely to be forced to be free contradicts the meaning and essence of freedom? My investigation of willing has already shown how force and freedom can operate in the same register. As I discussed in chapter 2, through a reading of Rousseau’s Émile, subjects are asked to do more than obey, they must obey out of their own free will. In this sentence from The Social Contract, the mechanisms for this “forcing” of freedom are revealed. If not to obey the general will is not to be free, then being forced to obey the general will is the condition of possibility for freedom. The general will is that which precedes the will of “whoever” but also is the condition that makes this will free. We can ask: how does this general will relate to the will of those who are given precedence? Who or what embodies the general will? There is another crucial term in this sentence: “the whole body.” The general will is the will, we could say, of the whole body. The address to “whoever” is an address to someone as part of the whole body. This chapter explores how the relation between will and willfulness can be reposed as a relation between the general will and the particular will, or between the will of the whole body and the will of a body part. Reposing the relation in these terms allows us to move beyond any assumption that the sociality of will simply refers to how individuals, as already constituted or even emergent beings, exist in a willing relation. The demand for obedience is not simply a demand that the part obeys the whole but is willing to become part of a whole. Willfulness would be a diagnosis of unbecoming

parts, and those parts may or may not be recognized as individuals. We could give a different kind of account of the Grimm story: of how the arm becomes a willful part. The general will in Rousseau does not simply refer to the will of all, or what Rousseau calls “the common will.” The latter would include private or particular wills, while the general will would not. An individual can thus have both a particular and general will: “Every individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen” (18). It is noteworthy how the particular will is defined here in terms of contrariness to the general. In the case of the general will, for Rousseau: “Each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and in return we receive every member as an indivisible part of the whole” (15). A general will is thus how a part relates to the whole. In Patrick Riley’s reading of Rousseau he describes the particular will as a willful will. Riley notes that Rousseau’s aim is “to retain the moral attribution of will while doing away with will’s particularity and selfishness and ‘willfulness’ ” (2001, 131). For a part to become willing rather than be willful, it must put to one side its own particulars. Through acts of association “a moral and collective body” is produced. For Rousseau, the will is either general or it is not: it is either “the body of the people” or “that of only a portion” (27). However, at the same time, the general will is not simply about counting each part. For Rousseau “what generalizes the will” is “not so much the number of voices as the common interest which unites them” (32–33). There are two further points worth making here. Firstly, for Rousseau the general will is “always right” by which he means it “always tends to the public advantage” (29).1 But there is a but: “the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened” (39). As I noted in my introduction, there has been a philosophical tendency to associate will with error, but for Rousseau, it is understanding or knowledge that would lead us astray. Will is assumed to be willing in the right way. This is how education matters to Rousseau’s argument: the public must “be made to see objects as they are” which means they must be “guarded from the seduction of private interests” (39). The pedagogic arguments of Émile could thus be understood as behind The Social Contract: the individual subject must learn to put aside his or her own particular or willful will and be willing to will the general will. And secondly, Rousseau asks how the general will is to be expressed. He asks, “Has the body politic an organ for expressing its will?” and describes the “need for a legislator” (39). The 98

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concept of the general will thus introduces the necessity of a mediating part. The legislator who becomes the organ of this expression has three wills: in the perfect system he will have a particular will, which must be rendered “inoperative”; a common or corporate will, which must be “subordinated”; and a sovereign will, which will be “dominant” (62–63). The general is “given” expression through a body that is not reducible to the whole body: one part of the body becomes an organ for its expression, which requires that this part of the body does not express itself as a part. In this chapter I ask which parts become “expressions” of the general will, and which do not.

Willing Parts We now tend to associate the idea of the general will with the work of Rousseau. But as Patrick Riley (1988) has shown, the general will has a long history and is transformed over time from a religious to a secular idea.2 I want to draw firstly on the work of the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. In Pensées, Pascal associates the particular will with self-will. The will is a kind of tendency to tend toward oneself. As he puts it: “All tends to itself. This is contrary to all order” ([1669] 2003, 132). For Pascal, the particular will is inevitably depraved because, as Helena Rosenblatt notes, it is “bound up . . . with human corruption and selfishness since the Fall” (1997, 190).3 Pascal argues that the will should tend toward the general, that is, it should acquire a general tendency, which is not the natural tendency of will. Let’s consider the “part” in the particular. A particular will is the will of a part. Pascal attributes danger to the willing part in the following way: “Let us imagine a body full of thinking members. . . . If the foot and the hands had a will of their own, they could only be in their order in submitting their particular will to the primary will which governs the whole body. Apart from that, they are in disorder and mischief; but in willing only the good of the body, they accomplish their own good” ([1669] 2003, 132, emphasis added). If a part is to have a will of its own, then it must will what the whole of the body wills. The body part that does not submit its will is the willful part. One could learn so much from Pascal’s mischievous foot. The willful part is that which threatens the reproduction of an order. As Pascal further describes: “If the foot had always been ignorant that it belonged to the body, and that there was a body on which it depended, if it had The General Will

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only the knowledge and the love of self, and if it came to know that it belonged to a body on which it depended, what regret, what shame for its past life, for having been useless to the body which inspired its life . . . ! What prayers for its preservation in it! . . . For every member must be worthy to perish for the body, for which alone the whole is” (132). To be a thinking member of a body thus requires you remember you are part of a body. Willfulness refers to the part that in willing has forgotten it is just a part. The consequences of such forgetting are shame; the part that is ignorant of its status as part would compromise the preservation of the whole. Implicit in the drama of Pascal’s description is how the will binds memory and utility: the part in willing only the good of the whole body must remember that body by becoming useful to that body. Explicit to his model is the intimacy of general will and what we can call general happiness. Pascal notes: “To make the members happy, they must have one will, and submit it to the body” (133). If having one shared will is deemed necessary for the happiness of each member, then failure to submit to this will compromises the happiness of the whole body. Unhappiness and willfulness are not only traveling companions in this model; they embody the same sort of threat to the “whole body.” Or to be more precise: willfulness becomes the cause of the unhappiness caused. Pascal’s mischievous foot belongs to the same history as the arm in the Grimm story. A rebellion is a rebellion of a part. The rebel is the one who compromises the whole, that is, the body of which she is a part. When we think of this “whole body” we might tend to think of “the organic body,” but we also think of how the social is imagined as like a body, as a sum of its parts. The idea of the social body has a long history.4 As Mary Poovey notes in her book Making a Social Body, this idea is “historically related” to the classical metaphor of the body politic (1995, 7). She suggests that “the social body” acquired significance as a more inclusive metaphor than that of the body politic, as it gave a part to the laboring poor who had previously been excluded, who were deemed “not part” because they would compromise the health of the body. Poovey concludes: “The phrase social body therefore promised full membership in a whole (and held out the image of that whole) to a part identified as needing both discipline and care” (8, emphases in original). To be a part is to be the one who receives a promise: the promise of membership. If to be a part is to be the recipient of a promise, then to become part is a demand to be worthy of reception. What is being demanded? We 100

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might think of the part in participation. Take, for instance, Hegel’s argument that “limbs and organs, for instance, of an organic body are not merely parts of it; it is only in their unity that they are what they are and they are unquestionably affected by that unity, as they also in turn affect it” ([1817] 1975, 191–92). Indeed, for Hegel, organs and limbs “become mere parts, only when they pass under the hands of the anatomist, whose occupation, be it remembered, is not with the living body but with the corpse” (192). To become a mere part would participate in a scene of death. Affect becomes crucial to the scene of participating in life: an affective unity. The parts are in sympathy, or must be in sympathy, for life. Mary Poovey refers to the work of the medical scientist Robert Whytt who describes the relation between each specialized part of the body as sympathetic: “by which he meant communication of the senses among bodily organs” (1995, 79). Poovey notes the compatibility between Scottish medicine and moral philosophy, between this model of the internal sympathy between body parts and models of social sympathy that we find in the work of philosophers such as Adam Smith and David Hume (81). Bodies are sympathetic to each other as parts of the social body. Sympathy can be understood as accordance: the verb “accord” derives from heart.5 A sympathetic part is an agreement with heart. To become part is to be affected by other parts: to acquire a ner vous connection. I would suggest that the idea that parts are sympathetic not only describes how parts relate to each other, but also prescribes what parts must do both for other parts, and for the body of which they are part. In Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the particular will or the will of the part is explicitly tied to purpose. Matter is described as the “mere visibility of the will” ([1818] 1966b, 45, emphasis in original). The parts of the body are understood as “secondary organs.” So the foot is “the will-to-walk,” the brain “the will-to-know,” the stomach “the will-to-digest,” the hand “the will-to-grasp,” the genitals, “the will-to-procreate,” such that “the will exhibits itself as organized body” (259, emphases in original). Perhaps lodged in each description of the will of a part is an injunction: feet walk, brain know, hand grasp, stomach digest, genitals procreate! A willing part would be for what it is assumed as for. To become part is to inherit this prescription; it is to acquire a function. The parts must be willing to do what they are assumed to be for. Sympathetic feet— feet that are in sympathy with the whole body—must be willing to walk. Sympathetic arms must be willing to carry. We might note a connection between the arm and the pot discussed in chapter 1: they must be willing The General Will

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to carry. When they are willing to carry, they would be filled with the content of an agreement. Feeling becomes tied to function. However much Nietzsche’s own reflections on the will involve a critique of Schopenhauer’s ethics of renunciation, his work extends the model of willing as organized through or in life forms offered by Schopenhauer. Nietzsche relates organization directly to commandment. Nietzsche’s own model rests on his reading of an essay by Wilhelm Roux called “The Struggle between Parts of the Organism.” As Lukas Soderstrom notes, “According to Roux, organic purposefulness results from an inner struggle between the various parts (Theile) of the body caused, in both the embryonic and post-embryonic development, by the continual appearance of small organic variations that struggle for survival against older, already established parts” (2009, 58). This struggle between parts leads in Roux’s model to “one part dominating another part and ascribing a function to it, which then regulates the organism, thereby allowing for the emergence of seemingly purposeful behaviour” (58). The capacity for some parts of the body to assign a purpose to other parts is necessary for a general or organic sense of purpose. Domination both leads to and takes form as the acquisition of function. It is worth noting here how social models of will are borrowed from biological models. As Sarah Franklin shows in Biological Relatives, Darwin’s approach to higher and lower levels of organization finds its way into Marx’s Capital, which makes use of On the Origin of Species to describe industrial organization: “By a low level of organization I mean a low degree of differentiation of the organs for different particular operations” (cited in Franklin 2013, 41, emphasis in original).6 In these models, social as well as biological advancement depend on the specialization of parts: the more advanced an organization, the more each organ is differentiated according to a particular purpose. Nietzsche translates Roux’s model of embryonic development into a model of the body. As Gregory Moore notes in Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, Nietzsche offers an “aristocracy of the body,” in which there is an “aggregate structure of the will” or a “compound of myriad minor wills,” such that “the will of the individual” is the “coordinated wills of the component cells” (Moore 2002, 39). This is how for Nietzsche the will is an “interlocking chain of underwills” (39).7 In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche explicitly relates this model of the body to political order, suggesting “what happens here is what happens in every well constructed and happy commonwealth namely that the governing class identifies itself with the 102

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success of the commonwealth” ([1886] 1997, 14). The governing class in identifying with the commonwealth also secures its own happiness. I have already noted how the general will is a thesis of general happiness. For Nietzsche in willing there is a “feeling of delight” in the successful execution of a command, which is the same executing mechanism for the governing class of a social body, as it is for a person in relation to an individual body, which too is comprised of under-wills (14). We can thus connect Nietzsche’s happy commonwealth to his model of the strong will discussed in the previous chapter in which the underwills are coordinated under “a single predominant impulse” ([1901] 1968, 28–29).8 One wonders whether Nietzsche’s model of the strong will would be translated in narrative terms into a will dystopia as well as a happiness dystopia.9 Nietzsche’s aristocratic model of the body may seem far removed from the political sentiments expressed by or in Rousseau’s general will, which rests on the principle of formal equality and inclusion. We learn from this removal: the idea that we are all parts or members of a “whole body” can be used to describe, as well as express commitment to, a wide range of political forms. In some cases the idea of the social body is used to demonstrate the right of some parts to demand obedience from others. For example, in Malebranche’s The Search after Truth, to be a member of a body means that some parts must be willing to obey a command: “Not all the members of a body can be its head and heart; there must be feet and hands, small as well as great, people who obey as well as those who command. And if each says openly that he wants to command and never to obey, as indeed each of them does, it is obvious that every body politic would be destroyed, and that disorder and injustice would reign everywhere” ([1674–75] 1997, 333). The idea that all parts have distinct roles as parts of a body is translated into a demand for obedience. Not to obey would threaten anarchy. A willful part threatens to break the whole body apart. Parts must be willing to obey (this is how, to return to my discussion of Rousseau’s Émile in the previous chapter, free will can come under obedience). Other scholars have used the part/whole distinction to generate a very different role for the part. Contrast Malebranche with Saint Paul: The body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, “Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body” is it therefore not of the body? Now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, “I have no need of thee”; nor again, the hand to the feet, “I have no need of you.” There is no schism in the body, but . . . The General Will

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the members should have the same care for one another. And whether one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. (cited in Bray 1999, 21) A different member of the body is valued as taking part in its own way; indeed, the whole needs each of these ways equally in order to function. Each part is valued for what it is with “is” referred directly to “does.” The relation of part to part is one of mutual dependence rather than subordination. In this dependence, feeling still retains a function. Sympathy is feeling with: if one part suffers, suffer do all; or at least suffer should all. A part should be willing to care for other parts, and in turn will receive what we might think of as a parting care. Despite their obvious differences these arguments share an assumption that to become a part of a whole is to acquire a duty. Pascal describes this duty as a death duty (“the part must become worthy of perishing for the whole body”) but we can also think of this duty as a life duty: the part must be willing to preserve the life of the whole. If the life of the part is dependent on the life of the whole, then the part to preserve itself must preserve the whole. This logic is well articulated by Johann Gottlieb Fichte: “If each individual part of the tree were endowed with consciousness and a will, then each part, just as certainly as if it wills its own preservation, must also will the preservation of the tree, since it can be preserved only if the tree is preserved” ([1797] 2000, 176). Self-preservation depends on preserving the whole. These different political uses of the part/whole distinction might correspond to different techniques: in some cases, a part must be forced to obey; in others, a part is asked to be sympathetic. These techniques are different means to the same end: the alignment of the will of the part with the will of the whole. These techniques could be described as harder or softer; they might at a more formal level correspond to the techniques described in the previous chapter that rest on breaking or making the will of the child. We can now show how the will being made or broken is the will of a part. As I will explore in due course, this might be how the child too comes to figure: as part of the body of the family.

Will and the Productive Body The part/whole distinction becomes a willing distinction: not simply a distinction between the part and whole, but between parts, between those who are willing and those who are not. This is why we cannot have 104

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a general logic of the part.10 Willfulness as a diagnosis could be a historical record of moments in which some parts fail in their duty to carry and support the whole body. Arguably all parts of the whole would be diagnosed as willful if they are not willing to provide this support. But we learn that some parts who are willing “the good” of the whole body escape the diagnosis. Remember Pascal: “They accomplish their own good.” This is how some parts in accomplishing their own good might be diagnosed as not only willful but also selfish (as willing away from others), while others who are also accomplishing their own good might be diagnosed not only as not willful or selfish, but even as will-less or self-less (as willing for others).11 The point of this difference is how the general in expressing the will of some parts allows the will of those parts to appear as general rather than particular. When the will of some parts is accomplished by the general will, those parts acquire a freedom not to be supportive.12 This is how the distinction between willing and willful parts—between those whose will is accomplished by the general and those whose will is not—functions as a moral as well as a discursive frame. Let’s take two contrasting examples. In the current landscape of cuts to public spending or austerity a much-repeated speech act is that we must all “tighten our belts.” Of course the ones who make the command are probably not themselves tightening their belts. But those who resist the command, who call into question the right of or in the command, are deemed as self-willed, or even as selfish, as putting themselves (or perhaps even their own stomachs) over and above the general interest, as compromising the very capacity of the nation to survive, or flourish. We might assume that in the current financial climate, the bankers would be judged as willful, as putting themselves (and their own stomachs) before the general interest.13 But even if this judgment is made (by some, certainly not by all) that judgment is rarely expressed in action: after all, the bankers have kept their bonuses. Why can ask why even if we know why. Capitalism is understood as “the whole body,” as what parts must be willing to reproduce. And capital is identified as the lifeblood of this body: as what must be kept in circulation no matter what (or who), as if without capital or blood being pumped through, the whole body would not flourish. The function of the banks as willing parts (as accomplishing in their “own good” the good of the whole body) is what stops any judgment of willfulness from being followed through. Perhaps the judgment is the follow through. Understanding the part/whole distinction allows us to recognize not only how the will becomes duty, but how the duty becomes a particular The General Will

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as well as a general duty. Given that the social is imagined as a body with parts, then some bodies more than others will be thought of as the limbs of the social body. The New England reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, for example, describes “the labouring classes” as “the feet of society; they support and carry the whole social body” (cited in Klages 1999, 44). Howe argues that we should care for laborers in the same way that we care for our feet, because without them we would be unable to walk. In return, a sympathetic laborer is willing to become feet, to support and to carry the social body. Bodies can be supported in order that they can fulfill their duty to provide support. Caring for others can thus be a technique for keeping others under the social body as subordinate parts, to return with a difference to Mary Poovey’s formulation (1995, 8): from discipline and care to discipline as care. If capital is assumed as the lifeblood of the whole social body and laborers provide that body with limbs, then the will of laborers might become tied to their limbs. George Eliot’s Adam Bede begins with a description of Adam engaged in manual labor. There are two references to Adam’s will: “You’ve got an iron will, as well as iron arm” is one ([1895] 1961, 166); “his strong will and strong arm” is the other (199). The implication of these descriptions is that strength for the laborer is not only strength of will and arm but an alliance of will to arm. The arm might even become the will. Or the laborer “willingly” becomes the arm of the whole social body. Or think of the worker’s hands or how the workers become hands. Our starting point might be synecdoche: the workers become “hired hands,” the part standing in for the whole. Janet Zandy begins her extraordinary discussion of hands in working-class worlds with synecdoche in order to move beyond it: “Human beings reduced to working parts, just so many hands. This book develops out of the synecdoche of the hand as obscured and undifferentiated stand in for human labour and moves towards cultural retrieval and reclamation” (2004, 1–2, see also Brown 2002, 249). It is not simply that the worker’s hands stand in for the worker. Rather workers in being treated as hands are materially shaped or pressed by this very treatment. The history of workers’ hands is a history of loss and dismemberment in ser vice to the industrial machine. The worker’s hands become rough and coarse in time, shaped by work, taking the shape of work. To give hands a history would be to describe the somatization of the division of labor. As Zandy shows, to be shaped by work is also to have a certain kind of know-how, a manual knowledge that is about the

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acquisition of capacities. “No book can reattach the human hand severed on the job,” Zandy notes, “but it can trace the process of dis/memberment and remembering, and see the hand’s potential for graceful movement, its delicate rough beauty, and its hidden wisdom” (5). I love the idea of becoming more attuned to the wisdom of hands. Perhaps this wisdom is what the hands must work for. But in the history of hands is a demand for another kind of attunement. It is as if the very parts of the worker are attuned to this part: that the worker has worker’s hands, for instance, as if these hands were always in tune with a machine, that these hands were for work before they even were; as if these hands are shaped by the purpose the worker has been assigned. In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders there is a description of the violence of this assumption: “With so many right hands borne to manual labour, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing but the cast of a die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to do it in good time” ([1887] 1996, 9–10).14 Even if some bodies are not “borne to manual labour” those who engage in manual labor are shaped by that labor. And once shaped, once the member has been formed like this, a convention is given support: as if this was what this member was for, as if this was a bond of fate. A bond can be bondage. Think back to Silas Marner. Silas is a laboring body and thus has a laborer’s body. He is a weaver; he weaves his fortune: “His life had reduced itself to the mere function of weaving and hoarding” ([1861] 1994, 17). Just as Silas Marner’s body is bent by what he carries, so too his hands are shaped by what they are asked to do, how in clasping they become clasps: his “face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart” (17, emphasis added). The body of the laborer can become not only like a tool but a tool. To become a tool is to lose the possibility of standing apart. Henri Bergson in “Frenzy, Mechanism and Mysticism” reflects on the relationship between bodily organs and technology: “If our organs are natural instruments, our instruments must be artificial organs: the workman’s tool is a continuation of his arm, the tool-equipment of humanity is therefore a continuation of

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its body” ([1932] 2002, 339, emphasis added). If the arm is continued by a tool, the arm is also a working tool. If the tool continues the arm, the tool is also a living arm. The worker can be diminished by this continuation, which might explain how the specific story of the workman does not simply fold back into a general story of the human.15 Or the story of the workman’s arm might be another way of telling the story of the human. Arlie Hochschild describes how “the factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation, what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own?” ([1983] 2003, 7, emphasis in original). We need to tell these (unfinished) histories of lost arms, of how workers lose their arms, as the loss of a relation of ownness, when arms become tools in the creation of wealth. The loss of the worker’s arms in becoming tools is also the acquisition of arms by others, such as factory owners. When some bodies provide the “whole social body” with arms, other bodies are freed from the necessity of this becoming. The body of the worker is shaped by becoming the arm of the social body. In Queer Phenomenology I explored how what bodies “can do” is affected by what bodies “do do” (2006, 59). We acquire the shape of actions when those actions are repeated. Labor shapes not only what bodies do but what bodies are assumed to be for. And then, in acquiring the arms of the laborer, it is as if this body was created to provide arms for the social body; it is as if that is what this body was for. This for can be what is before. If it is assumed before our arrival, that we have a certain future in front of us, we might be pushed toward that future; a class system can be lived as a system of expectation, deciding that some bodies will become the arms, which bodies will employ others as arms. What you are assumed to be for can then become what you are good for, even all that you are good for. The laborer in doing more with an arm has an arm that can do more, such that the laborer is more reducible to the arm, the increase in capacity becoming a loss of possibility. When worker’s become social limbs, their role is to maximize the efficiency of the whole social body. The will duty becomes a productive duty, one that falls unequally on bodies as parts of the social body. It is not only bodies that are shaped by what they are asked to do: work spaces are organized to maximize efficiency, with limbs in mind. Michelle Murphy’s description of office space as an “elaborate apparatus for extracting time 108

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and labour from the bodies of workers” demonstrates this point very effectively (2004, 195). As she argues: “The purpose of the office apparatus was to maximize the efficiency of the worker’s corporeal gestures by rationalization of the stretch of the worker’s arm, her posture in a chair, and the duration of each of her motions” (195–96). In the following chapter I will take up the implication of this description: the social spaces in extending the motility of the body are how the will becomes not only general but concrete. But note how even the stretch of the arm is measured by the rod of the apparatus. I have already observed, following Janet Zandy, how some workers lose their limbs in ser vice to the industrial machine. Rehabilitation can aim to restore productivity to the whole body through restoring the capacity of the worker. As David Serlin notes in his contribution to the edited collection Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: “Even by the 1950s, the typical goal for prosthetics was to make the worker as productive or efficient as possible” (2002, 67). The workers as hands must be handy. Some hands are already tools as means to a productive end. The artificial hand was organized by the industrial desire that all workers be handy: as a demand that they be willing parts, that is, that they be willing as well as able to take part or participate in the labor process. One history of prosthetics is thus the history of the restoration of the functional capacity of the laboring body. This restoration of function is understood therapeutically. As Edward Slavishak notes “here was a therapeutic narrative of machinery—machinery that attempted to mitigate the damage it had done. Machinery removed worker’s limbs, but it also provided them with replacements, which were compact machines themselves” (2008, 255). This idea of machines as therapy can be related to the idea of the body as a machine. Robert McRuer (2006) has offered a model of “compulsory able-bodiedness” in which “being able” becomes a corporeal and regulative norm. McRuer cites the work of Norah Vincent: “It’s hard to deny that something called normalcy exists. The human body is a machine, after all—one that has evolved functional parts: lungs for breathing, legs for walking, eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a tongue for speaking, and most crucially for all academics concerned, a brain for thinking” (2006, 7). Normalcy can be understood in terms of function: having a part that can do, and is willing to do, what it is assumed as for (“willing and able”). Being willing might be required when one is not able (“willing not able”). Compulsory able-bodiedness could be thought of as a will duty as well The General Will

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as a productive duty: a body that is not whole, that has nonfunctioning parts, must be willing if not able, or willing to be able. Given how the division of labor is somatized, it is not surprising that artificial limbs came to express that division. Heather R. Perry in her article “Re-Arming the Disabled Veteran” describes how “many of these prosthetic hands physically fastened the disabled man to his work station” (2002, 89). A prosthetic limb can become like the rod, keeping the workers fastened to the machines. Different kinds of arms were developed for nonmanual workers known in Germany during this period as Kopfarbeiter (head worker) who were given cosmetic or simple artificial arms (94). Head workers thus have limbs that are freed: limbs that do not have to be supportive members. Willfulness comes up as a charge made against disabled subjects who are unwilling or unable to return to work. Heather Perry refers to the work of Dr. Konrad Biesalski who in 1915 wrote “Caring for War Cripples.” Biesalski considered “the biggest obstacle to return to recovery was not the injury itself, but the veteran’s lack of will to fully recover and return to work” (Perry 2002, 81). This lack of will would be simultaneously described as willfulness, “the willful refusal to return to work” (81), which Biesalski interpreted as a symptom of “pension psychosis.” Biesalski suggested that to care for disabled veterans is to expect them to return to work so they can care for themselves: “The crippled should earn his bread for himself and his dependents completely on his own, so that he does not . . . fall into misery and poor relief—for us, the hero of war is too good for that—instead he should be an upstanding, economically independent member of our society, just as before” (81). To become an independent member of society is here to contribute actively to society: the happiness and health of workers depends on their capacity to contribute to general happiness and general health. Contribution is here restricted to specific kinds of work. Biesalski’s work was explicitly informed by the theory and practices of Arbeitswissenschaft or the science of work: “By streamlining the corporeal activity of a worker, German scientists of work aimed to eliminate wasted motion and thereby increase worker productivity. German orthopaedists adhered to similar principles while developing artificial limbs, analysing the various occupations in minute detail and listing the motions absolutely necessary to their performance. By reducing each job to a series of movements, doctors determined which particular functions a worker had ‘lost’ along with his arm and created a corresponding ‘work arm’ capable of perform110

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ing them. In short, form followed function in German prosthetic design” (Perry 2002, 86). The substitute part is one that “follows the motion” of the original it replaces. The body must not become a spare part. If what cannot be spared is time, then what is eliminated are any movements that are not tied to the efficient accomplishment of its purpose. The reduction of form to function in the design of prosthetic limbs reenacts the reduction of the worker to a fully functioning limb. Does the arm that is not productive, that willfully does not work, have any relationship to the striking arm of the willful child? The figure of the unused arm could be understood as another rather striking member as we can see in this quote from Scott and Nellie Marguerite Seeds Nearing’s account of social progress: “It is true of any animal that disuse means decay; the arm, held rigid for a year, would prove an indifferent member; this is equally true of any other faculty. Disuse involves decay, physical, mental, spiritual. The powers of the will, the positive forces of the individual which make up character, are no exception to this rule. Like the unused arm, they degenerate through lack of functioning” (1912, 145). The unused arm seems to be charged with a different sin than the willful arm of the Grimm story: one is lifeless and rigid; the other full of life and energetic. But these arms help us to make a connection. The arm must be willing to work, just as the will must work to be willing. Willfulness—and other failures of will—becomes that which threatens the degeneration of the whole body; not to function would cause the whole body to become dysfunctional. In the threat is a command: if the arms must become rods as I argued in the previous chapter, by straightening themselves out, then arms must be willing to support the whole body through proper employment. The freedom not to be supportive is the freedom not to become the arms: by employing others to be the arms. Who become the arms? I will return to this question in the conclusion of the book by trying to listen to the arms themselves. But we can consider how a wide range of power relations can be understood in terms of some becoming the limbs to support others. We can simplify this formulation: some bodies become supporting limbs. Just think of how the servant class became understood as “hands” that existed to support the bodies of those they were serving. The female servant is thus a handmaid.16 Bruce Robbins shows how servants are represented as and through hands in nineteenth-century British fiction as “parts without a whole” (1993, ix–x).17 Perhaps the hand is cut off from the worker’s body in order to be given to the body of the The General Will

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aristocrat. Robbins cites William Hazlitt’s essay “Footmen” from 1830, written from the point of view of the gentleman with the aim of satirizing that viewpoint: “What would be the good of having a will of our own, if we had not others about us who are deprived of a will of their own, and wear a badge to say ‘I serve’ ” (17).18 The gentle class, the aristocratic class, rules through the will: an exercising of will that takes the form of the deprivation of others of a will of their own, treating others as servers, in the case of handmaids, as hands, in the case of footmen, as feet. An unwilling servant would be “impertinent,” a word that now implies “rudely bold” but derives from the Latin for “unconnected” or “unrelated.” An unwilling servant would be a part that is not related to a whole, as the one who is unwilling to subordinate her or his will to the will of the whole. We could also think of settler colonialism in terms of the generalization of will. The colonized provide the bodies of the colonizer with limbs, not only becoming the arms that sow the ground, but providing the hands of ser vice, the wombs for reproducing the bodies to supply more laboring parts. Frantz Fanon in describing the geography of the colonial city noted the disappearance of the settlers’ feet: “The settlers’ feet that are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his towns are clean and even, no holes or stones” ([1961] 2001, 30). The settlers’ feet can disappear because colonial occupation releases the feet from the necessity of carrying the whole body; their feet can be clean as the natives’ feet are dirty; the settlers’ feet can be protected while native feet are required to walk on rough streets. A division of labor becomes a difference in feet. Feet in standing can stand for will. When the will of some parts is generalized, those parts are freed: they can be free not to support the whole body when others provide this support, when other bodies become their feet. Freedom to will translates into freedom from function. And this uneven distribution not only of will but of freedom to will shapes the surface of bodies as well as streets.

The Reproductive Will The general will is a mechanism for differentiating not only between the whole body and its parts, but between the parts, some of which acquire a supportive and subordinate function in order to free the time and labor of others. An attribution of willfulness is made when supportive parts do not provide support, when a part does not obey a command that would 112

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allow the whole body to do what it wills. With the part/whole distinction in mind we can return with fresh eyes to the Grimm story. I suggested in my introduction to this book that the arm that keeps coming up inherits the willfulness of the child. Perhaps it would be closer to the direction of  this history to offer a reversal: the willful child inherits willfulness from the arm in her refusal to become a supportive limb. If the willful child is the one whose will is not directed in the right way, toward the preservation of the family, then she would acquire life only from death, as if her life would amount to the killing of the body of which she is a part. If I focused in the previous chapter on the relation of parental will to the child’s will, we can now attend to the family as such: the family becomes another fantasy of the “whole social body.” And thinking through the membership of the family allows us to reflect on how willing relates to inheritance and reproduction. In chapter 1, I referred to the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, a sociologist of the will. The social will for Tönnies is understood in terms of not only concurrence but also inheritance: “human wills, each one bound in a physical body, are related to one another by descent and kinship; they remain united, or become so out of necessity” ([1887] 2001, 22, emphasis in original). Descent and kinship are presented here as forms of will relatedness. To concur in willing you might share a history (we could think of this as the inheritance of will or wills as inheritance), or you might come to will the same way, toward ends that have already been agreed in advance of an arrival. We can thus understand why willfulness is deposited in the figure of the child. The child is the one who promises to extend the family line, which requires the externalization of will as inheritance (to bequeath one’s property is to write a will). We can think of inheritance as a straight line: a way of passing assets as well as qualities down a line. Hegel in Philosophy of Right describes the bequeathing of property by a person to nonfamily members as “wayward,” such that “this willfulness is opposed to the substantive right of the family” ([1821] 2005, 93). The family becomes given as a straight line. Perhaps a child too in becoming willfully wayward would get in the way of the straight lines of the family tree. The child must not only become part of the family, a willing member, seated at the family table, but as part must become a point, willing to extend the family line, to assemble a new body. Even when a child is still a child, the parents can speak to the child about their anticipation of becoming grandparents, as if it was a fait accompli, an already accomplished fact. Becoming part can mean to become another point on a line. The General Will

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The family line can become a rod: a technique for straightening the child out. The death of the willful child is required for the birth of a willing child, the one who, in being willing to reproduce the family, can receive its inheritance.19 To be willful is thus to refuse what we might call “the reproductive duty,” as the duty of a part to reproduce the whole or at least to be willing to participate in reproduction. To be willful would be to “snap the bond,” to borrow Lucretius’s expression, understood as snapping the affective tie of the family as well as the bond of reproduction, understood as fate, or even fatality. In George Eliot’s novel Romola, about a character of the same name, we learn what can follow snapping the bond. Alas, poor Romola. She attempts to flee from a marriage based on deception, a marriage in which she loses both heart and inheritance. In a chapter entitled “Arresting Voice” Romola is indeed arrested. She is stopped by a monk who says: “You wish your true name and your true place in life to be hidden, that you may choose for yourself a new name and a new place, and have no rule but your own will. And I have a command to call you back. My daughter you must return to your place” ([1863] 1998, 338). To leave her place, to leave her place of subordination, is to have no rule but the will.20 The monk commands Romola to return to this place: “I have a command from God to stop you. You are not permitted to flee” (338). To have no rule but will is to bid for freedom without permission. Romola at first refuses to listen to the monk’s voice or to hear his wish as a command. “What right have you to speak to me, or to hinder me?” she asks (338). As the monk defends his right to speak and to hinder (the rights of being a messenger from God) Romola’s ear still rebels against the command: “Romola’s mind rose in stronger rebellion with every sentence. She was the more determined not to show any sign of submission, because the consciousness of being inwardly shaken made her dread lest she should fall into irresolution. She spoke with more irritation than before” (338). Even from this description we can hear how the judgment of willfulness falls. It is implied that Romola does not hear the monk, because her ears have blocked the content of what he is saying. Her very refusal to submit to the monk’s counsel becomes a repetition of a prior wrong, that of leaving her marriage, described by the monk as “willfully breaking” a bond that she had willingly chosen (340). I will return to how rebellion is diagnosed as willfulness in the following chapter. The monk describes Romola as a “willful wanderer, following [her] own blind choice,” as the one who is “seeking [her] own will” or “seeking 114

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some good other than the law [she is] bound to obey” (341). To wander is here to be in pursuit of one’s own will. The monk adds: “You are a wife. You seek to break your ties in self-will and anger, not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them” (343). Note the intimacy of selfwill with anger. Anger as a feeling has been understood as antisocial, as destroying ties of affection (see Ahmed 2004, 174–78). You may be assigned willful when you break these ties of affection. Even if these ties are violent and damaging, to break them is to go astray and become a stray. The right path is the path of duty but also of kinship, a path of being related as part. Partness is like a pathway, leading the part back to the whole body, to a life dedicated to caring for one’s own. The willful part is the one who leaves the path of becoming part, breaking, or threatening to break, the tie that holds a community, a family, a nation together. The monk can thus describe Romola in her bid for freedom as “below the humblest Florentine woman who stretches forth her hands with her own people, and craves a blessing for them; and feels a close sisterhood with the neighbour who kneels beside her and is not of her own blood; and thinks of the mighty purpose that God has for Florence; and waits and endures because the promised work is great, and she feels herself little” (341). The willful wanderer does not lend her hand to her people; in wandering away from them, she refuses to be part of them. She becomes a separate member. Such a refusal is read as a failure to return the debt of her life by giving her life to others. “Every bond of your life is a debt,” the monk says, “the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else. In vain you will wander over the earth: you will be wandering forever away from the right” (343). The wanderer wanders in vain, away from what is right, good, and just. In the monk’s command so much is said: duty is opposed to will (translated as self-will and willfulness) and defined for the woman as the tie of kinship, ties that tie her not only to the willed choice of this husband, but to the city, to the polis, to her “own kind.” The figure of the willful wanderer is opposed to the figure of the wife. Indeed, the history of marriage could be another way of giving a history of will.21 Marriage was not historically about two wills but one: the man as head of household acquired the woman, who became subject to his will, or who is given a will through him. The will economy is thus a gendered economy. For example, Fichte (who invests in the right of what he calls the common will) describes marriage in terms of man’s determination of will: “The wife’s peace depends on her completely subjecting The General Will

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herself to her spouse and having no will but his” ([1797] 2000, 272). This identification of will depends on a kind of willing to be willed: “In consequence of her own necessary will, the husband is the administrator of all her rights; she wills her right to be asserted and exercised only insofar as he wills them to be” (299). For the woman any act of willing other than what the husband wills would be attributed as willfulness. His will is supposed to become her will, her own. In the case of Romola, she returns. Even if Romola does not return to her husband, she returns to her position as wife: no longer understood as the one who gives support to the husband but as the one who gives support to the polis or city: Romola becomes the city’s wife, a humble Florentine woman who “stretches forth her hands with her own people” ([1863] 1998, 341). Her rebellious act of not being willing to return, of rising up in anger against the right of the monk to say what is right, gives way to willing obedience. Her anger “melted” and she began “to look with a vague reverence” (339). The monk in predicting her obedience gives that obedience its form: “ ‘I know—I know you have been brought up in scorn of obedience. But it is not the poor monk who claims to interfere with you: it is the truth that commands you. And you cannot escape it. Either you must obey it, and it will lead you; or you must disobey it, and it will hang on you with the weight of a chain which you will drag forever. But you will obey it, my daughter’ ” (345). She accepts the lot assigned to her: “Teach me, I will go back” (345). And she becomes “a child of Florence” (345), a child who is willing to receive an inheritance. Nevertheless, there is something rather queer about the ending of this novel. The two wives, Romola and Tessa, one married legitimately, the other not, of Tito end up in one household with Tessa and Tito’s two children:22 even if Romola ends up married to the city, she and Tessa could be read as having a rather queer bond. In appearing to fulfill one’s duty by returning or going back, wandering away remains possible. To break free from duty is narrated as willfulness, wandering away from the right path. To break the bond of marriage and family is not only to cause unhappiness, but is read as a form of self-regard, as putting yourself before others. We could note as an aside here how queerness is often regarded as self-regard, turning away from the straight path as turning toward oneself. The willful wanderer is indeed a rather queer figure. Jonathan Dollimore notes that “even the apparently more neutral notion of ‘wandering’ can be charged with a terrifying negativity” (1991, 104).23 This negative charge is a willfulness charge. Stray women, loiter116

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ers, and perverts: those who fall under or in the shadows, wandering as they do from the course of the straight and the narrow. It is certainly the case that Eliot’s novels are full of the sorrow of the wanderer: in Adam Bede, we have a description of “poor wandering Hetty” ([1895] 1961, 371). In Felix Holt “the right to rebellion” is asserted but defined against “the right to wander in mere lawlessness” ([1866] 1972, 242). The figure of the wanderer has an anarchic as well as a willful charge. Perhaps to wander is to wander away from a body.24 Let’s return to Pascal’s model of the general body of “thinking members.” Pascal’s mischievous foot might be one that is willing to walk but only by wandering away from the body: The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only a perishing and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on self, and desires to make itself both centre and body. But not having in itself a principle of life, it only goes astray, and is astonished in the uncertainty of its being; perceiving in fact that it is not a body and still not seeing that it is a member of a body. In short when it comes to know itself, it has returned, as it were to its own home, and loves itself only for the body. It deplores its past wanderings. ([1669] 2003, 134, emphasis added) The wandering part does not settle; it sees only itself, and not what it is part of; it has lost its bearings. The wandering part is homesick. It becomes disoriented; unable to find its way home. It is not only that wandering threatens the death of the whole body, but that to leave that body is cast as being cast out, as death, whether or not leaving was intended. To become a stray is represented as a miserable becoming. We could reflect on how queerness has been understood as the sadness of “becoming apart.” Take, for example, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a book that has been described both as the lesbian bible and as one of the most depressing lesbian novels ever written (can these descriptions be related? one wonders).25 It is a novel about Stephen Gordon, an invert, whose inversion is written on the body as a stain or mark: “I am one of those whom God marked on the forehead. Like Cain, I am marked and blemished” ([1928] 1982, 303). Queer bodies are historically marked by their disgrace. The novel offers an image of a queer bar, as presented to us by one character in the novel, Adolphe Blanc: “In this little room, tonight, every night, there is so much misery, so much despair, that the walls The General Will

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seem almost too narrow to contain it. . . . Yet outside there are happy people who sleep, the sleep of the so-called just and righteous. When they wake it will be to persecute those who, through no fault of their own, have been set apart from the day of their birth, deprived of all sympathy, all understanding. They are thoughtless, these happy people who sleep” (395). We can hear in this description a queer critique of the very idea of happiness: happiness redescribed as the thoughtlessness of those who sleep; happiness as slumber. Happiness becomes a way of dwelling, a way of not dwelling, a way of keeping to the surface of the skin of the city, a way of being protected by the skin of virtue. The freedom to be happy translated as the freedom to turn away from what compromises one’s happiness, the right to happiness translated as the right to deprive others of an existence by encountering their existence as deprived. Note also how apartness becomes a queer setting. Apartness becomes an orientation toward bodies, a way of differentiating between bodies who can receive sympathy, who become sympathetic, and those who cannot. We can inherit a lack of sympathy in becoming unsympathetic. Apartness can also be used as a threat, as a way of announcing the costs of deviation. To come out as queer can involve being threatened with apartness: “You are no longer my child”; “You are no longer part of the family.” To follow queer desire can mean to be perceived as willfully cutting yourself off from the family, as if that is what your desire is intending. When your desire causes unhappiness, you can be judged as desiring to cause unhappiness. Wandering away from the straight path of happiness can lead to acts of disowning: not part. Or we could reflect on how maladies and ailments have been attributed to wandering parts of an organic body. Think of how hysteria was understood as a “wandering womb,” a womb that does not stay in place, that does not reproduce, that in leaving its place allows the woman to lose her place.26 Wandering is what compromises the whole body, causing that body to become unreproductive. Plato’s Timaeus describes the willfulness of the nonreproductive womb: “There exists inside the womb, for the same purpose, a living being with an appetite for child-making, and so if it remains unproductive long past puberty, it gets irritated and fretful. It takes to wandering all around the body, and generating all sorts of ailments, including fatal problems, if it blocks up the air channels and makes breathing impossible” (91a.97). The womb is given a life and a will of its own: we might call this will a reproductive will or, to extend Schopenhauer’s framework, the will-to-reproduce. If women exist as wombs, 118

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as child makers, then they inherit the reproductive will, as that which if thwarted or blocked, causes illness and damage. Nonreproductivity can thus be treated as a willful object: what gets in the way of what is on the way, to use my terms from chapter 1. The barren womb not only does not deliver its own will to reproduce but compromises the health or wellbeing of the whole body. A willing womb would be one that lives in expectation of becoming fruitful. A willful part would not be willing to reproduce the whole body. Returning to Augustine, he opposes the good will to desire by referring to the disobedience of his “sexual member.” In City of God Augustine identifies the very possibility of virtue with the ability of the mind to command parts of the body: “It must be firmly established that virtue, the condition of right living, holds command over the parts of the body from her throne in the mind” (1.16.26).27 Augustine’s image of virtue prefigures Nietzsche’s description of the coordination of a strong will. Augustine describes the evil of lust: “Surely such a man would prefer, if possible, to beget children without lust of this kind. For them the parts created for this task would be the servants of his mind, even in their function of procreation, just as the other members are its servants in the various tasks to which they are assigned. They would begin their activity at the bidding of the will, instead of being stirred up by the ferment of lust” (14.16.577). The sexual impulse is described as “an unwanted intruder.” The sexual part is willful, appearing like a stranger with a life of its own, as the part that does not obey the command of the will. Augustine contrasts the sexual part with the other obedient parts of the body: Yet that does not mean that it should seem incredible that one part of the body could have been subject to the will, without the familiar lust, seeing that so many other parts are now in subjection to it. We move our hands and feet to perform their special functions, when we so will; this involves no reluctance on their part, and the movements are performed with all the ease we observe in our own case and in that of others. And we observe it particularly in craftsmen engaged in all kinds of physical tasks, where natural powers which lack strength and speed are developed by active training. Then why should we not believe that the sexual organs could have been the obedient servants of mankind, at the bidding of the will, in the same way as the other, if there has been no lust, which came in as the retribution for the sin of disobedience? (14.23.585, emphasis added) The General Will

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Augustine presents an ideal image of a coordinated body, in which parts are willing, are not reluctant to carry out their special duties: parts which can be strengthened in their performance by training. Desire is presented as the loss of ser viceable parts. And desire is understood here not only as disobedience to will’s command but as the punishment for disobedience. Augustine extends: “The retribution for disobedience is simply disobedience itself. For man’s wretchedness is nothing but his own disobedience to himself, so that because he would not do what he could, he now wills to do what he cannot” (14.15.575). The opening of a gap between will and capacity becomes a punishment: in not willing what they could, humans are doomed to will what they cannot. The will itself becomes wretched: not just an unhappiness cause but the cause of its own unhappiness. For Augustine, procreation should have been or would have been determined by will rather than desire. Desire is a fall from will as well as to will. The penis that rises up “on its own” is a willful part: it is the wretchedness of not being able to do what you will. A subject of virtue would have full command over all the parts or members of the body. The general will is the good will when all parts are subordinated to that will. The productive body is the reproductive body: all members of the body are subordinated to the reproductive requirement, which requires the evacuation of desire from will. Even if desire is permitted, even if queerness is allowed, the sexual body is still valued for its role in reproducing the membership of the social body. We can play with our organs, but eventually we must remember what they are for, converting them from objects of play to what we must work upon, from our own end, to the social end. No wonder that growing up is imagined as leaving playfulness behind you: nonreproductive adult bodies can thus appear as willful children, or perhaps as willfully childlike, as selfish, as spoiled, as refusing the demand to grow up, perhaps by growing sideways, as Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) has suggested. Through the lens of Augustine and his disobedient sexual part we could return to the willful arm of the Grimm child. Is the arm that keeps coming up the penis? I refuse this reading. The arm does not stand up by standing in for the penis.28 To read the arm as the penis would not only be a form of phallocentrism but it would refuse to bear witness to the agentic potential of arms, and the other limbs supposedly “intended” for carrying and supporting. I am reminded of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who point out how Freud in seeing the father does not see the horse in Little Hans’s story ([1980] 1987, 286).29 We need to see the arm by 120

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not looking beyond the arm to what it is assumed to be standing in for. Other wise we would negate the willfulness of the arm: parts become willful when they pulse with the potential for being something other than a member of a body, which assumes “for” as “before.” Otherwise we would not embrace the fleshiness of the arm, a fleshiness that reveals how the arm is always more than what it is assumed as being for. One way of describing a queer feminist history of will is as a history of willful parts, parts that in willing are not willing to reproduce the whole. Perhaps willfulness is possible given the gap between inheritance and reproduction. We might even say when we live in this gap, when we reach for its expansion, when we make it our room, we become willful parts. Perhaps willful parts queer the whole body. Decadence has been understood in terms of the pulsation of willful parts. One definition of decadence offered by the French writer Paul Bourget and drawn on by Havelock Ellis (as well as Nietzsche)30 is as follows: “If the energy of cells becomes independent, the lesser organism will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole” (cited in Ellis 1932, 52). As Ellis elaborates, a decadent style would be when “everything is sacrificed to the development of individual parts” (52, see also Gagnier 2010, 91–92). A social body becomes queer, becomes decadent, when the parts have “too much will,” compromising everything: the reproduction of the whole. Do we notice this “too much” because of what we do not notice? Parts appear as full of will when they don’t support the reproduction of a whole. Perhaps queer parts allow us to make the whole body wonky; we can witness the lines that no longer recede when things line up. I have already noted how queerness is often regarded as self-regard. Perhaps the selfregard of heterosexuality is concealed under the sign of the general will, because this particular will has already been given expression in the general will. Giving up a will that does not have a general expression is what allows you to inhabit the familiar, or to recede into the background. In chapter 1, I discussed how what is already willed tends to become background drawing on Schopenhauer’s argument that we do not tend to notice what is in agreement with will. We can redescribe recession in terms of the general will. When willing “agrees” with what is generally willed, a part becomes part of a background. When willing does not agree, the will of the part is too full: willful. Willfulness might “come up” when an act of willing does not agree with what has receded. A queer phenomenology teaches us what or who recedes in the generalization of will. The General Will

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Willing Strangers Reflecting on wandering parts allows us to bring together the arguments in my previous two sections: wandering parts compromise the productive as well as the reproductive body. Indeed, the creation of a class of willing workers depended on a history of violence against wandering, one that also created a new sphere of voluntary criminals (the vagrant and the vagabond), as Karl Marx demonstrated so powerfully in the first volume of Capital: The proletariat created by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this free and rightless proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned in massive quantities into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances. Hence at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth centuries, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it was entirely within their own powers to go on working under the old conditions which in fact no longer existed. ([1867] 1990, 896)31 The creation of the voluntary criminal, the willing and thus willful wanderer, was a necessary part of the creation of the proletariat: the workers who were forced to be “willing” to become the supporting limbs of the industrial body. A history of vagabondage teaches us the impossibility of separating class from race as techniques for disciplining bodies, for transforming bodies into laborers, whose capacities are treated as capital—in reserve, always waiting to be released and to reach their potential.32 I have already observed how colonial rule can be understood in terms of the general will: as the expropriation not only of land but of the bodies of the natives, those who were to become slaves, who were to become subalterns, who were made into property by being emptied of will.33 To assemble a willfulness archive is to gather the vagabonds in one place. There are precedents to this assembling. Take, for example, Henry 122

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Mayhew’s survey London Labour and the London Poor (1851). The book is described as an encyclopedia of the conditions and earnings of “those that will work,” “those that cannot work,” and “those that will not work.” Those that will not work could be described as the willful and criminal class. Mayhew describes the existence of “two distinct races”: they are the “wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen—the nomadic and the civilized tribes” (1851, 1). The vagabond appears as a figure that is both classed (think of those even Marx had trouble giving humanity: the Lumpenproletariat) as well as racialized, as opposed by law as well as nature to that of the settler. Mayhew draws on Dr. Andrew Smith’s “extensive observations in South Africa” of how respectable castes are surrounded by “hordes of vagabonds and outcastes from their community.” Mayhew compares these hordes to London street folk (1). His point is to show how this distinction between wanderers and settlers can be applied to explain “certain anomalies in the present state of society among ourselves” (2). If anything, his argument implies that the difference that matters “mostly” is a class difference, understood in terms of the difference between the wanderer and the settler, the vagabond and the citizen (which become attached to more familiar class markers: as differences of morality, civility, and respectability), a difference that is shared between races (races are treated as alike insofar as they differentiate between classes). It is not the case that the equivalence between native tribes elsewhere and the poor and homeless is simply maintained. But we can learn from how race and class as markers of the higher and the lower, as moral markers, can switch places. How the vagabond travels! The willful arm in the Grimm story could indeed be the arm of the vagrant or the vagabond. The arm that comes up and out of the grave, which I have noted is a common motif in fairytales and folklore, is also related by the authors in their notes to the widely held superstition concerning trespass on consecrated trees (Grimm and Grimm 1884, 416). Trespass: to travel without permission. It is the concept of trespass that gives permission to the idea that you can only travel with permission. No wonder that a willfulness archive is a wandering archive, an archive without a fixed abode. To become a member is to be willing to participate in a whole. We learn more about why willfulness is deposited in the figure of the child. The child also signifies the not-yet-subject, as well as the subject-tocome, the one who comes after, such as the guest, the migrant, or the stranger. In my previous work I suggested that rather than strangers The General Will

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being those we do not recognize, some bodies are already recognized as strangers, as “bodies out of place” (Ahmed 2000). I considered how the neighborhood watch becomes a technique for recognizing strangers as those who pose a danger to property and person. The wanderer is also recognizable as a stranger: as someone who is not from here, whose arrival is thus not only noticeable but potentially criminal. Strangers could be redescribed in terms of the distinction between parts and the whole: bodies that are not part of the whole body become bodies that endanger that body. To think through will in relation to strangerness we can return to George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Silas, you might recall, had a willing companionship with his jug. Does his investment in the jug signify his lack of human companionship? Silas could be thought of as a stranger in the community in which he resides. He not only comes from elsewhere, and is thus outside the bonds of kinship, but he does not work to create new bonds in the place of this arrival. He feels himself a stranger among strangers: “He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship towards the strangers he had come amongst” ([1861] 1994, 14). Living in solitude means he accumulates guineas for his weaving but not much else (even his pot breaks, as we already know). He in turn is treated with suspicion or as suspicious, a viewing point the reader is encouraged to adopt: “Anyone who had looked at him as the red light shone upon his pale face, strange straining eyes, and meagre form, would perhaps have understood the mixture of contemptuous pity, dread and suspicion with which he was regarded by his neighbours in Raveloe” (36). Indeed, his status as wretched is referred to by the neighbors as “his ill-will” (68). If Silas becomes a stranger he also unbecomes one. The will is crucial within the narrative as a conversion point. One aspect of the novel, which is central to the twists and turns of the plot even if it is most often in the background, is that Silas suffers from a will disorder called catalepsy, “a stiffening of the body or more commonly a specific body part, such as a limb, which can be induced by hypnosis.”34 Two key events depicted in the novella relate to Silas’s catalepsy. In the first he is exiled from his community of origin by his friend who “cast[s] suspicion” over Silas by implying catalepsy is “like a visitation of Satan than a proof of divine favour” ([1861] 1994, 9). Silas’s story of arrival is thus also a story of forced departure. Strangers are the ones who have yet to arrive, but this “yet,” even if it opens upon a future, is a trace of a past, of where 124

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someone has been, but is no longer. We are not yet here because we are no longer there. If Silas’s will is bound up with becoming a stranger, it is also bound up with unbecoming one. The second moment occurs when Silas experiences a cataleptic fit. He is opening the door to his house. As he “went in again, and put his right hand on the latch of the door to close it—but he did not close it: he was arrested, as he had already been since his loss, by the invisible want of catalepsy, and stood like a graven image, with wide but sightless eyes, holding open his door, powerless to resist either the good or evil that might enter there” (95). Silas is under arrest, his body unable to command itself to close the door. A will disorder is here a social opening. And it is through this door that a young child called Eppie enters. In many ways the short novel becomes about Eppie and Silas’s relationship. It might be this fact alone that justifies Lee Edelman’s reading of the novel in terms of reproductive futurism: “the promise condensed in the image of the child as a figure of naturalization” (2004, 57, emphasis in original). The child in becoming an object of Silas’s affection (replacing other lost objects, such as the pot, as if its role was simply to keep open an empty place) also transforms Silas from an unbecoming stranger to a member of the community. It was Eppie who “made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours” (109). Through the bond of the child, Silas becomes integrated into the Raveloe community. It is not simply that the family is secured as a social body, but that the family tie becomes a wider social tie, resting on the distinction between members and strangers. When a stranger becomes a member the distinction is preserved. But perhaps the relationship between Silas and the child has more queer potential than such a reading would admit. For Eppie, like Silas, is a stranger: she is not recognized by her father because her mother is “of the wrong class.” It is the death of this mother that leads Eppie to accept Silas’s unwilled opening of the door as an invitation to enter his house. The affection between Eppie and Silas is one of a parent and child who have happened upon each other, rather than inherited each other, by the chance opened by the arresting of Silas’s will. This hap tie might be a happier tie. And if Eppie and Silas stay together, if they form a happy and willing companionship, they also do not use the usual techniques for straightening the will. Eppie does not accept her biological father’s offer to become his willing child, which means she gives up the good fortune of inheritance; and Silas does not discipline Eppie and convert her from The General Will

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a willful to a willing child. By the time Eppie was three years old “she developed a fine capacity for mischief and for devising ingenious ways of being troublesome” (110). Silas is instructed by others to punish her, to straighten her out. On one occasion he “sends her to the coal-hole for punishment” but she misrecognizes punishment for play. Silas is shaken from a belief: “This total failure of the coal-hole discipline shook Silas’s belief in the efficacy of punishment” (112). And so: “Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds being borne vicariously by father” (113). Silas vicariously assumes the willfulness of the child, accepting her misdeeds as his own. So even if having a child makes Silas a member, he is an unbecoming member in his willingness to assume the qualities of willfulness that are not his own. A community or family of strangers might be one in which the wayward arm becomes a social bond, one that does not eliminate the hap from happiness (see Ahmed 2010). I will return to this more hopeful model of kinship in the conclusion of this book. Suffice to say here how the diagnosis of willfulness is a way of creating strangers, those who are not part, although as we have learned, those who come “apart” can become parts of a new whole. If the willful wanderer is a queer figure, then the willful wanderer is also a stranger, an unbecoming member. Unbecoming can have a range of senses and all of them matter to create a sensibility: something is unbecoming when it is not flattering, or when it does not fit. The stranger as a figure can be dynamic within a life trajectory. It is not just that the stranger moves but that you can move through this figure: you can pass into a community by passing out of the figure. The stranger then is not simply one who is not part of the body: the stranger is not yet part. In the promise of this not yet is an invitation. If strangers are the ones who are not yet members, then strangers can become members if they are willing in the right way. If passing out of the figure of the stranger is a requirement to be willing (the narrative of Silas Marner might be telling: the stranger can only enter the door if they open the door), then those who do not unbecome strangers might be diagnosed as willful, as refusing to budge. Can citizenship be understood as an invitation to will, to pass out of the figure of the stranger by passing into the community? The national body is another fantasy of the “whole social body.” If the stranger is often defined against a member, then what does it mean to become a member of the national body? National membership is often imagined as a “community of strangers,” with strangers understood in the conventional sense, as persons who do not know each other. You can be part 126

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of a “whole social body,” without ever meeting. Time is thus crucial to national membership: you can experience being in the same time without being in the same place. Benedict Anderson in his classic text on the emergence of the nation as an “imagined community” focuses on the role of the print media in the creation of “wholly new ideas of simultaneity” ([1983] 2006, 39). Anderson also notes: “The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection—the steady onward clocking of homogenous empty time” (33). The nation is experienced as community through time: you become part of this community by doing the same things “at the same time,” such as reading a local or national newspaper in the mornings. You direct your attention to an object, one that circulates, creating pathways in its trail. And the objects in turn direct your attention: the newspapers might refer to the nation and to events that happen in terms of their significance for the nation, as forms of easy and restricted referentiality that Michael Billig usefully describes as “flagging,” the ways in which the citizenry is “unmindfully reminded of [its] national identity” (1995, 154). If your body can be set to a national rhythm, can be “in time,” then you can do the nation without thinking of what you are doing; the nation can recede into the background when your membership is assumed. The social will can become a national will: citizens come to experience themselves as being in time without being copresent (though immediately we register the possibility of national estrangement as being out of time). The injunction to be “with” the nation, to feel happiness and sadness at the right time, is a familiar way the citizenry is asked to perform solidarity and allegiance. To be with can be understood as to become part of the national body. Citizenship is becoming part. We might note here how migrants can become part by becoming citizens only by being treated first as strangers: not only in the sense of not part of us or not familiar to us or not familiar like us, but in the sense of coming after. We can condense the narrative: elsewhere as after. This is why so much antiimmigration and racist rhetoric can command those bodies recognized as strangers to “go away” or “go home” by “going back.”35 Citizenship could be understood as a technology of will, a way of deciding whose will comes first.36 The nation offers a form of conditional hospitality that I have described as predicated on conditional will: migrants as would-be citizens are welcomed on condition they are willing to will in accordance with the national will. What does this willing requirement actually require? After all, in multicultural liberal secularism, a diversity The General Will

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of individual parts is permitted. A diversity of individual parts is even encouraged but on condition that each part is willing to participate in national culture, where participation requires an agreement with a common end or purpose. We learn the requirements of participation from those whose particulars fail to meet them. Think of how “the veil” has acquired a willfulness charge (see also chapter 4). The veil becomes a willful part, a part that refuses to take part in national culture, a stubborn attachment to an inassimilable difference.37 Perhaps the nation can have diversity as its skin (a happy skin of many colors) as long as underneath we beat to the same heart. The creation of a distinction between willing and willful parts is thus a crucial mechanism for reproducing the national body. My account here develops the argument I first offered in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, where I suggested that the key differentiation is not between us and them, but between them, between those differences that can be assimilated into the national body and those that cannot (Ahmed 2000, 106). Some differences become indigestible: what the nation cannot stomach. Willfulness is useful as a technique for making those who are assumed as inassimilable (whom I described in this book as “stranger strangers”) responsible for not being assimilated. It is as if they do not enter a door (imagined as open, an open door functions as a sign of national good will) because of what they have failed to give up. An attachment becomes willful (as well as melancholic) when it is you who is supposed to give something up.38 Anti-immigration discourse thus exercises the figure of the unwilling migrant, or more specifically the migrant who is “unwilling to integrate.” To be unwilling to integrate is to be “too willing” to retain an allegiance to another body. This figure of the unwilling or willful migrant is thus hard at work in the making of the national body as a social body. Ghassan Hage reflects on “national will” as what requires opposition, what he calls “counter will” and what I have been calling willfulness: “Where the national will has achieved an enduring though never final capacity to keep otherness in check, and feels secure in its capacity to stop the otherness forming a counter-will, national wills are more easy going with national otherness” (1998, 110). Hage implies here that otherness cannot be fully eliminated. In a way, then, the national will requires signs of willfulness or counterwill to justify the project of eliminating the threat of otherness as a security project. At the same time, to become citizens, migrants have a will duty not only in the sense that they must be willing to will in accordance 128

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with the national will but also in the demand they prove they are not willful. To demonstrate national allegiance requires countering the willfulness charge. The figure of the willful migrant plays a crucial rule in securing the borders of the national body: those migrants whose proximity is read as ill will, as not only compromising the health of that body but as aiming to compromise that health. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I discussed the use of rhetoric of “soft touch Britain” as a way of imaging the national body as vulnerable and easily bruised (2004, 2). More recently David Cameron, the current British prime minister, has called for a “muscular liberalism,” for a national body that is strengthened by exercising its muscles in the never-ending project of defending the general interest. An article in the Guardian reports: “David Cameron will warn that immigrants unable to speak English or unwilling to integrate have created a ‘kind of discomfort and disjointedness’ that has disrupted communities across Britain.”39 Those unwilling to integrate dislocate the national body, causing discomfort, disjointing its arms. The word “integration” comes from the Latin “to make whole” and becomes a demand that new arrivals become part by giving allegiance to the whole. The allegiance is presented as a restoration of this whole. Citizenship comes to be presented as what must be forced upon an unwilling and thus willful migrant. A much-repeated mantra in the UK is that “migrants must learn to speak English.”40 This mantra needs to be heard as such: in fact, many of the English language courses are oversubscribed (with long waiting lists). The figure of the unwilling migrant participates in the transformation of citizenship into a requirement, such that the nation is “forced to force” the migrant to become willing. Can we hear, then, in this mantra an echo of the quote from Rousseau that I opened this chapter with? The migrants if they are to become citizens “shall be forced to be free,” constrained by the whole body such that they “obey the general will” ([1762] 1998, 17). What we learn is that those deemed to come after are often “forced to be free,” whether or not they are willing, in order to generalize the will of those whose precedence is given.

Conclusion: The National Rod The reproduction of the national body as a social body also depends on the figure of the willful child. In other words, she might travel from the domain of the family to that of the nation, often imagined in familial The General Will

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terms, as a bond of kin and kind. In these travels, the willful child accrues even more affective value. It was very noticeable in political and popular responses to “the riots” that took place in the UK in the summer of 2011 how quickly this figure was conjured up.41 The events were blamed on wayward and undisciplined children who were described in one especially violent phrase as “feral inner-city waifs and strays.”42 The public discourse on the riots focused on feral children, a wandering and wild tribe, as symptom and cause of the broken nation.43 As Imogen Tyler has noted, the rioters were described not only as feral but as “scum” and as “verminous waste” (2013, 180). The feral child might even be described as the offspring of the vagabond, evidence that if the “wrong bodies” will reproduce then the national body will not. Perhaps feral children embody a wayward branch of a family tree that threatens the legitimacy of the national trunk. It is worth adding here that the figure of the willful child is supermobile and can be used as a frame to interpret different kinds of political actions. She became a technique for delegitimating those involved in protests against the government’s cuts to public spending, including education, as I will discuss further in the next chapter. Protestors were swept up by this figure, as if they protested out of selfishness or obstinacy, or even because of an anarchic desire to destroy the whole body. The figure of the willful child becomes crucial to the national project, allowing that project to be framed as a matter of life and death: the project of straightening the children becomes about saving the nation. When the willful child comes up, the rod comes quickly after. In discussions of the riots, the rod was evoked again and again as the proper instrument for moral correction; commentators regularly referred to the failure to discipline the children as if the riots were caused by nothing other than the sparing of the rod. In chapter 2, I referred to the brutish maxim: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” The maxim is translated: “Spare the rod, spoil the nation.” This was a typical commentary posted during “the riots”: “Schools are no longer allowed to discipline children by using any kind of physical force, and parents who slap or use the rod to discipline an errant child face prosecution from their own children.”44 The rod is exercised by being understood as prohibited. The rod thus keeps its place in the national imaginary as a melancholic object, an object whose loss is still mourned, and which is thus retained as a national idea or ideal. In mourning the rod, it is as if the rod once kept the body of the na-

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tion whole (as if there were no riots in the time of the rod); it is as if the rod would have restored this body, as if the rod could have prevented the masses from revolting. The rod participates in the fantasy of the nation as a “whole social body,” a technique for restoration that rehearses the scene of its destruction.

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Chapter Four

WILLFULNESS AS A STYLE OF POLITICS

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n this final chapter I aim to reflect on how willfulness has been, and can be actively, we might even say willfully, claimed. To affirm willfulness or to find in willfulness “something” affirmative is not the only way we can respond to the charged histories of willfulness I have presented thus far in this book. To affirm willfulness does not mean prescribing a set of behaviors, such as those that have been historically diagnosed as willful,1 as if they are an appropriate or necessary way of doing politics. I have questioned the very status of willfulness as a diagnosis, and I will keep questioning its status even as I mobilize the language of willfulness for different ends. In my discussion of how willfulness can become a style of politics, I do not assume we can always recognize this style. By “style” I refer to a mode or manner of expression. Willfulness is not only what subjects are assigned with but shapes the bodies who receive the assignment. Willfulness could be thought of as political art, a practical craft that is acquired through involvement in political struggle, whether that struggle is a struggle to exist or to transform an existence. Willfulness might be thought of as becoming crafty. Willfulness can become a style of politics through the use of the word “willful” to describe oneself or one’s own politics. To claim to be willful or to describe oneself or one’s stance as willful is to claim the very word that has historically been used as a technique for dismissal. The word “dismissal” derives from dis (apart, away) and mittere (to send, let go). To dismiss is to make something apart. We can accept this dismissal in refusing to become part. Not surprisingly our histories are full of self-declared willful subjects. Take the Heterodoxy Club that operated in Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century, a club for unorthodox women. The members described themselves as “this little band of willful women,” as

Judith Schwarz reveals in her wonderful history of this club (1986, 103). Heterodoxy refers to what is “not in agreement with accepted beliefs.” To be willful is here to be willing to announce your disagreement, and to put yourself behind it. Feminist, queer, and antiracist histories can be thought of as histories of those who are willing to be willful, who are willing to turn a diagnosis into an act of self-description. Let’s go back: let’s listen to what and to who is behind us. Alice Walker describes a “womanist” in the following way: “A black feminist or feminist of color. . . . Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one. . . . Responsible. In charge. Serious” (2005, xi, emphases in original). Julia Penelope describes lesbianism as willfulness: “The lesbian stands against the world created by the male imagination. What willfulness we possess when we claim our lives!” (1992, 42, bold in original). Marilyn Frye’s radical feminism uses the adjective willful: “The willful creation of new meaning, new loci of meaning, and new ways of being, together, in the world, seems to me in these mortally dangerous times the best hope we have” (1992, 9). Together these statements can be heard as claims to willfulness: willfulness as audacity, willfulness as standing against, willfulness as creativity.2 As we know from assembling a willfulness archive, willfulness is usually a charge made by someone against someone. I want to explore how willfulness becomes a charge in Alice Walker’s sense: being “in charge.” If we are charged with willfulness, we can accept and mobilize this charge. To accept a charge is not simply to agree with it. Acceptance can mean being willing to receive. This chapter explores a history of willfulness as a history of those who have been willing to receive its assignment. In following subjects who are willing to be willful, who might even transform a judgment into a project, my argument moves across a range of political situations. There is a risk that in moving across time and space, I move too far, and too quickly. This is a risk I have been prepared to take. I acknowledge that willfulness is a fragile thread that can be stretched only if it is not broken.

Willfulness and Disobedience A willfulness archive is full of acts of disobedience: the willful child is the one whose actions are not only punishable by law, but can be treated as justifications of punishment and thus justifications of the law. It is 134

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perhaps not surprising, then, that the histories of willfulness available to us (examples in which someone has set herself or himself the explicit task of writing “a history of willfulness”) are histories that explore how willfulness became a legal term. For example, Michael Louis Minns offers a “history of willfulness” with the aim of demonstrating that “willfulness is an important legal standard” in criminal tax law (2007, 396). “Willful” comes to mean intentional in two related but distinct senses: an act carried out not in ignorance of the law but in knowledge of the law, and an act carried out “with bad purpose” (403). “Willful” insofar as it qualifies the nature of an action with reference to knowledge and intent remains obscure and difficult as a legal term. As Andrew M. Stengel notes, in an article that draws on the earlier work of Minns, “In American criminal law generally, willful is the legal lizard of mens rea, a chameleon-like term that defies a single, constant definition in New York or any other jurisdiction, and is thus a ‘wild’ term” (2011, 781).3 Wild indeed! Both Minns and Stengel give one case of the use of “willful” in law the status of an originary case: the case of John Cooke, the first solicitor general of the English Commonwealth who led the prosecution of Charles I. John Cooke was accused of “willfully and knowingly” engaging in conduct that led to the death of Charles I and was executed in 1660. I include John Cooke as part of a willfulness archive, one that can be assembled out of biography among other threads, in part because of how his story has been forgotten. John Cooke was an individual willing to stand against injustice. Minns has the following note: “John Cooke was the first recorded person to claim that poverty was ‘a major cause of crime’; to suggest that national healthcare would be appropriate; to suggest that lawyers should do ten percent of their work pro bono; to suggest an end to debtor’s prison; to suggest the abolition of Latin in courts so that common people could understand the proceedings; and to suggest the abolition of portions of the death penalty” (2007, 396). We need this case to leave a trace: it helps to show not simply how willfulness is criminalized (to disobey willfully a law) but how willfulness can be an orientation toward crime (to expose willfully the injustice of the law). Assembling a willfulness archive is another way of addressing one of the oldest political questions: that of sovereignty. The sovereign is the one whose will is given as a command. This is the argument of Hobbes’s Leviathan, written during the turmoil of the English Civil War. As Ross Harrison describes, for Hobbes, the command “is obeyed just on the basis Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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of the will of the sovereign” (2003, 82).4 A command is “where a man, Doe this, or Doe not this, without expecting other reason than the Will of him that sayes it” (Hobbes [1651] 1968, 303). The will of the sovereign must be obeyed whatever the sovereign wills. Those who kill a king are accused of regicide: possibly the act designated as the most willful of willful actions in human history. Is this not the specter of the Grimm story: that the insolence of the subordinate threatens the very life of the sovereign to whom our obedience must be unconditional to qualify as obedience? Not all killings of a king are named regicide (or not all regicides hold on to that name). It is possible to give the act of killing the same king another name: tyrannicide, the killing of a tyrant. This is indeed the title of Geoffrey Robertson’s biography of John Cooke, Tyrannicide (2005). The question of whether the sovereign is a tyrant is a question of whether the sovereign will can be a willful will (of whether the rod, as the agent for eliminating willfulness, can be the willful agent). For the death of a sovereign to be judged as tyrannicide is for the sovereign to become a tyrant. For the death of the tyrant to be judged as regicide is for the tyrant to become a sovereign. The question becomes one not only of will but of judgment. Aquinas argued that subjects do not have a duty to obey a tyrant, by which he meant a sovereign who in “despising the common good, seeks his own private good” (The Treatise, 4.13). For Aquinas sovereign will can be a willful will, in which case the sovereign should or would be judged as a tyrant whom we have a duty not to obey. However, if the tyrant is the judge, he would judge that the judge is not a tyrant. Two key aspects, then, of the legitimating of the will are the rendering of sovereign will as non-willful will and the rendering of those who do not obey the will of the sovereign as willful will. One way of thinking of sovereign will is the right to determine whose wills are the willful wills. At the same time, a rebellion against tyranny might involve those named as willful renaming the sovereign will as willful will, the sovereign as tyrant. The Grimm story could be reread in terms of sovereign will: the sovereign would be embodied by the rod as the legitimate heir of God’s will (the rod as ruler). The story is not only of the rod, but told from the rod’s point of view. It is the story of how the rod legitimates its violence. In my reading I suggested that the rod is not only an embodiment of will (what we can now call the sovereign will) but also a technology for eliminating willfulness from others. A key aspect of disobedience, then, is the judgment of the rod as an illegitimate ruler. To declare the rod an 136

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illegitimate ruler might include the strategy of reassigning the rod as the willful subject.5 One definition of disobedience is the “trait of being unwilling to obey.” A willfulness archive might be full of accounts of how some bodies come to acquire this trait. Just take Antigone: she is unwilling to disobey the command of the sovereign Creon not to bury her brother. She is willing to die before she is willing to obey not because disobedience is her aim (the judgment of willfulness often creates this impression), but because disobedience is required to achieve her aim to bury her brother. To be unwilling to obey what is commanded by the sovereign is to be heard as willful. In Sophocles’s play Antigone is compared to the “hardest iron” (473) by Creon, this girl who “already had learned the art of insolence” (480, 17). The gendering of insolence is clear: the threat of female disobedience is to male authority as well to the sovereign. Creon’s judgment of Antigone’s willfulness is shared by the city: thus sings this chorus that “none that holds authority, Can brook disobedience, O my child, Your self-willed pride has been your ruin” (875, 30). We can understand how and why it is that those who are not willing to obey become “self-willed.” If we focus on why she disobeys, not on that she disobeys (in other words, if we read this story as a story about kinship or different kinds of law— such readings are legitimate but we also need to read in ways that are not legitimate),6 we might miss the significance of the charge of willfulness.7 To be unwilling to obey the will of the sovereign is to accept the charge of willfulness. An acceptance can be a ruin. The history of disobedience is a history of those who are willing to be ruined by standing against what is instituted as right by law. The verb “to obey” derives from the Latin word for hearing: to give ear. To obey is to give your ear to the law. A history of disobedience could be thought of as a history of willful ears, of ears that block the message of the justice of the law, of ears that hear a right as wrong. To hear a wrong is to hear wrongly; it is to be willing to be heard as in the wrong. I began an exploration of the relationship between will and obedience in chapter 2. It might seem that there is little to add in taking up the theme of willful disobedience, that we are simply seeing the other side of the same picture: the one who does not obey is diagnosed as willful. Obedience, whether or not one’s will is in agreement, can thus be a way of avoiding the costs of this diagnosis. The picture, however, is more oblique when seen from this viewing point. An oft-cited sentence from Michel Foucault is: “If there was no resistance, there would be no power relations.” A less Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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cited but equally important sentence follows: “Because it would be just a matter of obedience” (1997b, 167).8 For Foucault, there is power because there is disobedience. Our Grimm story is a lens through which we can show the intelligibility of the argument: if it was “just a matter of obedience” the story would not be necessary. I have already suggested how the story can be heard as a command: “obey!” In order for a command to be given, it is not necessary that this or that person has disobeyed. A part is commanded given the possibility of disobedience; and this possibility rests on will. Obedience is required when a will has not been completed. Another way of responding to willing obedience is thus with surprise: why do some obey the sovereign will if that will requires their will in order to be completed and if that will would also complete their subordination? Consider the concept of “voluntary servitude” developed by Étienne de La Boétie in the sixteenth century, a concept that has had a profound influence in the history of anarchist thought (see Newman 2010). Boétie begins with his own surprise about the consistency of obedience to a tyrant: “For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no power other than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!” ([1576] 2008, 40, emphasis added). Willingness to bear involves not only that subjects agree with the tyrant—or agree to his rule—but that they be willing to carry out or complete his will, to become his subordinate parts. Obedience thus entails being willing to provide the limbs of the tyrant, to refer back to my discussion in the previous chapter, as Boétie himself notes: He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power to confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? (46) 138

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To become subject to the will of the tyrant is thus to provide him with the very organs of this power: you become his feet, his arms, and his eyes. Becoming the limbs of the tyrant means becoming the agent of your own harm: when you provide the tyrant with arms, you are beating yourself. This is another way of considering how the willful arm becomes the straightening rod. We can interrogate further the idea that power “over you” can only take place “through you.” This “through you” is explicitly tied to will: the tyrant exists “only to the extent to which they have willingness to bear with him.” Such a model implies, of course, that power depends on subjects being willing to be subjected. The problem with this model is how it can imply yes as origin (and thus will as culpability). Power can be precisely what makes yes seem necessary for survival. In the first chapter of this book, I reflected on the intimacy of will and force. A usual formulation is that if subjects are willing they are not forced; but I suggested that a subject can be willing in order to avoid being forced. Avoiding the consequences of being forced can be a consequence of force. Becoming willing to bear might be to avoid the costs of not being willing to bear. Subjects might become willing if not being willing is made unbearable. And yet, as we know, there have been those who have been unwilling to bear: more unbearability has been risked in the project of creating a less unbearable world. The project of becoming unwilling to bear can be thought through the lens of willfulness: you have to will “too much,” you have to will “wrongly,” in order not to be willing to bear. It is important to note that for some, any act of will would be designated as willfulness: any will is too much will when you are not supposed to have a will of your own. When we use the word “own” we are most likely to hear ownership: what is my own as what belongs to me and not to others. But think back to the Grimm story: the wrong of the arm is how it ends up willing on its own. My arguments thus far have shown how only some “owns” become wrongs. As Max Stirner notes: “The own will of Me is the State’s destroyer; it is therefore branded by the State as self-will” ([1845] 1993, 196).9 In the case of rebellious action, “ownness” can thus be a diagnosis: not only as a way of implying rebels act out of self-will as I discussed in chapter 3, but as a way of denying the extent of support for rebellion, as if the rebels are the ones who are out on a limb. One way the judgment of willfulness works is to create this impression: that disobedience of the law is unsupported. This impression is how the judgment of law is supported. Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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The creating of an impression can be a technique of power. Maybe we have to “strike” to dislodge an impression. If obedience is a striking situation, then so too is disobedience. In the introduction to this book I considered one history of will as the history of the elimination of willfulness from will. I have also shown how this history can become embodied in a person through the adoption of techniques for instruction. For example, in chapter 2, I reflected on how, in the case of poisonous pedagogy, the aim is not only to eliminate the child’s willfulness but to erase the child’s memory of having a will other than the will of the parents. In chapter 3, I showed how to become a subordinate part of a whole can require giving up a will other than the will of the whole. When parts become willing to obey, they exercise what they are supposed to give up. If obedience is not the starting point, obedience would require forgetting. To become unwilling to obey (or willing not to obey) what is given as a command could be understood as a memory project: to discover a will of one’s own is to recover a will that has not been fully eliminated. Willfulness might be required to recover from the very attempt at its elimination. A self-recovery is a recovery of a collective. Willfulness becomes a vital and shared inheritance: bodies can remember what has not been fully erased from themselves and from other bodies that have become parts of a social body. Willfulness can be a trace left behind, a reopening of what might have been closed down, a modification of what seems reachable, and a revitalization of the question of what it is to be for. Reaching for something, reaching for will, is thus an opening up of the body to what came before, reaching as going back in time. Willful action can create the possibility of not being willing by not giving will up or giving up on will. Thinking of willfulness as an embodied and shared vitality might help us to think of how willfulness is not always expressed as no. As I suggested in chapter 2, it is often more than obedience that is required by obedience (subjects must obey out of their own free will). It is thus possible that disobedience can take the form of an unwilling obedience: subjects might obey a command but do so grudgingly or reluctantly and enact with or through the compartment of their body a withdrawal from the right of the command even as they complete it. The word “reluctance” has a willful history of its own. Though it now tends to be used to refer to being unwilling or disinclined to do something, it derives from the Latin word reluctari, which means to struggle against, to resist, or to oppose. An unwillingness to do something that one nevertheless does can express an opposition to that thing. And, to return to the example of Gwendolyn’s 140

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feeling of guilt in Daniel Deronda, a subject might obey a moral command but hesitate, such that the hesitation leads to the failure to complete the command successfully. Or a subject might obey a command in front of an officer so that willfulness can be expressed behind the back: willfulness as plotting. It is possible, in other words, to obey willfully. Perhaps when obedience is performed willfully, disobedience becomes the end: what obedience aims to bring about. Willfulness can be understood as the labor required to reach that no,10 which might even require saying yes along the way. The effort to acquire a will to disobey is the effort not only to say no but to say it publicly, to say it loudly, or to perform it through one’s own bodily action or inaction. I will return to the intimacy of body and will in the final section of this chapter. We have behind us the agentic potential of these noes which might even be historically audible in the form of a shout or a scream: the collective sound of those who have not being willing to obey the will of the sovereign or the body that takes his place. If a willfulness archive is an archive of incompletion, no wonder it is noisy: it includes the sound of voices raised in protest against the injustice of commands. Voices can be arms, raised in the hope of disturbing the ground. We can understand why many philosophers of decolonization have stressed the importance of political will. Frantz Fanon describes how revolution becomes possible when colonized subjects “violate” the “directives of the commanding bodies” (1967, 23). What Fanon calls for is a kind of willing willfulness: a will to create a new world by opposing the old directives.11 In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon suggests: “The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded” ([1961] 2001, 35). To will this change is at the same time not to be willing to bear or reproduce the present; the project of willing thus begins with, but exceeds, negation: to oppose the old directives is to will what follows. Aimé Césaire too offers an account of the will in decolonization. Giving a genealogy of the term “negritude” he notes: “That’s when we adopted the term Negri, as a term of defiance. It was a defiant name” ([1955] 2000, 89). To adopt a term of defiance requires a will to defy: “There was in us a defiant will and, we found a violent affirmation in the words Negri and negritude” (89). A defiance of the will can be affirmed by the words you send out. A defiance of will might involve being willing to provide evidence of insubordination. Willfulness might be required to act when you do not have the right to act. Think of black radicalism including the Black Power movement Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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(so often charged with willfulness; we can hear what is at stake in the charge) as a movement made up of those who were willing to disobey the command of unjust laws, whatever the penalty. Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham City Jail wrote of unjust laws, drawing on philosophers such as Aquinas and Martin Buber, as laws that “end up relegating persons to things” ([1963] 1969, 78). To break an unjust law, he writes, one must “do it openly, lovingly” and “with a willingness to accept the penalty” (78); indeed, he repeats this phrase a second time on the same page: “willingness to accept the penalty.”12 The penalty for breaking the unjust law is a way of bringing attention to the injustice of the law in the name of a future justice. King reminds us of the price of obedience to unjust laws (such as in the case of the obedience to the will of the führer in National Socialism) as a price we should never have been willing to pay (79). One could recall here the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Civil disobedience is a necessary part of non-cooperation. You assist an administration most effectively by obeying its orders or decrees” ([1939] 2008, 368).13 Political willfulness could be thought of as becoming unwilling to give assistance to those who administer unjust laws. An unwillingness to assist can be performed by what bodies do not do: disobedience enacted as inaction. To disobey here is not only about not obeying this or that order or decree but also not giving any assistance to the regime that gives those orders and decrees. Political labor can be the effort not to be moved. Take Rosa Parks’s refusal to obey the bus driver’s command to leave her seat at the front of the bus on December 1, 1955. Her action led to the black community in Montgomery boycotting the city bus system: individual act, collective action. Rosa Parks had not planned to protest on that day but said afterward “she had been pushed as far as she could” (cited in Theoharis 2009, 123). Of course the action was not an accident; it did not just happen. Rosa Parks had a long history of activism. A willful action is not always planned but it is always in some sense willed: it is what a body gets behind. Willfulness here involves being unwilling to move: not to budge, to refuse to give up a seat, or to take up an assigned seat. This is how an assignment of willfulness can get in the way of an assignment. As many have pointed out, including Rosa Parks herself,14 she was not the first black person to be willing to disobey this command. As Jeanne Theoharis argues, if Rosa Parks’s stance that day was “an independent and personal choice” what “made it the catalyst for a movement was certainly not a singular act but years of organizing by Parks and others in Montgomery 142

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that made people ready for collective action” (2009, 123). Collective action might be necessary to make people ready for collective action. Even if Rosa Parks’s will to disobey on that day was not the starting point, her willingness to symbolize possibility by actualizing possibility did matter: she was “willing to take up the role of the mother of the civil rights movement” (Theoharis 2009, 132).15 Rosa Parks could be understood as affirming a willful inheritance in her willingness to disobey an unjust law, an inheritance of actions that have not been recorded by official histories but are nevertheless part of history. It is the willingness of a community that allows an act to acquire the status of willful for others, to be available for recall as political memory, such that a name can become charged with hope. Indeed, thinking of the history that allows Rosa Parks as a black woman radical to become a symbol of the civil rights movement allows us to explore the complexity of the relation between individual and collective willfulness.16 A community is willing for an individual actor to receive the willfulness assignment before an individual can receive this assignment. At the same time, a collective will can only be realized through individuals who are willing to push back in order not to be pushed into obedience. We learn from the way in which the priority of individual or collective willfulness is reversible; willfulness becomes what travels, as a relation to others, those who come before, those who come after. Disobedience involves a chain of action that needs to be unbroken. A political action can be what is performed to stop a chain from breaking. The individual capacity not only to say no but to repeat the no in what bodies do not do could be described as a willful gift: a no is what can be given to others. A willful gift is also a willing passing, a passing of will from one to another, will not as a thing, but as the possibility of not being reduced to thing, of not being compelled by an external force, including the wills of others, enshrined in or as law.

Diversity Work as Willful Work When political actors aim not to complete a will given as command, or to get in the way of that completion, they might have to push harder: the very effort required for such actions is necessary for them to be possible. Willfulness might be required given that the will is unevenly distributed. An action might be judged as willful not only when it gets in the way of the completion of an action that has been given support but as an action Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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being completed without support. However, it is not always self-evident what or who is being supported: a command can be given without being supported as I will show in this section. To think through the question of will in relation to support, I will distinguish between willfulness as a character diagnosis (what is assumed as behind an action) and willfulness as the effect of a diagnosis (what is required to complete an action). Sometimes you can only stand up by standing firm. Sometimes you can only hold on by becoming stubborn. I suggested in the first chapter of this book that social will can be experienced as the momentum of the crowd. You feel that momentum when you are going the wrong way. No one person has to push or shove for you to feel the crowd as pushing and shoving. For you to keep going you have to push harder than any of those who are going the right way. For some bodies mere persistence, “to continue steadfastly,” requires great effort, an effort that might appear to others as stubbornness or obstinacy, as an insistence on going against the flow. You have to become insistent to go against the flow and you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. I think of this as a life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being. How do know which way things are flowing? Usually by not going that way. Let’s think of institutions. They are crowds; and they have orientation devices that direct the flow of human traffic in particular ways. I want to draw from some examples I collected as part of my research on “diversity work” within institutions (see Ahmed 2012).17 I am using diversity work in two senses: firstly, diversity work can refer to work that has the explicit aim of transforming an institution; and secondly, diversity work can be what is required when you do not “quite” inhabit the norms of an institution. These two senses can meet in a body: those who do not “quite” inhabit the norms of an institution are often given the task of transforming those norms. It is important to note that diversity is a mobile word. Institutions speak the language of diversity consistently and with fluency; claiming they have it, even that they are it. It might appear that diversity is part of an institutional flow. Diversity is the way things are going. And yet a common experience of diversity practitioners, those appointed by institutions to institutionalize their commitments to diversity, is that of the institution as a brick wall. One practitioner says: “So much of the time it is a banging your head against the brick wall job” (Ahmed 2012, 27). A job description becomes a wall description. Diversity work is an experience of 144

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coming against something that does not, and seemingly, will not move. I want to take an example of an encounter with an institutional wall: When I was first here there was a policy that you had to have three people on every panel who had been diversity trained. But then there was a decision early on when I was here, that it should be everybody, all panel members, at least internal people. They took that decision at the equality and diversity committee which several members of smt were present at. But then the director of Human Resources found out about it and decided we didn’t have the resources to support it, and it went to council with that taken out and council were told that they were happy to have just three members, only a person on council who was an external member of the diversity committee went ballistic— and I am not kidding went ballistic—and said the minutes didn’t reflect what had happened in the meeting because the minutes said the decision was different to what actually happened (and I didn’t take the minutes by the way). And so they had to take it through and reverse it. And the Council decision was that all people should be trained. And despite that I have then sat in meetings where they have just continued saying that it has to be just 3 people on the panel. And I said but no Council changed their view and I can give you the minutes and they just look at me as if I am saying something really stupid, this went on for ages, even though the Council minutes definitely said all panel members should be trained. And to be honest sometimes you just give up. (Ahmed 2012, 124–25) It seems as if there is an institutional decision. Individuals within the institution must act as if the decision has been made for it to be made. If they do not, it has not. A decision made in the present about the future (under the promissory sign “we will”) can be overridden by the momentum of the past. The past becomes like that crowd: what directs action not only does not have to be given as a command but can even resist a command. An institutional will can be a will that is in the process of being completed because it has energy and momentum behind it. A decision does not need to be made for the action to be completed and a decision cannot easily intervene in its completion. In this case, the head of personnel did not need to take the decision out of the minutes for the decision not to bring something into effect. Perhaps an institution can say yes when there is not enough behind that yes for something to be brought about. The institutional wall is when a will, a yes, does not bring Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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something about, a yes that conceals this “not bringing” under the sign of “having brought.” It is only the practical labor of coming up against the institution that allows this wall to become apparent. To those who do not come against it, the wall does not appear: the institution is experienced as yes, as open, committed, and diverse. We might assume institutional will as that which is necessary to bring something about. When used in this way institutional will operates in the future tense: what an institution is willing to do when willing requires an additional exertion of energy or effort. When used in this way, institutional will would be required to break an institutional habit. I want to suggest an institutional habit could be understood as a continuation of will. Hegel suggests that human beings “stand upright” as an act of will that has been converted into habit: “That a human being stands upright has become a habit through his own will” ([1827–28] 2007, 156–57). A habit is thus a “continuation” of willing: “It is a continuous will that I stand but I no longer need to will standing as such” (157). A habit is a continuation of willing what no longer needs to be willed. This is an important way of reframing what we denote by habit as well as by will: a habit is not empty of intent or purpose; a will does not require an individual act of volition.18 An institutional will is what is continued precisely because it does not need to be willed. The wall is an institutional no that does not need to become the subject of an utterance; indeed, you come up against the wall when a yes does not bring something about. Using Hegel’s terms, a wall could be described as an “institutional standing.” There is “a continuous will that [it] stand but [it] no longer need[s] to will standing as such.” Perhaps this wall is how history becomes concrete. When we think of concrete we might think of the cement used to build walls. But concrete has an older sense: deriving from Latin concretus, “condensed, hardened, thick, hard, stiff, curdled, congealed, clotted,” figuratively “thick; dim,” literally “grown together.” To think about the wall as will in concrete form is to suggest that what has been willed can become hard or condensed, becoming part of the materiality of an institution. It is not then simply or only that the will of some comes first. The will of those whose precedence is assumed becomes embedded in the materiality of worlds; this will is worlding. The will of those who come first does not need to be expressed as will. In the first chapter of this book I suggested that for those who come after, the will becomes work: you have to be willing to adjust to the will of those who precede you. Diversity work can be thought of as will work: you have to become willing to adjust to 146

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a world that does not accommodate you. An accommodation is both a house or dwelling and a process of fitting or making fit. Diversity work is accommodation; some have to adjust in order to be housed. Perhaps diversity work becomes willful work when we are less accommodating. It is not only the bodies of those deemed to come after who have to make willing adjustments. Think also of how adjustments have to be made to spaces insofar as those spaces assume certain bodies; the pavement might have to be adjusted to support the passing through of those in wheelchairs; a podium might have to be adjusted to support those who are not the right height; a timetable might have to be adjusted to support those with child care responsibilities, and so on. I noted in the first chapter how bodies can be experienced as “willful things,” if they get in the way of an action being completed. Bodies can be experienced in this way, as getting in the way, when spaces are not made “accessible” to those bodies. Willfulness can be a bodily experience of not being accommodated by a space: how a space is organized can become what “gets in the way” of a forward progression. Access, as Tanya Titchkosky (2011) has observed, should not be understood simply as a bureaucratic procedure, but is about how spaces are experienced and lived as orientated toward bodies, with their differing capacities and incapacities.19 That we notice these modifications of spaces to make them more accessible reveals how spaces are already shaped around certain bodies. As Nirmal Puwar (2004) describes, some bodies are perceived as “space invaders.” The modifications required for spaces to be opened to other bodies are often registered as willful impositions on those spaces. We learn from this: when wills become worldly, we do not recognize how the world has already adjusted to those wills. If institutional and public spaces assume certain bodies, then history becomes concrete by enabling those bodies to flow through spaces. In my discussion of habit and attunement in chapter 2, I drew on William James who quotes from the work of M. Léon Dumont to describe how over time a garment begins to cling more and more to the body that wears it. Maybe an institution is like an old garment: it acquires the shape of those who tend to wear it, such that it becomes easier to wear if you have that shape. Privilege could be thought of in these terms: that which is wearing. Another of Dumont’s examples is the reduction over time of the force required to work a locking mechanism. The more you use a mechanism, the less effort is required; repetition smoothes the passage of the key through the hole. James describes this reduction of force or Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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effort as essential to the phenomenon of habituation. I would claim the lessening of effort as essential to the phenomenon of privilege. If less effort is required to unlock the door for the key that fits the lock, so too less effort is required to pass through an institution for bodies that fit. Social privilege is like an energy-saving device: less effort is required to pass through. No wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so “trying.” Not to fit, or to fail to inhabit a norm, can often mean being charged with willfulness, whatever you say or do. In chapter 3, I noted how becoming a citizen can require “countering the willfulness charge.” This countering can involve self-modification. We might note firstly that diversity is offered as a form of citizenship: as an invitation made to people of color to become part, to add color to the body of the institution. Diversity can take the form of a welcome. People of color in being welcomed are treated as guests, as temporary residents in someone else’s home. People of color are welcomed on condition they integrate into organizational culture. In order to meet these conditions, you have to counter the willfulness charge: “I think with a person of colour there’s always a question of what’s this woman going to turn out like . . . they’re ner vous about appointing people of colour into senior positions. . . . Because if I went in my Sari and wanted prayer time off and started rocking the boat and being a bit different and asserting my kind of culture I’m sure they’d take it differently” (Ahmed 2012, 158). Some forms of difference are heard as assertive, as “rocking the boat.” Some forms of difference become legible as willfulness, as if you are only different because you are insistent (on being different). You have to counter that charge by modifying your appearance, by softening your demands, by not asserting any differences because those differences are already registered as assertive. You have to become sympathetic. I have already noted how when parts are sympathetic, they are agreeable: they are not noticeable; they become part of a whole. An unsympathetic part fails to recede: “I have to pretend that I am not here because I don’t want to stick out too much because everybody knows I am the only black person here” (Ahmed 2012, 41). You don’t want to stick out too much because you do stick out. Think of the expression “sticking out like a sore thumb.” To be a willful part is to be a sore part. Yes, the sore thumb has come up again. When we fail to inhabit a norm (when we are questioned or question ourselves whether we are “it,” or pass as or into “it”) then it becomes more apparent, rather like the institutional wall: a sign of immobility, what blocks a forward progression. An institutional norm is also a social 148

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category. A category can be a house, that which gives residence. Some have to “insist” on belonging to the categories that give residence to others. Take the category of professor. An example: we are at a departmental meeting with incoming students. We are all talking about our own courses, one after the other, each coming up to the podium. Someone is chairing, introducing each of us in turn. She says, this is Professor so-and-so. This is Professor such-and-such. On this particular occasion, I happen to be the only female professor, and the only professor of color in the room (the latter was not surprising as I am the only professor of color in the department). When it is my turn to come up, the chair says: “This is Sara.” I am the only professor introduced without using the title professor. What do you do? What to do? Diversity work is how we fill this gap or hesitation. If you point this out, or if you ask to be referred to by the proper name, you are having to insist on what is simply given to others; not only that, you are heard as insistent, or even for that matter as self-promotional (as insisting on your dues). Not only do you have to become insistent in order to receive what was automatically given to the others; but your insistence confirms the improper nature of your residence. We do not tend to notice the assistance given to those whose residence is assumed. Insistence is a form of political labor, given that it is unevenly distributed as a requirement. Insistence can thus be understood as a political grammar. For example, to be transgendered can be to experience the labor of having to insist on what is automatically given to the others: having to insist on being “he” or “she” or “not he” or “not she” when you are assigned the wrong pronoun; having to keep insisting, where the necessity of repetition gets in the way of the hope of things just receding. Sometimes you might have to insist on not being gendered by pronouns at all: willfulness can be the refusal to be housed by gender. And to be in a same-sex relationship is to experience the gendered pronoun as a sign of struggle, one that is both personal as well as political: when your partner is assumed to be “he” or “she” you have to correct the assumption, and the very act of correction can be heard as a willful imposition on others.20 It is exhausting, this labor, which is required because certain norms are still at work in how people are assumed to be and to gather; even if we have rights and recognition, the ongoing and everyday nature of these struggles with signs are signs of a struggle. A desire for a more normal life does not necessary mean identification with norms, but can be simply this: a desire to escape the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist. Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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Things appear fluid if you are going the ways things are going. If you are not going that way you might need to become willful to keep going. A flow is also an effect of bodies that are going the same way. To go is to gather. A flow can be an effect of gatherings of all kinds: gatherings of tables, for instance, as kinship objects that support human gatherings. We can pause here and note the willful part can also be a limb, a table, a jug: any bits of matter can be attributed as willful if they do allow the completion of an action for which they are assumed to be intended. The queer table would certainly show us the promise of willfulness, of how objects can be reassembled by not supporting an action that has been agreed (see Ahmed 2006). A queer experience: you are left waiting at a table when a straight couple walks into the room and is attended to straightaway. We might also think of this as a female experience: as if without a man present at the table, you do not appear: you do not “knock at the door of consciousness” to borrow again a description from Husserl ([1952] 1989, 105).21 For some, you have to become insistent to be the recipient of a social action; you might have to announce your presence, wave your arm, saying: “Here I am!” For others, it is enough just to turn up because you have already been given a place at the table before you take up your place. Willfulness describes the uneven consequences of this differentiation. In response to my description, someone said she thought it reduced queer and feminist politics to self-assertion, the “I am” as what or who is “here.” But who is heard as assertive? Which acts of will are attributed as self-willed? We can learn to become cautious about how self-will is used to dismiss the claims of others. You do not need to become self-willed if your will is already accomplished by the general will. We tend to notice categories when we come up against them: when they do not allow you to flow through space.22 Willfulness might be an experience of coming up against. It is important, however, that we not reduce willfulness to againstness. It is this reduction, after all, that allows the willful subject to be dismissed, as if she is only going “the other way” because she is for being against. There is a family of words around willfulness (stubborn, obstinate, defiant, rude, reckless) that creates a structure of resemblance (we feel we know what she is like).23 This familalism is how an arresting can happen. This familalism also explains how easily willfulness is confused with, and reduced to, individualism.24 In the previous chapter I referred to what we could call loosely “the veil debates” by considering how the veil has become a willful part. The looseness of 150

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the debates can be referred back to the looseness of the “veil” as a sign. The veil is a catchy word because of its looseness.25 I am going to keep using the word “veil” because of its catchiness: we need to account for how some can be caught. If we describe the Muslim woman who covers as willful it might seem that we are reading her action in terms of a Western idea of individual freedom and dissent. Alternatively we might challenge the Western idea of the Muslim woman as submissive, as always and only receding to the will of others.26 But to recognize the action of veiling as individualism would be to misrecognize the act (to conflate what is necessary to complete an action with what is behind an action). Willfulness can be required in order to persist not only as an individual but in one’s very loyalty to a culture whose existence is deemed as a threat. This is how an act that in one situation is ordinary (an act that might not feel like an act, as what you do, but rather as an expression or an unfolding of who you are) can in another situation require conscious willed effort: you have to work to keep something going as otherwise it would recede from a horizon of possibility. Willfulness can be required to sustain an attachment, one that might have previously been experienced as habit, as a “second skin.”27 When it is assumed you are holding on because you are stubborn you might have to become stubborn to hold on.28 Of course, we must recognize the diversity of ways in which we might gather around what has acquired the status of a willful sign. For some Muslim women, if wearing the veil was a habit, then to keep wearing the veil once it has been officially prohibited or made into the object of general suspicion might require becoming willful. In this becoming, what had previously receded becomes part of the foreground in ways that can be experienced as estranging (this is how you can pass into the figure of the stranger in retaining a familiar). Or for other Muslim women, once the veil has become a willful part, then it might become something to be willed: you might wear the veil in a conscious and deliberate act of loyalty, which is at once an expression of disloyalty to the nation as a “whole social body,” a disagreement with those who assume the right to determine what Muslim women can and cannot do. In following willfulness we can track the complexity of how we gather over, through, with, and around its signs.29 One of the risks of assembling a willfulness archive is that we might gather too much material under this sign. After all: willfulness has already gathered too much. And because the willful subject is so impressive, we Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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might in following her, assume the impression as her own; we might take it for granted that to be willful is to act in a certain kind of way, an act that stands out because it stands apart from the ordinary. In this risk is an opportunity. It is because willful actions are often assumed to stand out, to be striking, that it becomes possible to act willfully, to oppose your will to what is already or generally willed, by not standing out. We can pass as willing in order to be willful. Somewhat ironically then, it is given that the willful subject is so impressive, because she has already gathered up too much, that we acquire even more possibilities for willful action, by appearing in ways that are not consistent with this impression. I am reminded of a diversity officer who talked about being willing to use the happy languages of diversity precisely because she thought of herself as a counter-hegemonic worker (Ahmed 2012, 75): she was willing to appear with so she could work against. There are risks in such a strategy: as I will argue with more detail in the final section of this chapter, the selfperception of being willful can be a way of not registering how one’s will is accomplished through agreement. You can also “become with” in the strategy to “appear with” by losing yourself in the appearance.

Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects) Once you are charged with willfulness, you are not with. An attribution of willfulness also involves the attribution of negative affect: you become charged with “not” in being not with. To be not with is to get in the way, to “go against the flow” in the way you go. Conversations are also flows; they are saturated. We hear this saturation as atmosphere. The willful subject shares an affective horizon with the feminist killjoy as the ones who “ruin the atmosphere.” Understanding how willfulness is an affective judgment has given me a new handle on the figure of the feminist killjoy. I previously wrote about my experiences of being a feminist daughter at the family table (Ahmed 2010). Those experiences involve rolling eyes (the rolling eyes might be how some body parts in their expression register the willfulness of others). You are at the table and someone says something you find problematic. Do you say anything or do you say nothing? When a decision is required because of how you hear what you hear, the situation can be experienced as hesitation, even as crisis. It is so familiar that scene. And it can be empowering to find that scene elsewhere, in other words, not only to have your own memories handy but to be reached by the hands of others. I have been collecting 152

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“feminist killjoy” scenes. I consider this part of the work of becoming a killjoy: collection. One scene in Rachel Cusk’s novel Arlington Park (2006) touches my feminist killjoy heart.30 There is a dinner. And if there is a dinner, there is a table, around which friends gather. One character, Matthew, is speaking. He “talked on and on. He talked about politics and taxes and the people who got in his way” (2006, 15). He complains about women who take maternity leave. He relates a story of a woman he is going to sack unless she comes straight back to work after having a baby. One woman, Juliet, is silent at first. But eventually she can’t stand it anymore; she cannot let her silence imply she is in agreement. She says, “That’s illegal.” She says, “She could take you to court” (16). Illegal: how a word can cut through an atmosphere like a knife. It is Juliet who is heard as sharp. Matthew responds: “You want to be careful.” And then, you come up against it, that wall of perception: “She saw how close she was to his hatred: it was like a nerve she was within a millimeter of touching. ‘You want to take care. You can sound strident at your age’ ” (17). Feminist killjoys: living in proximity to a nerve. Note also how to become a feminist killjoy can be an aging assignment (“at your age”). The woman who speaks out becomes an old hag, a woman who does not take care or does not care, who willingly removes herself from the sphere of male interest. I am reminded of Mary Daly’s treatment of the haggard in Gynecology: “an intractable person, especially: a woman reluctant to yield to wooing” (1978, 15). Daly points out that “willful” is one of the “obsolete” meanings of haggard. Indeed, Daly’s radical feminist reclaiming of the haggard (which she calls hagiography) could be considered an important predecessor to my attempts to reclaim the figure of the feminist killjoy, along with other willful subjects. Daly describes “haggard writing” as writing “by and for women” who are “intractable, willful, wanton and unchaste, and especially those who are reluctant to yield to wooing” (15–16).31 Willfulness is often used to diagnose “reluctance to yield” as a problem of female character. This description reminds us heterosexuality can work as an affective economy, a system of charges and being charged: women who do not yield to men’s advances become unyielding. We can hear what is at stake in how women who speak out are heard. To sound strident is to be heard as loud, harsh, or grating. Some styles of presentation, some points of view, are heard as excessively and unpleasantly forceful. You know from what you are called. You know that other voices can be saying the same thing over and over again, even saying those Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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things loudly, and not be heard as strident. They can be saying wrong things, mean things, unjust things, and not be heard as strident. But you become a problem if you even dare to say that what they say is a problem. Oh the frustration of being found frustrating! Oh the difficulty of being assumed to be difficult! You might even begin to sound like what they hear you as being like: you talk louder and faster as you can tell you are not getting through. The more they think you say, the more you have to say. You have to repeat yourself when you keep coming up against the same thing. You become mouthy. Perhaps we are called mouthy when we say what others do not want to hear; to become mouthy is to become mouth, reduced to the speaking part as being reduced to the wrong part. The figure of the feminist killjoy recalls those broken pots and jugs discussed in chapter 1. The feminist killjoy too might fly off the handle, an expression used to indicate the suddenness of anger. Rather like the jug she is viewed as too full of her own will, as not empty enough to be filled by the will of others. She is assumed not only to cause her own breakage but to break the thread of a social connection (a history enacted as judgment: feminism as self-breakage).32 A willfulness archive does include broken threads; it is full of scenes of breakage. Feminists can be filled with the content of their disagreement: when we are no longer willingly helpful we are judged as willfully unhelpful. Perhaps being no longer willingly helpful simply refers to the condition of not being willing. Feminists are often judged as willful women because we are unwilling to participate in sexist culture; more than that, we are willing to critique the very requirement that women be willing.33 To be unwilling to participate is to have too much will. In other words, we are judged as willful when we are not willing. To transform this judgment into a project requires we make another willful translation. We are willing not to be willing: not willing translated into willing not. And then: it is as if she disagrees because she is disagreeable; it is as if she opposes something because she is being oppositional. To be filled “with will” is to be emptied “of thought” as if speaking about injustice, about power, about inequality, is just another way of getting your way. Those who “get in the way” are often judged as “getting their own way.” Feminism: a history of disagreeable women!34 If we hear this sentence as an exclamation it can sound empowering. And yet, when you are filled with the content of disagreement, others do not hear the content of your disagreement. There is a “not hearing” at stake in the figure of the feminist killjoy, without question. And there is no doubt that some of these 154

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experiences are wearing, even when we convert that figure into a source of energy and potential. And no wonder in the repetition of what we come up against, we might snap. To snap might be to “snap the bond of fate,” to draw again on Lucretius’s formulation. A bond of fate can be fatal. Think of a situation in which a bond has become violent. What can make living with violence hard is how hard it is even to imagine or think the possibility of its overcoming; you might be isolated; you might be materially dependent; you might be down, made to think and feel you are beneath that person; you might be attached to that person, or believe it when that person says he or she will change; you might have become part of that person, have your life so interwoven with that person that it is hard to imagine what would be left of you if you left. But in spite of all of that, there can be a point, a breaking point, when it is “too much” and what did not seem possible becomes necessary. She fights back; she speaks out. She has places to go because other women have been there. No wonder that leaving a situation of violence can feel like a snap: a bond of fate has indeed been broken. Perhaps the slow time of endurance can only be ended by a sudden movement. Or perhaps the movement might only seem sudden because we cannot “see” the slower times of bearing, what Lauren Berlant (2007) has called compellingly “slow death.” I think one of the reasons the feminist film A Question of Silence (1982, dir. Marleen Gorris) remains so powerful is because it shows what we can call feminist snap. The film follows three different women: each of them has her own story, but they share what they are asked to endure: patriarchal culture. The film works by juxtaposing scenes of being worn down, worn out; sexism becomes a worn thread of connection. I saw this film most recently at the London Feminist Film Festival in 2012. One scene in particular had the audience of (mostly) women groaning in recognition. It is another table scene: there is one woman seated at a table of men; she is the secretary. And she makes a suggestion. No one hears her: the question of silence is in this moment not a question of not speaking but of not being heard. A man then makes the exact same suggestion she has already made: and the other men turn to him, congratulating him for being constructive. She says nothing. It is at that moment she sits there in silence, a silence that is filled or saturated with memories of being silenced: her memories, ours. Femininity can be lived as the accumulation of experiences of being silenced; of having to overlook how you are looked over. Sometimes we become accommodating because our views are not accommodated, a not that happens, over and over again. Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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If in the film the women are shown as worn down, it does not just depict this wearing. There is an event. Three women happen upon each other because they happen to be in the same dress boutique at the same time. It might be a coincidence that they arrive at the same time, but that they are here is no surprise; they are doing what many women do, shopping for clothes as part of the ordinary routines of femininity. But while doing ordinary things they commit what appears to be an extraordinary act. One of the women is stopped by a male shopkeeper as she attempts to steal an item of clothing; to take what she has not bought, what is not rightfully hers. Maybe she is stealing as an enactment of what has been taken from her. Maybe she experiences this event of being stopped as the injustice of not having recognized what has been taken from her. She is used to this injustice; she has come to expect it; but this time she snaps. They snap. These three women each have a hand in murdering the man with the tools that usually extend the female body: shopping trolleys, coat hangers, the high heel of a shoe. If it is an act of rage and revenge, it is directed not only against this man, but this world. It is a seemingly random act of violence, a confirmation of female madness to the eyes of the law, but the film is told from the women’s point of view: and patriarchy becomes the reason. When they are on trial, in the courtroom the women start laughing at the patriarchal reasoning of the Law. The laughter might be heard as hysterical, when you have a worldview that prevents you recognizing this reason. Maybe women are heard as reactive, as rash, as unreasonable, because the world we respond to, the injustices that keep coming up, again and again, do not come into view. I have already noted how feminists might become mouthy; you might even shout in frustration at the difficulty of getting through; shout because you are already heard as shouting, realizing an expectation in response to an expectation. We learn from this film how laughter can be another kind of willful and rebellious noise.35 When one woman begins laughing at the law, her laughter spreads. More and more women are caught up by it. To laugh compulsively, even violently, at the reasoning of Law, to gender as reason, is to expose its violence. It is also to risk being heard as the origin of the violence exposed. However the women’s laughter is heard, it becomes contagious for those women in the courtroom who “get it.” Their laughter becomes a feminist lead. They leave the courtroom. Even if they are asked to leave, they walk out willingly, laughing with and to each other.

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Feminist snap: to break the bond of femininity can be to make room for life by leaving the room. Perhaps it is willfulness that allows us to leave the room. Even if willfulness can be containing, even if willfulness can make us feel cramped, we can by accepting this assignment create room. I have already noted how the English word “willful” in the story is a translation of the German word eigensinnig which is also sometimes translated as “stubborn.”36 It is worth noting here that this word is crucial to the work of the German social historian Alf Lüdtke in his investigation of the tactics for survival and resistance employed by German workers in the early twentieth century. He notes “they occupied space and time for themselves, and demonstrated their willfulness” (1995, 227, emphasis added).37 Eigensinnig or “self-willed distance” is a way of creating a space of one’s own, of coming apart, or becoming apart from a structured and oppressive environment. Here “ownness” is what allows a survival of “belowness.” Willfulness or eigensinnig can be a way of withdrawing from the pressures of an oppressive world and can even become part of a world-making project.38 Willfulness as a diagnosis can thus be willingly inhabited, as a way of creating a room of one’s own. Willfulness thus becomes an assignment in another sense: a project or task that we can take up in our everyday negotiations with the world. Willfulness is pedagogy: if I was given this assignment, I have learned so much from it. I have learned how whatever you say can be swept up and swept away by the charge of willfulness. The sweeping seems to become more vigorous when what you are saying is about the politics of saying. Becoming aware of how willfulness is an unjust assignment can be a lesson in the grammars of injustice. I am not only referring here to a sense that we might have that willfulness is false as a charge, an unfair dismissal, though this sense can be acute: we can feel this false. The experience of being attributed as willful can also heighten your consciousness of the work required to keep social surfaces shiny, the “will work” required to keep up the signs of getting along. When we don’t keep up, so much can surface. The experience of being assigned as willful can be a mobilizing experience. When we are not willing to adjust, we are maladjusted. Perhaps willfulness turns the diagnosis into a call: don’t adjust to an unjust world! As with other political acts of reclaiming negative terms, reclaiming willfulness is not necessarily premised on an affective conversion, that is, on

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converting a negative into a positive term. On the contrary, to claim willfulness might involve not only hearing the negativity of the charge but insisting on retaining that negativity: the charge after all is what keeps us proximate to scenes of violence. Consider Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s powerful reflections on the term “queer.” She writes: “If queer is a politically potent term, which it is, that’s because far from being capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy” (1993, 4). Willfulness might be a style of politics because it too cleaves to that scene. The experience of being that willful child can be a crucial part of political mobilization. The scene is not only a childhood one: there are many scenes of being seated at a table with others, in which willfulness becomes a charge that is taken up or taken on by those charged. Do you remember being charged? Do you remember how it felt? I remember.39 I write with this memory, from this memory. Willfulness becomes an archival project when we share these memories. Activism also involves tables, ways of being seated in order to take up a task. And a table can be a house, assembled as dwelling space. Let’s think about the conference table. In the Sexual Nationalism conference that took place in Amsterdam in January 2011, to which I was invited but was unable to attend (I say this, as the invitation came to matter), there was what we might call “race trouble.”40 The conference organizers in a statement written after the event give us a history of this trouble entitled “After Amsterdam.”41 They reflect back to their initial calls for papers and list of invited speakers. They admit this call “hardly reflected the diversity of scholars working in this field.” I want to comment here on how the use of the word “diversity” contains the trouble that is named: rather than the statement explicitly naming the problem of whiteness (the speakers listed were all white but one, which is often a typical list in my experience, perhaps this “but one” is possible because the “but one” can stand for all who are not white). They then state the “resulting impression contradicted our explicit intention.” If whiteness is an impression, then it is assumed to be a false one. The organizers note that they invited more people (to counter, perhaps, the false impression: is diversity a way of creating a happier impression?). The statement proceeds: “We made a concerted effort to address this concern—which included finding extra funding for guests. Some of the people we contacted (in particular Sara Ahmed and Gloria Wekker) were not available these

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dates, but we were pleased that others accepted our invitation to come as fully-funded guests.” Let’s think about this invitation: offered here as an extension. Even those who did not participate (such as Gloria and I) are included as a sign of the potential reach of an embrace. Note also the repeated emphasis on funding; to be a guest is to be positioned as indebted, as relying on the good will of the hosts. No wonder that those who were invited “later” used the event of their participation to talk about the politics of invitation. No wonder that in the final panel two queerof-color academics, Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn, refused to take part; they refused to become part. The statement uses a “we” as a feeling statement at this point, the point of their refusal: “We still want to express regret with this decision by two of our guests. While we acknowledge that the list we first published in July manifested real political shortcomings, we believed that the final list of invited scholars, as well as the overall conference programme, did not eventually justify such a perception of marginalization.” Did not eventually justify? Here the very emphasis on the effort of the organizers to extend the invitation to other others, that is, to other queers of color, is used to establish that the queer-of-color critique of the event is not justifiable: it is used to counter the critique, to treat that critique as a false perception. Those who perceive whiteness as a problem become the problem. The organizers then express a further regret that Gert Hekma, who had already articulated racist views about Islam on an e-mail sent out to all speakers in advance of the event, would use his participation on the final panel to articulate racist views about Islam. What were they expecting, one wonders. But note how when diversity becomes a table, one assembled in good faith, then racism is put on the table, as just another item to be tabled. This regret about how Hekma uses his participation is expressed alongside the regret about the nonparticipation of Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn, creating a sympathetic alliance between racist speech and the critique of racism, between his presence and their absence, as if they are both “intrusions” into the happiness of the queer table. As Jin Haritaworn noted later, “Blame for the bad diversity work was put instead on the few people who had worked to challenge the racism at the conference” (2012, 78). Racism becomes projected onto a stranger allowing us not to see the very ordinary and mundane racism exercised as or in the history of the invitation. And queers of color become willful parts: those who do not participate in the conversation.

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Think of the expression “stuck in the mud,” which can be used to refer to a person who is “unwilling to participate.” This expression is related to the figure of the killjoy: to be unwilling to participate is not only assumed to kill the joy of participation but it is read as motivated by the desire to kill joy. We might need to intrude on a world in which we figure as intrusion. Oh, how many of our histories are histories of willful words! Let’s think about the word “assertive.” How often minority subjects are called assertive!42 In being called assertive we have to become assertive to meet the challenge of this call. We might have to assert our existence in order to exist. Audre Lorde has taught me this: how caring for one self can be “an act of political warfare” as a form of self-preservation not self-indulgence (1988, 131).43 There are “those of us,” she reminds us, who were “never meant to survive” (1978, 32). Just being is willful work for those whose being is not only not supported by the general body, but deemed a threat to that body. If some have to be assertive just to be, others are given freedom from the necessity of self-assertion. What are we asserting when we become assertive? In asserting ourselves, we are asserting more than ourselves. If we do not submit our will to the will of the “whole body,” if we do not aim for its restoration, we do not simply leave that body behind us. After all we are exposing the violence that supports that body. Those lodged as particular can dislodge the general. Assembling a willfulness archive gives us another way to challenge the formalist universalism of philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which rests on more and less muted critiques of “particularism” and “identity politics.”44 The latter, for example, argues in relation to Saint Paul that “his universe is no longer that of the multitude of groups that want to ‘find their voice,’ and assert their particular identity, their ‘way of life,’ but that of a fighting collective grounded in the reference to an unconditional universalism” (2003, 10). Žižek is not necessarily making an argument in his own terms here; but the use of quote marks works to create a caricature of identity politics that is familiar both from his own writing and more general consensus.45 We need to challenge this consensus. Perhaps some have “ways of life” because others have lives: some have to find voices because others are given voices; some have to assert their particulars because others have their particulars given a general expression. For some, willfulness might be necessary for an existence to be possible. When willfulness is necessary another world becomes possible. 160

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Striking Bodies In the first chapter of this book, I discussed how willfulness becomes striking: what gets in the way of what is on the way. Willfulness as a style of politics might involve not only being willing not to go with the flow, but being willing to cause its obstruction. If willfulness can become striking in how a body appears (if what appears is what tends to cause obstruction), then willfulness can be also be willingly performed (to go on strike is to aim for obstruction). Willfulness: to stop working; to stop a body from working. Political histories of striking are indeed histories of those willing to put their bodies in the way, to turn their bodies into blockage points that stop the flow of human traffic, as well as the wider flow of an economy. We could think of the hunger strike as the purest form of willfulness: a body whose agency is expressed by being reduced to obstruction, the obstruction of the passage into the body. A history of willfulness is a history of those who are willing to put their bodies in the way, or to bend their bodies in the way of the will. There is something queer about this will. You bend: you become bent. It is worth considering here Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of queer politics as “voluntary stigma,” as the “then almost inconceivable willed assumption of stigma” (2003, 30). Her argument could be related to that of Dan Brouwer who explores the use of tattoos in hiv/aids activism: “the conscious and willful marking of oneself as ‘tainted’ as a particular communicative and performative strategy grounded in visibility politics and practiced in the context of aids activism” (1998, 115). To mark the body becomes a willed and willful act. Not all stigmas are voluntary; and this is partly the point. You will stigma given the history of unwilled stigma, which might include your own embodied history. Sedgwick contrasts the voluntary stigma of the picket lines with “the nondiscretionary” nature of skin color (2003, 30). Color can be experienced as a willful intrusion on the unmarked and unremarkable body of whiteness. Some forms of sexual stigma too can be thought of as unwilled not because the stigma is simply on the body, but because if a certain idea of the right body is in place, then some bodies will and do appear as the wrong bodies.46 If your body is already stigmatized, you might have to be willing (at least) to double that inheritance, to be stigmatized all over again. There is something deeply evocative about Sedgwick’s own account of her involvement in political struggle: Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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This was a fight about blackness, queerness and implicitly aids: properties of bodies, some of them our bodies, of bodies that it seemed important to say most people are very willing, and some people are murderously eager, to see not exist. I got there late and hugged and kissed the students and friends I hadn’t seen in a few weeks, and Brian gave me his sign to carry. I can’t remember—I hardly noticed—what was on it—even though when I was a kid I remember that most of the symbolic power of the picket lines used to seem to inhere in the voluntary self-violation, the then almost inconceivable willed assumption of stigma, that seemed to me to be involved in any attempt to go public as a written-upon body—an ambulatory placard—a figure, I as a child, could associate only with the disciplining of children. I wonder now how I related that voluntary stigma to the nondiscretionary stigma of skin color—that is, of skin color other than white— considering how fully, when I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s—“protest” itself implied black civil rights protest. (2003, 29) The willed and voluntary assumption of stigma can be understood as political art: a way of performing the body, a way of reinhabiting the streets. Those who gather are those whose deaths are willed, who gather with those who love and support those whose deaths are willed, who gather in protest against a world that can and will “will deaths” onto others. “Brian gave me his sign to carry.” How I love these kind, gentle words. To be involved in a protest can mean not only to assume the sign of willfulness but to be willing to carry the sign for others. To be willing to carry a sign is what makes it possible to pass a sign onto others. We can make a queer trail by passing these signs, another kind of desire line created by not following the official paths. What is at stake in this queer passing is not so much the content of the sign, or of the sign as having a denotative function. The placard which, like the rod, is intended for straightening the child provides instead the means to wander: perhaps the rod can become the arm, refusing the demand to be straightened out. We could reflect further on demonstrations as willfulness transformed into political art. The word “demonstrate” shares its root with “monster” (from the Latin monstrum “monster, monstrosity, omen, portent, sign”). To demonstrate is to be involved in the creation of ominous signs. Together bodies can become monstrous. Bodies in alliance can generate, as Judith Butler (2011) has suggested, a new public, one that is not supported by existing institutions or law, one whose very persistence might 162

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be necessary to achieve a supporting ground. Action can aim to create a ground for action. Perhaps the streets we occupy can be shaped by feet that tread. We might even imagine an alternative army of the wayward: hearing in the Shakespearean expression “hydra headed willfulness”the promise of monstrosity, the promise that like the monster Hydra, who acquires two heads from the loss of any one, the blows we receive will create more disobedient parts.47 The many heads of the monster Hydra are an appropriate sign of the promise of willfulness. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have shown in their history of rebellion “from below,” how the hydra myth “becomes a means of exploring multiplicity, movement, and connection” (2000, 6). J. Jack Halberstam has explored the queer potential of this history from below: this hydra history that swells from under the social belly (2011, 18–19). A history can come alive as a willful presence on the streets. In demonstrating, we assume the form of monster, becoming an obstacle, a physical fleshy thing. We can think of demonstration as counter-will: more bodies must gather if we are to acquire enough momentum to resist what has acquired momentum. Not all demonstrations are ones we would agree with: the content of the disagreement does matter. But the act of assembling does more than disagree: the bodies that gather also reclaim time and space. An assembling on the streets can be a protest against how and by whom the streets have been owned. This could not be better expressed than by the Reclaim the Night marches that are still going on (violence against women is ongoing). Reclaim the Night marches are willed and willful acts of populating the streets by and for women, a claiming back of a time as well as a space that the reality of sexual violence has taken from us. To reclaim the streets as a reclaiming of night is to enact what we will: a world in which those who travel under the sign of women can travel safely, in numbers: feminist feet as angry feet. The Occupy movements could also be understood as willful monstrosity: when bodies occupy streets of commerce they can transform streets into bodies. It is interesting to note how Occupy Wall Street evoked the character of Bartleby, the “scrivener” from Herman Melville’s novella (see Gerson 2011; Greenberg 2012). Bartleby who stops performing his job as a copier in an office on Wall Street, who stops everything except for occupying the office where he is supposed to work. The narrator says to Bartleby: “Are you aware that you are the cause of great tribulation to me, by persisting in occupying the entry after being dismissed from the office?” Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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([1853] 2010, 55). Occupation becomes persistence: working by not working, the part becomes idle, slow, refusing what I called in the previous chapter “the will duty” as a productive duty, refusing to be handy, to lend a hand to the administration of business. Bartleby’s famous explanation for his inaction is “I prefer not to,” an explaining which refuses to explain beyond the repetition of these exact terms. Bartleby could certainly be included in a willfulness archive: although he is described by the narrator as not intending insolence or mischief, he is also characterized as having a “strange willfulness,” not only in what he does not do, but in his refusal to express his opposition in any terms other than the terms he uses (22). The very use of this expression “I prefer not to” becomes a reenactment of his refusal to budge. He even refuses to say: “I will not.” The narrator tries to lead him to say, “I will not,” to which Bartleby replies, “I prefer not” (25, emphasis in original). His not is expressed by “prefer,” a word described in the novella as a “queer word” (38). In not saying “I will not,” Bartleby does not say “I will.”48 We can understand why the Occupy movement made a willful hero out of Bartleby.49 Movements need rallying points. Of course, this is not to say we occupy “Occupy” in the same way: bodies, offices, as well as streets are filled with memories that affect how we do the work of inhabitance. A willful inhabitance of space never empties a space even as it aims to stop the flow of traffic. Spaces remain saturated by the bodies that come and go, leaving traces behind.50 The slogan “99 percent” could be heard as a wayward army; it reaches for a solidarity by extending the reach of “the not” to those who are not in the one percent. Of course some have protested against the very overreach of this “not,” how it gathers together too many, including in the same group those who benefit from exploitation with those who are exploited by this benefit.51 And for others the word “occupy” is too tainted with histories of violence in the context of settler colonialism to organize under that name: the settlers are already occupiers; the land is already occupied. The politics of demonstrating are indeed messy: but when things become messy we do not lose the point. If anything, becoming ner vous shows how we are getting closer to a nerve, to what matters. To bother is to be bothered. And we might feel charged up by what we are charged with. Those who demonstrate against the state are often charged with willfulness. Or perhaps willfulness is used as a charge to differentiate some protesters from others. When demonstrations get “out of control” (translation: not controlled by the police as the enforcers of state 164

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will) it is often blamed on the willfulness of a minority. It is the figure of the anarchist who mostly receives this willfulness charge: as if anarchists have taken over the protest, transforming it from peaceful and law-abiding into violent and criminal. The violence of or in protesting is often called “mindless.” We learn from this description: perhaps actions are called  “mindless” when we don’t like the content of other people’s minds, when we don’t want to hear what it is they are saying. Not only does this diagnosis of a willful minority overtaking the protest work to pacify protest as such (as if the “real” protesters were not themselves angry, as if they walk the streets with happy feet), but it removes attention from the violence perpetrated by the police themselves. To be involved in demonstrating can mean to come up against this violence more directly: you might become more aware of the injustice that led you to demonstrate in the first place. This is how even if political rage brings us to demonstrate, demonstrations can be politicizing. There is promiscuity in rebellion: witnessing the blows we receive can create more disobedient parts. The very physical force of the blow, its appearance as the visible sign of the rod (the police did not appear in the Grimm story, but they are most certainly there, the police are rods), can make more parts willing to take part, willing not to bear the unbearable; willing to lose their place in an order in the hope of creating a new order. The rod too can be a rallying point, if we rally around what we are against. If to be willful is to keep coming up, despite or even because of what you encounter, then willfulness can be understood as a method of proliferation. No wonder willfulness has offered me a queer method. In promising the monstrous, willfulness does not create a simple harmony of parts, even in the headiness of those moments of anticipation. Willfulness could be understood as a necessary horizon for politics, as what cannot be overcome by the participation in politics. The experience of protest can be the unifying sound of a shared “no,” but that does not mean all parts participate in that “no” in the same way. An example: in 2011 a demonstration against the English Defence League, a far-right group with an anti-immigrant and anti-Islam stance, took place in Tower Hamlets, East London. Prior to the march, the lgbt activist and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell announced his willingness to demonstrate as a gesture of solidarity with Muslims. He wrote the following invitation or request to the queer community: “I urge everyone to support the Saturday’s protest against the far right English Defence League (edl), as it attempts to threaten and intimidate the Muslim community.” He also Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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indicates his own will to be present under, we might say, the queer sign: “I will be there with a placard reading: Gays and Muslims unite! Stop the edl.”52 The sign might seem to promise solidarity between willful parts: gays and Muslims, those whose particular will is not expressed by the national will (although we can note this “and” assumes the parts as apart: the gay Muslim disappears in this “and”). In a follow-up article, Tatchell refers again to his placard. This time he makes clear that the sign has two sides.53 On the other side is the following: “Stop edl and far-right Islamists. No to all hate.” Let’s think about the two sides of the sign: one says yes to solidarity between gays and Muslims, the other says no to “the edl” and “far-right Islamists.” On the other side of the sign, is a no that creates what we can call a problematic proximity between the edl and Islamism. On the other side “Islam” appears only as “far-right Islamism.” We realize the significance of these different sides of the placard if we read the narrative. Tatchell uses the occasion of recalling the experience of the march against the edl (an organization that has an anti-Islam but “gay-friendly” stance) to speak out not against the edl, which recedes or becomes background, but against what he calls Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, Tatchell uses the occasion to argue that Islamist goals are “much more dangerous” than that of the edl. One has to note that Tatchell is adopting here the very language of the edl. It is easy to identify the problems with this identification of Islam as the “bigger threat” in the context of a protest against those who perceive Islam as the “bigger threat.” But how does one read the insistence on the right to be visible as a gay man in a protest, to carry a queer sign? One could say surely he is right; surely queers have a right to gather whenever and wherever? But traveling under the queer sign can become part of the management of the racial space of the nation. As Jin Haritaworn (2010) has noted in a sharp critique of gay imperialism, the use of kiss-ins near mosques by mainstream lgbt groups in Berlin shows how what appears as an assertion of a sexual minority can function as the assertion of a racial majority. Traveling under the queer sign becomes a way of occupying political space and of claiming territory as one’s own residence or home. This is how the content of this sign does come to matter: the queer sign is not empty in the sense that it cannot be filled by anybody. The queer sign becomes aligned with the state apparatus, a happy sign, depending on the unhappiness of the Muslim other; it can achieve its status as voluntary 166

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stigma by willing the very signs of an involuntary Islamic homophobia. The Muslim others become unwilling citizens: unwilling to integrate, unwilling to love the love that is willingly (although conditionally) endorsed by the nation. We learn that if insistence is a political grammar, it is not always legible. It might appear that organizing under the queer sign requires willfulness. And yes, sometimes, maybe even often, it does. But sometimes it does not: you might feel like an arm but act like a rod. This is a complicating point: one that complicates my own argument thus far in this chapter. The very assumption of willfulness can protect some from realizing how their goals are already accomplished by the general will. It can be whiteness that allows some queers to accomplish their goals; it can be the unseeing of whiteness that also allows some queers not to see how they appear to others when, for instance, they carry a sign that makes Islam proximate to the edl; it can be unseeing whiteness that allow some queers not to see how that very proximity can be a threat. What is assumed as a willful queerness can be a willing whiteness. Jasbir Puar’s (2007) important critique of homonationalism could be read as an account of how wayward queers can and do become the straightening parts. This kind of queer politics aims to become part of the nation where partness is achieved by or through the very projection of willfulness onto others. It is important to describe the racism of this projection. But to describe the projection of willfulness as racism is to be heard as willful. When queers of color talk about racism in queer politics, we become killjoys, as if this very talk is what prevents us from just taking up our seats at the table. Audre Lorde explores powerfully the figure of the angry person of color: the one who is always getting in the way of a social bond. As she describes: “When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are ‘creating a mood of helplessness,’ ‘preventing white women from getting past guilt,’ or ‘standing in the way of trusting communication and action’ ” (1984, 131, see also hooks 2000).54 To speak out of anger about racism is to be heard as the ones who are stopping or blocking the flow of communication, who are preventing the forward progression sometimes described as reconciliation. When we talk about racism we become the cause of the problem we reveal. Racism is treated as a foreign(er) word: as imposing our will on what would otherwise be a happy situation. The happiness of a situation is protected by treating anything inconsistent with happiness as foreign Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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to the situation. No wonder the foreign is such an anxious site. Racism becomes a willful word: going the wrong way, getting in the way. I am speaking of racism in a seminar. Someone comes up to me afterward and puts her arm next to mine. We are almost the same color, she says. No difference, no difference. You wouldn’t really know you were any different to me, she says. The very talk about racism becomes a fantasy that invents difference. She smiles, as if the proximity of our arms was evidence that the racism of which I was speaking was an invention, as if our arms told another story. She smiles, as if our arms were in sympathy. I say nothing. My arm speaks by withdrawing. When racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who “bring it up” are bringing it into existence. To recede is to go back or withdraw. To concede is to give way or yield. People of color are often asked to concede to the recession of racism: we are asked to “give way” by letting racism “go back.” Not only that: more than that. We are asked to embody a commitment to diversity. We are asked to smile in their brochures. We are asked to put racism behind us as if racism is behind us. The narrative often exercised is not that we “invent racism,” but that we preserve its power to govern social life by not getting over it. I have an alternative. I call it my willfulness maxim: Don’t get over it, if you are not over it.

Conclusion: Feel Like an Arm, Act Like a Rod There is a joy in translating an experience into a maxim: a sense of being in charge of what you are charged with. And the charge itself can be a connection: a way of relating to others similarly charged. Perhaps the language can be our lead: perhaps willfulness can be an electric current, passing through each of us, switching us on.55 Willfulness can be a spark. We can be lit up by it. It is an electric thought. It is important not to get too carried away by this thought. Even when we are charged up, even when we translate that charge into personal and political maxims, we cannot assume that in a given situation we are the willful subjects. Willfulness is not a side: one that we can simply be on or stay on. In this chapter I have been trying to describe a difficulty or an experience of difficulty. I use “trying” deliberately: description becomes difficult when it is a difficulty you are describing. I pointed out earlier that willfulness can be a form of hearing that dismisses (to dismiss is to make apart). Willfulness is often dismissed as a (bad) habit, as a way some are 168

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just stuck (in a rut), as being unwilling to become willing subjects. One of my aims has been to hear these techniques of dismissal. What does it do to hear one’s own dismissal? If you are used to having to struggle to exist, if you become used to having others oppose your existence, if you are used even to being thought of as oppositional, then those experiences are wearing and directive. You can enact an expectation in the struggle not to fulfill it. You can even become somewhat oddly invested in the continuation of what you are up against. This is not to say you “really” want what opposes you (although there is wanting at stake here: you want to oppose what you don’t want). It is to say that if you spend time and energy in opposing something, an opposition can become part of you. It is not to say that the investment is what keeps something going at the level of the event or situation. It is to say that willfulness in becoming part of you can become a habit, even if the concept of a habitual willfulness is how willful subjects are dismissed. We have to be cautious and careful in describing these dynamics: we have to learn not to repeat the dismissal. I think we need to describe these dynamics because of the risk of repetition. I have experienced myself a sense of how possibilities can be closed down if I assume in advance a willfulness stance. You can get so used to struggling against something that you expect anything that comes up will be something to be against. It can be tiring being against whatever comes up, even if hearing a wrong ends up being right. And it is possible, of course, in expecting to hear wrongs not to hear them, because if you do hear them, they fulfill an expectation, becoming a confirmation of what you already know. We stop hearing when we are too knowing. I suspect we all do this: hear with expectation, listen for confirmation, whether or not we think of ourselves as willful subjects; this is ordinary stuff. Willfulness is ordinary stuff. It can be a daily grind. This is also how an experience of willfulness is world creating: willful subjects can recognize each other, can find each other, and create spaces of relief, spaces that might be breathing spaces, spaces in which we can be inventive. If in most spaces we have to be assertive just to be, we can create spaces which give us freedom from that necessity.56 There can be joy in creating worlds out of the broken pieces of our dwelling spaces: we can not only share our willfulness stories, but pick up some of the pieces too. And we can hear each other in each other: can be moved by each other with each other; we can even just tell each other to let it go, at the moments when holding on demands too much. We can say this, as we have been there, in that place, Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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that shadowy place, willful subjects tend to find themselves; a place that can feel lonely can be how we reach others. Even if we have received the assignment of willfulness, we are more than this assignment. And then, of course, given that we do not tend to notice agreements, or given that agreements tend not to be quite so impressive, we might in assuming willfulness be protecting ourselves. We might not notice our own agreements, if they are histories that are still. This is why the figure of the killjoy is not a figure we can assume we always somehow are: even if we recognize ourselves in that figure, even when she is so compelling, even when we are energized by her. We might, in assuming we are the killjoys, not notice how others become killjoys to us, getting in the way of our own happiness, becoming obstacles to a future we are reaching for. Activism might need us to lose confidence in ourselves, letting ourselves recognize how we too can be the problem. And that is hard if we have a lifetime of being the problem. But the lessons of willfulness are that we can loosen our hold on willfulness, even if, or maybe because, willfulness is used by others to hold us in place. Perhaps this is what it means to transform willfulness into pedagogy: you have to work out how to travel on unstable grounds. The history of sexism and racism within left activist spaces teaches us about these grounds. We have to enact the world we are aiming for: nothing less will do. Behind us are long histories of failed enactments, histories in which the critiques of how power is exercised within political movements have been dismissed under the sign of willfulness: heard as distractions from the shared project of transformation, as causing the divisions they reveal, as being in the way of what is on the way. Part of the difficulty is not only who is judged as the obstacle, but who takes charge, who defines what is to be done, who leads the way. Can seeing ahead be how some appoint themselves as heads? Just think of the Leninist idea of the “vanguard party.” My account of the sociality of will, of precedence as another history of being in time, could be read as a phenomenology of the vanguard. The word “vanguard” derives from “avant” meaning “front” but also “before.” The vanguard is an avant-garde: a front party, a part that fronts. This idea might have legs as it makes others into legs: those who are behind are assumed to need those in front to front. If those who are in front “front” our political movements, what happens? If those who come first are “first” in our political movements, what happens? To challenge precedence by exercising precedence is to negate the challenge. And what do we find when we work 170

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this way? Some become the arms that carry, the helping hands, the ones that make tea, who do the legwork: to free up the time for the heads. If the will of those who come first determines the political horizon, then nothing much different happens. Same old, same old: the exhaustion of reproduction as well as repetition, when working against reproduces the world we are working against. Given this political horizon it is not surprising that “identity politics” has acquired a negative willful charge: to rally around our particulars is to refuse to be led by those whose will has already been given general expression.57 Can we work differently? Can those who come after work differently, working as willful strangers, by not putting the will of those who come first “first”? Perhaps we need to work back to front.58 We have to work from behind to challenge the front. We have to work the behind. We can hear the queerness of this hindsight. We can also hear decolonial connotations. Those deemed behind, as lagging behind in the history of becoming modern, can rewrite that history from this view. Ramón Grosfoguel’s critique of the universalisms of Western modernity offers such a view, a rear view. It is not simply that we can generate an oblique angle on history from behind. We can aim to transform the angle into a different style of politics, rear-guard not avant-garde. Grosfoguel refers to the Zapatistas in southern Mexico. He notes: “The Zapatistas set out from ‘walking while asking questions,’ and from there propose a ‘rear-guard movement’ which contributes to linking together a broad movement on the basis of the ‘wretched of the earth’ of all Mexico” (2012, 12).59 Such a style of walking is contrasted with the avant-garde: “walking while preaching” (12). We have to walk differently: it is not that those behind come to the front, but that staying back gives you the time to question, to ask rather than tell. A politics of the rear is still a movement. When the wretched are walking, the feet are talking. To keep walking, to keep going, to keep coming up, is a certain kind of talking, talking to not talking at; talking without a message that can be passed simply from one to another, like a baton that we aim to get to the front so we can be in front. Sometimes to keep questioning requires a willful behind. There are behinds to the behind: to talk with your feet does not mean you walk at the same pace. But you might hesitate, look back; not hurry ahead to head. When those in front assume willfulness, willfulness becomes a front. Avant-garde life worlds are populated by subjects who think of themselves as willful, as disobedient, as opposing norms, as giving up conventions that hold others in place. But the self-perception of freedom from Willfulness as a Style of Politics

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norms can quickly translate into a freedom to exploit others, to engage in behaviors that are almost exact approximations of the norms that subjects think of themselves as opposing. The thought of willful opposition can enable a willing approximation in action. The film Ginger and Rosa (2012, dir. Sally Potter) explores the psychic structure of avant-gardism very well. Ginger’s father, who, we learn from the diagesis of the film, wrote a book entitled The Idea of Freedom, Ginger’s father who speaks of “autonomous thought,” who opposes marriage and convention, who thinks love should be free, ends up sexually exploiting young women: his students and Ginger’s own best friend, Rosa. He fulfills a sexual and social norm under or as the guise of transgression. In the end, when his behavior is exposed as harming others, including his daughter and his wife, he retains his willful self-identification. He recalls his own history of disobedience, how he went to prison as a conscientious objector. “Someone has to say no,” he says. He says this no as if in the present tense, as if that no can explain, even condone, his behavior. We learn how no can be a way of participating in norms and conventions while benefiting from the feeling of being free from them: a no can be how a yes is enacted without being said. To think of oneself as a willful subject, as being the no that is said, can be how a will stays in agreement. The appearance of being willful, of being an arm, can be the continuation of the rod by other means.60 However we respond to this becoming means we can learn to appreciate the risks of assuming willfulness, of assuming we have found ourselves in the arms. I am sure many feminists would recognize the portrait of left male chauvinism offered in Ginger and Rosa. And we might in this recognition be tempted to think: we are the arms that have experienced how some arms are really the rods; we are all the armier for this experience. But we can be more shaken if we do not assume the rod’s exteriority. To give up this assumption would be to let go of the arms. To hear the arms we cannot hear as the arms. Perhaps it is time to listen to the arms themselves. They might have something to tell us.

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Chapter Four

Conclusion

A CALL TO ARMS

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n this book I have both explored the charge of willfulness and reflected upon how we can take up that charge. I am not in thinking of this “taking up” as something that has been done, can be done, prescribing willfulness. My aim is to fall short of prescription. After all, willfulness remains a charge that can be brought against subjects in ways that are diminishing. And, as I suggested in the conclusion of the previous chapter, when willfulness becomes an assumption, it can participate in concealing how a will is in agreement with what is already willed or how a particular will is aligned with a general will. To be wronged is not to acquire a right to be right. How is it possible to take up this charge without making willfulness into a right? In this conclusion I will address this question somewhat obliquely, from a different angle, by moving away from willful subjects (those for whom willfulness is an experience of an attribution) and rethinking the part of other parts: including parts of a body such as hands, tongues, ears, arms, but also parts of a shared world of matter, a world that matters, such as stones. To return to a hopeful sentiment: when willfulness has priority, we can and do wander away from the subject of will, and by wandering away, we take her with us. Before moving on: is hopefulness more than a returning sentiment? I have without question approached the materials I have assembled with a sense of hope, a sense that there is a point to assembling them. Have I in this process become more hopeful about will, or even more optimistic? One of the key “will phrases” exercised in cultural studies, usually attributed to Antonio Gramsci, who himself was drawing on a formulation offered by Romain Rolland, is “optimism of the will, pessimism of the intelligence.”1 I think it would be easy to give this phrase a misleading translation: as implying optimism in will. Any such optimism might

be a “cruel optimism” as formulated by Lauren Berlant (2011), an attachment to an object that might diminish us: if we assume the will is how we get out, the will might become how we stay in. Gramsci, however, is not calling for optimism in the will as if the will could lead us out of the present, without effort or work. If anything he articulated a skeptical attitude to what we might call “optimism in optimism,” as well as “optimism in will,” as what might lead to the will to do nothing: It should be noted that very often optimism is nothing more than a defense of one’s laziness, one’s irresponsibility, the will to do nothing. It is also a form of fatalism and mechanicism. One relies on factors extraneous to one’s will and activity, exalts them, and appears to burn with sacred enthusiasm. And enthusiasm is nothing more than the external adoration of fetishes. A reaction [is] necessary which must have the intelligence for its point of departure. The only justifiable enthusiasm is that which accompanies the intelligent will, intelligent activity, the inventive richness of concrete initiatives which change existing reality. ([1975] 1992, 12)2 In other words, Gramsci is calling for us to be willing something actively and with intelligence or thought, asking us to orientate ourselves toward the future we hope to bring about, to work with others toward an actualization of a possibility, on concrete initiatives. If Gramsci warns against retreating into wishful thinking, then willful thinking might be what is being called for. I would hesitate to describe this call as optimism in the willful; but perhaps willfulness is an optimistic relation, a way of holding on, of not giving up.

Parting Gifts As I pointed out in the previous chapter, willfulness has a specific history within law, and although it has been described by legal scholars as a “chameleon-like term” it is used to describe the nature of a criminal act. Willfulness is used in law primarily as an adverb (a word that qualifies the meaning of a verb, that is, a word that denotes a kind of action). A willful action is one that is intentional, one that is done “with bad purpose” and in full knowledge of the law. I think we can understand immediately then the risks of affirming willfulness, even if we take the word away from the scene of a crime. Willfulness tends to imply a particular kind of subject, one that has intentions and knows her intentions. Rosi 174

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Braidotti evokes this risk of making the willful subject into the subject of feminist politics: “I am very resistant to a position of willful denial of something feminists know perfectly well: that identity is not just volition: that the unconscious structures our sense of identity through a series of vital (even when they are lethal they are vital) identifications that affect one’s situation in reality. Feminists must know better than to confuse, to merrily mix up willful choice—political volition—with unconscious desire” ([1994] 2011, 163). There is some irony in evoking perfectly knowing feminists when arguing for the limitations of what we can know about ourselves. Nevertheless, Braidotti exposes how focusing on political volition or willful choice can be problematic given the assumption of a knowing subject: of a subject who knows how she feels, what she wants, and even who she is. One of my aims in assembling a willfulness archive has been to give willfulness a different and perhaps more affective political history. Although I have not evoked the unconscious as structuring in quite the way Braidotti describes,3 I have shown how will and willfulness are bound up with struggle and resistance between different parts of a subject, as well as between subjects. Furthermore, assembling a willfulness archive has allowed me to show how some forms of political volition are understood as willful because they pulse with desire, a desire that is not directed in the right way; a willful will would have failed to acquire the right form, failed to have coordinated and unified disparate impulses into a coherent intent. Somewhat ironically, then, following willfulness around is one way we can move toward a more impulsive, less intentional model of subjectivity. We know from our shared collective histories of struggle that many acts of resistance are not intentional acts: to think these histories through willfulness risks making an intentional subject into the subject that matters. Even though willfulness is evocative of intentionality, or is even a form of hyper-intentionality, willfulness can bypass intentionality. I have noted throughout this book how willful subjects are not necessarily individual persons: anything can be attributed as willful if it gets in the way of the completion of an action that has been agreed; and when an agreement is shared, willfulness too becomes a shared assumption. In chapter 3, I introduced the idea of the “willful part,” the part that does submit its will to the will of the whole, or even the part that refuses to become part of a whole. A willful part “comes apart.” Here I want to think of this coming apart of the willful part as a “parting gift”; willfulness can be a gift given, a gift relayed between parts, a gift that allows noncompliant or resistant A Call to Arms

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action to be carried out without intent. Recall Mr. P whom I introduced in chapter 2 in my discussion of Ribot’s Diseases of the Will. Mr. P: whose will is found wanting. Mr. P cannot command his hands to sign over the deeds to his house. Perhaps a “wanting will” gives its “want” to other parts. Perhaps it is Mr. P’s hand that is willful, that is reluctant, a hand that refuses to be handy, that does not support an action Mr. P may consciously intend but not want. Is disobedience possible as a gifting of want from part to part? Does the hand resist by obeying another command that the subject is unable or not ready to make? Parts of a body in becoming willful might allow bodies not to do what they are supposed to do. Take the example of how female protest is represented in Jane Eyre. Jane appears to readers in the first instance as a fearful and submissive child, but one who is still judged as willful by her extended family, as a way of justifying the instruments of fear. Eventually Jane protests against the cruelty of her family, and her protestation is used as yet more evidence of her willful character, of how she causes the violence directed against her. We have witnessed this again and again: willfulness becomes a character diagnosis for those who do not adjust to the situation in which they find themselves, a diagnosis that endangers the child. Jane in the opening scenes of the novel, in the grim scenes of her childhood, struggles to speak back to her tyrannical aunt. Eventually Jane snaps. But she only speaks when her tongue seems to acquire a will of its own: “I say scarcely voluntary for it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance” ([1847] 1999, 21). A rebellious action does not always feel intentional. If our tongues can acquire will by speaking without consent, then we can be willful without being intentional. Our tongues can disobey for us, as a way of being impulsive, a way of summoning an impulse, a summoning which then, perhaps only retrospectively, is given the form of intent. When we are thinking about the part of willful parts, then, we are thinking of the ways in which willing against what has acquired momentum might require “party” support. A willful part might give its will to other parts in the very refusal to obey: a willful gift as a feminist gift, as a queer gift. Those deemed the limbs of the social body might depend on being given agency by their own limbs. Remember Gwendolyn from Daniel Deronda who hesitates rather than throws the rope quickly to Grandcourt? I implied in chapter 2 that her hands were involved in this hesitation. We do not as readers have an account of the event of Grandcourt’s drowning 176

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other than when Gwendolyn narrates the event to Daniel Deronda. As she narrates, her hands become communicative: “Her hands which had been so tightly clenched some minutes before were now helplessly relaxed and trembling on the arm of her chair” ([1876] 1995, 690). Perhaps it is her hands that are telling the story: the hands becoming mouth, the organ of a speech, a willful becoming. And if the hands tell the story, the hands are in the story; they are the ones who do not throw the rope, even if throwing the rope is the right thing to do: “I think I did not move. I kept my hands tight” (696). Gwendolyn’s hands are not the organ of rebellious action in quite the way that Jane Eyre’s tongue appears to be. Gwendolyn is the one who seems willing: if she keeps her hands tight, they are not tight of their own accord. But her hands participate: they allow her not to carry out the action. If they stay tight, she does not move. Gwendolyn’s hands could thus be understood as willful parts: her tight hands are obeying another command, a counter-will, a willful will, a will that is not willing to obey the social command that tells her that to save his life, his life as a life, as any life, is the right thing to do. Of course it is not simply or only that willful parts are on the side of resistance, or on the side of those who are resisting or even that resistance is always right even when or if we judge a right as a wrong.4 It is fascinating to note how the body part “comes up” as a sinister figure precisely insofar as it has “a will of its own.” Something is sinister when it is prompted by ill will or malice. The word derives from the Latin for “on the left,” implying the slower or weaker hand.5 In chapter 3, I noted, following others, how one history of prosthetics is the history of the restoration of the functional capacity of the worker’s body, a means through which the disabled worker can remain a willing part. A whole body is a more useful part of the social body. A will to become whole is a will to become part of a whole. Political rebellion might require becoming unwilling to be able, or perhaps becoming an “indifferent member.”6 The history of prosthetics is also full of more wayward stories: artificial arms that do not do what they are told. Who cannot but think of the film Dr. Strangelove (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick) in which Dr. Strangelove’s arm keeps willfully coming up into an unintended Nazi salute? He has to fight to keep the arm down; the arm betrays him. Narratives of transplanted limbs that retain the will of the body from which they have parted are central in the history of cinema. The short silent film The Thieving Hand (1908, dir. J. Stuart Blackton) is about a beggar who is given the arm of a thief, an arm that has a hand that keeps thieving despite the good intentions of A Call to Arms

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the beggar, only in the end to reattach itself to the one-armed criminal. This arm would be experienced by the beggar as having a “will of its own” insofar as it retains the will of the former body (the arm even if detached from the body is attached by will). Alison Landsberg usefully describes this arm as prosthetic memory, noting how even if the arm implies that memories can be transported, the arm by its own accord, returns to its “rightful owner” (2004, 239). This story of willful body parts (willful in part because they retain the will of the body from which they have parted company) is also central to the horror film Body Parts (1991, dir. Eric Red) in which three people who have lost limbs in car accidents are given the limbs of a dead serial killer. One, a criminal psychologist, in acquiring the serial killer’s arm now has an arm that wants to kill him. The arm willfully carries the intent of the dead serial killer, literalizing the threat of willfulness as the intending of harm to the body. Thinking of these horrifying narratives of murderous body parts could return us to the affective quality of our most grim Grimm story. The image of the arm coming out of the grave has been much repeated in the horror genre: who could not be reminded of the ending of the film Carrie (1976, dir. Brian de Palma), based on the novel by Stephen King. Harold Schechter makes a direct comparison between the portrait of willfulness in the film and the Grimm fable, pointing to the similarities in their endings: “As for the image of the arm protruding from the ground, the image which accompanies the tale in the Pantheon edition of Grimm’s—a line drawing of a grave with the dead girls hand jutting out of it—might almost be a storyboard sketch for the climatic sequence of Carrie” (1984, 69). Perhaps this comparison helps us to be affected by the terror and horror of the Grimm story, if we needed help (though we probably do not). We should not assume willful parts are friendly or somehow on our side. In some cases, such as Carrie’s arm or the arm in the grim Grimm story, the part seems to express the willfulness of a body, by keeping the threat of willfulness alive after death. The arm thus takes the place of a body. In other cases, when a part has a will of its own, it parts company from the body of which it is a part, and turns against that body. Willful parts are in these cases far from a companion species (Haraway 2003). But this capacity to part company from, and even to turn against, a whole, is what willful parts can give to the whole, like Jane Eyre’s tongue, by summoning up what cannot be given form as intent. To explore parting gifts as willful gifts I turn to Sara Maitland’s magical queer feminist novel, Home Truths, a novel which explores questions 178

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of female will and desire by taking up the part of the part.7 The story: Clare is in a relationship with a man David who offers her (or seems to offer her) security in exchange for freedom. She does not want to be with him: but she is with him. Up on a mountain in South Africa, something happens (something that Clare cannot remember even by the end of the novel) and she loses two things: David and her right hand. Much of the narrative involves her effort to remember what happens and the difficulty of her relationship to her new prosthetic hand. She joins her family on holiday, and the prosthetic hand becomes an object of shared attention, especially for her niece Lucy, who is deaf and involved in a battle with her parents over another prosthetic: a hearing aid. We begin with a parting hand: “They cut off her right hand and it was left behind when she left Africa” (1994, 5). But Clare in returning home is given a new hand, an electronic one, by her mother Hester who is busy coping with her daughter’s trauma by trying to be handy: “Almost before Clare had realized that she had lost her hand, Hester had completed her researches into amputations and artificial limbs and arranged the best possible treatment for Clare. Clare was now the lucky possessor of a state-of-the-art myeloelectric prosthesis” (7). Right from the beginning Clare encounters this new hand with suspicion, as a stranger. She places this hand within a genealogy of monsters: “Physiotherapy, learning to use her new hand, forced her to recognise what had happened to her and at the same time made it difficult to distinguish what was real and what was imagination. The real owner of her electronic prosthesis, her new hand, was a bright young computer wizard. She tried not to think of him as Dr. Frankenstein, and of The Hand itself as Frankenstein’s monster, yearning, angry and malevolent” (9). The hand is experienced as an alien thing, not only as not part of the body, but as harming that body. In her reflections on prosthetics in Carnal Thoughts, Vivian Sobchack discusses how they are meant to recede, becoming incorporated into the body: “The prosthetic becomes an object only when there is a mechanical or social problem that pushes it obtrusively into the foreground of one’s consciousness” (2004, 211).8 When a prosthetic does not recede, it becomes a willful part, what intrudes into consciousness. Clare begins to address the hand as The Hand, as a willful part that refuses to become part of her body. The sinister nature of the artificial hand is associated in the novel with it being self-willed, or having a life and a will of its own: “Involuntarily her right hand which was not hers but belonged to the hospital or worse still to itself, clenched and flexed” (20). When her hand has a A Call to Arms

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will of its own, Clare’s own movements become involuntary. Clare has to exercise her will to stop her hand from moving: “With an act of will Clare stopped the instinctive withdrawal of her right arm into hiding under the table” (68). The Hand will not submit to her will. It is not experienced as a companionable or friendly part. Even when The Hand accomplishes something, it makes Clare feel uncomfortable: She looked at The Hand. There was no reason, no reason why it shouldn’t shoot; in fact there was a good reason why it should, steady and unfaltering. . . . The Hand did not pull in the old sense. Its mechanisms gave her a stronger pincer in place of a thumb and an index finger. Years ago, in this very field, she had been taught, “Don’t pull, squeeze,” which had always seemed impossible. Now at last she could obey the instruction. With her will, rather than her sense of touch she pulled the trigger. The Hand was better at this than her own hand had been. Now she could shoot smoothly. (94) Even in this case, when The Hand obeys her will, when it accomplishes a task, it does not “feel” like it is being helpful: “The Hand loved the rifle, wanted to shoot, wanted to blast, destroy” (95). The Hand’s capacities become harmful desires. What do we learn from the very sinister mode of the Hand’s appearance? In one instance, Clare likens what her relationship with The Hand is supposed to be like to what her own relationship was like with David: “She had been his puppet. The Hand was supposed to be her puppet, but it wasn’t” (215). The Hand refuses to become what Clare was: a willing part, a part that submits its will to the will of another. Indeed, the language of will is exercised to describe the relationship between Clare and David: “She had tried to resist him, but his will was stronger than she was” (167). Note that his will is not described as stronger than her will but as stronger than she is. Evoking Daniel Deronda, masculinity is understood not only as a mode of power but in terms of “brute” strength of will. For Clare we learn also that David was himself a substitute: a way of not falling in love with a woman, of not being carried away from the safety of convention by her own desire. It is important to remember here that The Hand is a substitute for a missing part. What can we say about that missing part? Not only is her hand missing; so too is David. Clare admits right from the beginning that she wanted David to be missing. Again: we have an echo of the narrative of Daniel Deronda; a female character wondering whether to want the death of another is to be responsible for that death: “she had wanted him 180

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dead and he was dead” (5). It is worth noting that Home Truths refers to Daniel Deronda. It is the book that Clare’s father happens to be reading, a secondhand copy, a worn copy that reveals the trace of past readings on the material of its spine: “Her father was reading Daniel Deronda. His copy was a paperback, not new, the orange spine shot through with delicate white traceries from previous readings” (224). Daniel Deronda: a book that changed hands.9 A copy of a book can be secondhand: touched by the hands that have turned its pages, as the hands of history. Returning to Gwendolyn’s hands that tighten rather than move, hands that clench, we might say these hands in not throwing Grandcourt a line give Gwendolyn a lifeline: freeing her from the death sentence of her marriage. Does Home Truths say what was unsayable in Daniel Deronda not only because of the limits of genre, and what it was possible to articulate in the time of its time, but because of Eliot’s own commitment to a moral order? Women might need to change hands to liberate themselves from the scripts of gender. When hands change, women can stop being helpful hands: women can become willful, parting company. If Clare loses both her partner and her hand on the mountain, it is not then that they are positioned in a relation of equivalence; it is not that as missing members they are the same members. On the contrary, the implication is that her lost hand might itself have had a hand in David’s disappearance. The right hand, most often evoked as the hand that allows a person to be helpful (a good secretary is like a right hand), might be the willful hand. It is not clear if the hand is guilty, whether David’s death was caused by the hand. But if his death was not an accident, if Clare was involved, perhaps the hand rather than Clare did it. Clare thinks: “If she had killed David she had done it with the hand that was no longer there” (289). But then a second thought: “The me that is here didn’t kill David—but that hand may well have done” (290). If the hand did it, the hand committed a misdeed. The Hand is, at the same time, a willing replacement of a willful part. And yet Clare experiences The Hand as willful: she wears it against her will and it appears to act against her will. But does she, does it? She takes the hand off: “If it hurt, the nerves of her arm would instruct The Hand to clench or twist. Trying to remove an inanimate object which flexes and shifts was bizarre and humiliating. Tonight Clare was convinced The Hand had set its own will against hers. She hated it. She decided that she would never wear it again, and then she remembered the shame” (153). If the hand is experienced as a willful part, we learn why Clare was willing A Call to Arms

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to wear it. The Hand is how she avoids shame, the shame of an impediment, of disability, of having lost a limb. The Hand is a way of appearing whole, of not seeming broken. The Hand in this sense is a willing rather than willful part: it promises to make Clare into a whole body, to be a useful and able member of the social body. It is Alice, Clare’s niece who is deaf, who falls in love with The Hand. For Alice, the hearing aid, which she is forced to wear by her parents, is what is sinister. Her mother wants Alice to talk; the aid is intended to make Alice part of the family, able to participate in family discourse. So while Clare thinks the aid and The Hand are alike, Alice experiences them as very different: “Clare had also said that The Hand and the hearing aid were alike, but Clare was wrong. The hearing aid was horrible; through it came a distracting noise, summons from another world; huge in her head, but without meaning, disruptive. The Hand was lovely. They could play together. She wanted it. It wanted her, it told her so” (217). Alice wants to swap the hearing aid for The Hand. The aid tries to make her part of a hearing family; The Hand speaks to her by letting her be deaf: Alice loved The Hand. She had dreamed it in the night although she did not know or use the vocabulary of dreams. She loved The Hand and the Hand loved her. . . . Now she picked up The Hand, the wonderful toy which used the same language as she did, and engaged in her first imaginary conversation talking to it in Sign and receiving its responses. The Hand, it told her, spoke only in Hand, Hand was its name for her language, the language of Sign. Hand was for The Hand not a translation of another language but its very own. It was like her. (216) The Hand is not an ear; it does not try and make Alice be like people who can hear. The Hand signs: it communicates with signs.10 The Hand for Alice is a willful part; letting Alice not be all ears, because it is willing to lend a hand to her signing. A willful part can give a part a will of its own by allowing that part not to submit to the will of the whole. The hearing aid for Alice and The Hand for Clare are willing parts insofar as they promise to make Alice and Clare into more functional parts of the social body, giving them back what they are assumed to have lost. One of the most poignant aspects of the novel is the affinity it shows developing between Alice and Clare: The affinity she felt for Alice was deep, though untested. Even so, could it be right to assist Alice, to assist a five-year-old in hiding something 182

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that her mother was convinced was good for her? It was too risky; she did not know enough. Felicity was angry with her already. Unwillingly she picked it up. It was clumsier than The Hand and equally artificial. The box, the canvas body strap, the ear moulds; and the unmistakable marks of deafness. Yet it joined Alice to the hearing world as precisely as The Hand joined her to the world of limbedness. (240) Alice and Clare acquire an affinity in not missing a working member: in not wanting to be joined to the worlds they are cut off from. Perhaps you have to become willful not to aim to be rejoined. Willfulness then becomes a cutoff point: given expression as the freedom to part. Clare recognizes that she needs to lend her Hand to Alice, nay, give her that Hand, assisting Alice in a project of becoming free from the unwanted assistance of a hearing aid. And this is the parting gift of the novel. Clare gives The Hand to Alice: a willful gift that not only gives Alice permission not to hear but the freedom to sign. And in giving away The Hand, Clare willingly accepts the absence of her own hand: she lets go of her hand (perhaps has to let the hand go, before it can be gone); she lets her member be missing. A willful gift to another can be replayed as a willful gift to oneself. In this relaying of will between parts we learn how we can become willful with and through others. Not to aim to restore a missing part can still involve missing that part. Or if you feel its absence, if you recognize the body you had as not being the body you have, it does not follow that you long for the hand to return. Ann Oakley in her reflections on her experience of fracturing her arm emphasizes how it feels not to be able to feel through her limbs. So while the doctors focus on the “the bent fingers, the crooked arm, and the state of [her] scar,” what is important to her is that “a significant part of my right hand remains almost completely without sensation” (2007, 20).11 She has to learn to treat the arm “like a dependent child” (20). To fracture a body is to become more conscious of the body in a different way or as a different way. Ann Oakley’s memoir reads not only as a personal story of how it feels to inhabit a body that is broken but as an ode to hands. In the chapter “The Right Hand,” she notes: “Hands perform around a thousand different functions every day. It is with arms and hands that we feel, dress, perform skills, explore our body, and contact persons and things about us” (46). She shows us how an appreciation of a limb’s capacities when those capacities are lost does not necessarily aim to restore what has been lost. Even if Oakley admits that she still minds the loss A Call to Arms

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of the hand she “had before,” her writing enacts a process of coming to terms with a different body. To recognize what a body is missing can be to adjust the image you have of your own body and thus your perception of the bodies of others: “Not many people get to middle-age without various bits missing,” she notes (25). Given that bodily integrity is often “a moral as well as physical quality” (25), to accept a body with parts that are missing is to reorientate our relation to bodies. There is a promise in reorientation. Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals is another memoir that describes how it feels to inhabit a broken body. Lorde describes with acute detail how it feels to wake up after a mastectomy, to the gradual realization through the fog of tranquilizers that her “right breast is gone,” and of the increasing pain in her chest wall: “My breast which was no longer there would hurt as if it were being squeezed in a vise. That was perhaps the worst pain of all, because it would come with a full compliment that I was to be forever reminded of my loss by suffering in a part of me which was no longer there” ([1980] 2007, 37–38). It is not only that we can suffer an absence but what is absent can suffer. The Cancer Journals also offers an account of the willfulness required not to wear a prosthesis in the place of a missing breast.12 Once when she goes to the surgery the nurse comments, “You’re not wearing a prosthesis,” to which Lorde replies, “It really doesn’t feel right.” The nurse responds: “You will feel so much better with it on,” and then, “It’s bad for the morale of the office” (60). Not to wear a prosthesis, not to cover over an absence, is deemed to compromise the happiness of others. Audre Lorde’s response to this demand is not only anger but a call for action: “What would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended on Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?” she asks (14–15). I will return to this imagining of a rather queer army. A willful politics might involve a refusal to cover over what is missing, a refusal to aspire to be whole. A will duty often takes the form of an aspiration: even for bodies that are not able to be whole, they must be willing to aspire to be whole. There can be nothing more willful than the refusal to be aspirational, or at least, to refuse to aspire for the right things in the right way, a refusal to miss what you deemed to be missing. Carrie Sandahl, drawing on the work of Robert McRuer, among others, teases out the “affinities and tensions” between crip and queer (1993, 26).13 Perhaps a queer crip affinity might be possible when you share what you are not missing. A queer crip politics might allow the body deemed not 184

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whole to be revealed, a revelation that might be registered as a willful obtrusion into social consciousness (“bad for morale”). Or a queer crip politics might allow a prosthetic to become willful, not to recede by covering over something that is missing, or by becoming a functional part, but standing out, standing apart. Disability activism has indeed made prosthetics into aesthetics, as we can witness in the “alternative limb” project, in which limbs exceed function, becoming art.14 One alternative limb that caught my attention was a “snake arm,” a prosthetic arm that coils like a snake, a coil that might even return us to the willful affinity between woman and animal, as those behind the fall from grace, as those whose wills were found wanting. An arm can become a willful gift.

Stones Matter Thinking of politics through parting gifts provides a way of moving beyond the assumption of an intentional subject of will, as well as a way of considering how willfulness can travel between parts that are not whole or that refuse to become whole. It has been one of my commitments in writing this book not to assume a subject as behind the will. We might call this subject “human.” And yet many of my examples, even if they have found agency in parts that wander away from wholes, parts that leave holes in the whole, or parts that are themselves holey, do seem in some way or another to relate to humans (although they may also imply a cripping and queering of the human, how some become other than human by not approximating the right or whole form). In chapter 1, I did consider how objects become willful when they refuse to provide residence for human will, using examples of pots and jugs that break. But even these objects are objects shaped for or by human intention, as shaped by what they are assumed as for (even if they, willfully, come before this for). What about other matters?15 I want to return now to the example of stones, mentioned in my discussion of Augustine’s account of will in the introduction to this book. Can stones be willful objects? I chose stones for a reason. The history of will is full of stones. Even if the stones appear quite differently when they appear, the constancy of their appearance does create quite an impression: a stony impression. If we follow the stones, we can travel differently along the path of will. Take Augustine. For Augustine the stone matters insofar as it does not have a will of its own: the “movement of the will” is similar to “the A Call to Arms

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downward movement of the stone” but “the stone has no power to check its downward movement, but the soul is not moved to abandon higher things and love inferior things unless it wills to do so” (On the Free Choice of Will, 3.1.72). The stones here are the other of will; they become notwill insofar as they have no checking power. Will is the power not to be compelled by an external force, or by gravity. Will is the power to stop. A stone if flung will fall, and cannot, according to Augustine, stop itself from falling; this incapacity to check a downward movement shows that the stone has no will of its own. Why stone? Why stones and not another kind of object? Perhaps the stone already figures within human culture: to be stone-like is to be hard and immovable as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes in his moving “Stories of Stone” (2010). Or perhaps stones become the objects asked to do this work because our landscape is littered with stones: stones are available; they are around; they surround. Stones are assumed to be stationary, such that if they move, it is assumed they are moved by something other than themselves. I might pick you up and throw you. If you fall there, it is because of how you are thrown. Stones are hapless or maybe they are hapfull: things happen to them; but they don’t make things happen. We might imagine it would be sad to be a stone: always thrown, never throwing. Stones, we might assume, are shaped by forces of nature, and even take the shape of those forces. A stone on the beach, perhaps even a pebble (Ahmed 2006, 187), glistens from the water. It receives the waves that pound against it, creating and re-creating a surface. You can feel its smoothness as a trace of where it has been. Perhaps stones come to embody what is passive, what is capable of receiving an impression. To receive an impression can be to make an impression. The stones leave an impression upon our hands when we touch them. Perhaps touching is assumed too quickly as our gift. Perhaps we forget how our hands can be shaped by stones. Perhaps stones become useful characters in the play of human will because it is assumed they require human hands to become more significant than being just stones, requiring hands to become tools, to be given a purposeful shape, as the shape of human intention. We should remember, for instance, that the word “hammer” derives from stone. It is as if stones are just there, waiting for humans, to be given an end or purpose, to be given an assignment, something to do. In imagining this waiting around, we might be thinking of ourselves as purposeful, as given something to the stones: an occupation, no less. Stones are, in the house of philosophy, the philoso186

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pher’s hammer. Acquiring the meaning of matter, they become “not will,” what requires the will of another for completion. It is not that stones are these things. They are after all moving around quite a lot in being assumed to be stationary. They contradict the assignment in fulfilling the assignment. They are certainly hard at work in Augustine, giving him the shape of what we are not. If the not holds its place, it does so by moving around. Stones too often become the strangers, whose task is to reveal not only what we are not but what we are not like. They become examples of willessness (a word we almost have to invent to signify the absence of will). But the placeholder is not held in quite the same place. Take Spinoza, a philosopher who contrasts with Augustine as one who does not argue for free will. A contrasting set of beliefs, but the stone still appears. Spinoza’s stone is a rather queer stone. For in thinking of the stone, Spinoza gives us a story of a thinking stone. “Now this stone since it is conscious only of its endeavour [conatus] and is not at all indifferent, will surely think that it is completely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than it so wishes” (cited in Sharpe 2011, 65).16 Say the stone is falling. If a stone could think, Spinoza suggests, it would think of itself as a willing stone, as the origin of its movement, as able to stop and start at will. Oh how the wrong the stone would be! How wishful and willful but how wrong! That is not, however, Spinoza’s point: to expose the error of a thinking stone. He intends this stone to expose human error: if there is humiliation in the story it belongs to the humans not the stones. Spinoza aims in throwing a stone into a letter to expose the error of human will (an error that Nietzsche would later tie to the general error of causality). Spinoza: “This, then, is that human freedom which all men boast of possessing, and which consist solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined” (cited in Sharpe 2011, 65). The thinking stone is certainly used to exemplify what I am calling willessness, but in order to create a new kinship: a kinship premised on the absence of will, on the common state of being determined from without. Freedom here requires consciousness of being determined, perhaps a kind of stony consciousness, a consciousness that movement comes from what we are not is how we acquire self-knowledge. If we can think the queerness of a thinking stone, we might not need to travel far to reach the queerness of a willing stone. Willing would matter not as the causing of an action but as the feeling of being the cause, or even A Call to Arms

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the feeling that accompanies what Spinoza called conatus, perseverance in being. This is exactly Schopenhauer’s angle on Spinoza’s thinking stone. He writes: “Spinoza says that if a stone projected through the air had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own free will. I add merely that the stone would be right” ([1818] 1966a, 126). Schopenhauer is not in suggesting the stone is right (rather than humans are wrong) positing a model of the free will as self-originating movement. Rather the will becomes something everything has: another kind of kinship, a stony kinship. Schopenhauer explains: “The will proclaims itself just as directly in the fall of a stone as in the action of a man. The difference is only that its particular manifestation is brought about in the one case by a motive, in the other by a mechanically acting cause” ([1819] 1966b, 299). Schopenhauer’s will is far removed from what we would recognize as will in an everyday sense. As Deleuze describes, Schopenhauer, in making the will into the very “essence of things” (2006, 77), perverts the course of will by taking an old philosophy to a new extreme (though of course there are other older philosophies of will such as offered by Lucretius discussed in my introduction that anticipate Schopenhauer’s perversion of will). So why does Schopenhauer describe the fall of the stone as will if it is brought about not by motive but by a “mechanically acting cause”? He is suggesting that motivation can be thought of as determination. Will is a sphere of internal determination. Schopenhauer relates this distinction between motivation and mechanical causation to gradations of being: humans and stones are not different in being but are “higher” and “lower” grades of being ([1819] 1966a, 149). He is implying that mechanical causation is more complex than simple determination from without (recall that writers such as Ribot, discussed in chapter 2, relate will to irritability, understood as reaction, as the capacity to be affected from without). For Schopenhauer even a stone has impulses: an “impulse for it” is what “the motive is for me” (126). An impulse is what “in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity” (126). For Schopenhauer the stone has something to do with what happens to the stone: the “quality” of a stone is what we would call “character” in a person (126). The stones, in other words, have tendencies. How they fall is determined as much by their tendencies as by the arm that throws them. We might pick up stones to do certain things because of what stones are like: they have qualities of their own, on their own (ownness here registers what makes something be the thing that it is in this or that moment of a tra188

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jectory), such that we turn to them for this but not for that. I might not sleep on you because you are too hard; I might throw you because you are not too soft. The “too-ness” of course refers to the qualities of something only in relation to actions that I might or might not perform. But we learn that actions involve judgments about the qualities of things in the world. Actions are successful if we judge rightly, a judgment that reaches things, touches things, and shows how we are touched by things. To act requires being in touch with the world. Stones might be willing, or not. At one level, stones appear as willful, insofar as willfulness is often related to being obstinate and unyielding. But of course its hardness, its tendencies, allows us to do certain things. We might assume the stone as a willing participant if we use the stone as a hammer: our hammering might depend on the stone; our will might be distributed across a field of action that includes the stone. But we should not find agency only in agreement. That is an-all-too human tendency that I have been grappling with throughout this book: to assume yes as a sign of being willing, a sign that is taken up as the giving of permission to proceed. This is one way we tend to go wrong. It is not that from the point of view of the hammer, everything is nail, but that the hammer is already a human point of view. The hammer is stone given the form of human intention. Perhaps stones are willing inasmuch as what they do not let us do; in how they resist our intentions. They can be checking powers, reminders that the world is not waiting to receive our shape. Perhaps then, they grab our attention. We might need to lose the hammer to find the stone.17 And we too can become stone. Think of the “stone butch” in lesbian queer history: a history of those who become unyielding as a way of surviving, a history of those who might have to protect themselves by becoming stone. Here the stone becomes a willful gift, a quality we can assume. And if we think of ourselves as stony we are not simply bringing the stones back to ourselves. We are showing how human bodies cannot be made exceptional without losing something: how we matter by being made of matter; flesh, bone, skin, stone, tangled up, tangled in. The entanglement of stone and skin matters: skin too, skin like stone, is capable of receiving impressions. Damage can be understood as a form of reception. Audre Lorde once wrote: “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest” (1984, 160). It would be hard to overestimate the power of Lorde’s description. Social forms of oppression, racism, the hatred that creates A Call to Arms

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some bodies as strangers, can be experienced as weather. They press and pound against the surface of a body; a body can surface or survive by hardening. For some bodies to stand is to withstand. Or, as I described in chapter 4, sometimes you can only stand up by standing firm. Willfulness helps us to describe the unequal distribution of material as well as social standing. But a stone too can be more and less hard. Hardening does not eliminate what made hardening seem necessary: that sense of being too soft, too receptive, too willing to receive an impression. Hardness is a relative condition even when we try and relate differently to a condition. What we become to withstand can become something that hardens us from others, those who might be closest, who might too have to survive the weather. We can damage each other in how we survive being damaged. Stone and skin: softer and harder histories, material histories of bodies and worlds. Is a stone a willful inheritance? I began this book with a story of a willful child. We could relate her story to the story of willful stones. This story is a Christian parable, equally grim as our Grimm story. In the parable the stones, really, are us. But I am going to dehumanize the story and let the stones be stones. The story: The kingdom of God is like a house which a certain man began to build. He had very good blueprints of an excellent plan. He poured a foundation and started placing choice stones on the foundation where his plan called for them to be. As the house started to take shape, some of the stones became dissatisfied with the positions in which the master builder had placed them. They began to shift themselves into new positions, according to their own ideas of how the house should be built. Many of them dragged other stones with them into their new positions. Soon, instead of one perfect house, there were many smaller, unevenly spaced houses which more closely resembled mere piles of rocks. Some of the new piles were not even on the foundation at all; instead they called to the others to be more open minded about their positioning. The other piles adamantly insisted that each of them was more closely aligned with the master builder’s original plan, and that all who were not joined with them were not part of the same building. When the man saw these stones had aligned themselves differently, he took hold of them and pulled on them to move them back in line with his blueprints. Each stone he touched steadfastly refused to be moved. Though he pushed and pulled and worked 190

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very hard, those stones were convinced that they had come up with a much better design. At last, he grasped a rod of iron which he kept nearby and smashed the recalcitrant stones into powder. The powder was then cleared away and mixed with the cement which was to fill in the cracks between the newer stones which the builder brought to replace them.18 Willful stones do not stay in the right place, the place assumed as divine or, in my reading, as human. They move around. That their movement begins with dissatisfaction tells us something. The point of stones we might assume is to be satisfied by the place we have assigned them. They participate in creating a dwelling for us. We might even say they are willing. If we build a house, we might assume we have their agreement. But when the stones do not stay in place, they bring our walls down. Willful stones would be those that bring the walls down. They get in the way of our purpose; they get in the way of our capacity to create the conditions we assume necessary for survival or flourishing. Their unhappiness with their lot causes our loss of the warmth of shelter. Oh how selfish are they not to play their part! Houses become piles of rocks, wrong bundles. The human appears with a rod: he punishes the willful stones, turning them into dust, as if to lessen the particle is to lessen the capacity to resist. The human rod straightens things out, forcing the wandering stones back into their place. The rod as a technology of will assumes might as right; it might punish the wayward stones for the stones themselves, to give them a chance of a more meaningful life. There is a moral to the story: we as humans must be satisfied with the place we have been given within the divine order. But we can willfully transform the human moral into a stone pedagogy. We would as dwellers assume the qualities of willfulness. We would relate differently to the capacity of all things to deviate from the places given as assignments. Dissatisfaction can be an opening up of things, a gift from things. We would imagine crooked houses, wonky bundles, assembled from unwilling parts, assembled out of the agency of things that have not agreed with our own design or purpose. We would be for those who might refuse our own desire to be with, our desire for company, who might as parts come apart. A stone pedagogy is another way of describing what willfulness has taught me. In treating willfulness as a lesson, I am also making a commitment to will. The problem with will remains how it can allow us not to register how things are determined. But the will is also the name we give A Call to Arms

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to possibility: the shared condition of not being fully determined from without, whatever that without; the will as wiggle room, as the room to deviate, a room kept open by will’s incompletion, a room most often in human history designated as ruin. To inhabit this ruin is to inhabit the room of willfulness. We might in the work of this willful inhabitance create a stony kinship, a kinship of strangers, to return to my reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Such a kinship would be between those who have willfully refused to be straightened out, to become points on the straight line of inheritance. Such a kinship not only embraces the swerve, as described by Lucretius, and those who follow him most queerly, but takes up these points of deviation as points of attachment. Willful stones might even offer us a new beginning, one without blueprint, one in which the capacity not to be compelled by others is made into the promise of a queer thing. The promise of a queer thing: is this not an earthly promise, a way of accepting a shared inhabitancy of an earth? Is there a willful ecology being implied here? I think so; I hope so. We could relate a willful ecology to the Gaia hypothesis of the earth as a single organism. Let’s think back to Pascal’s mischievous foot. One way of telling the story of the willful foot might be as a story of the humans who have selfishly forgotten they are part of the earth, and who in this forgetting have compromised the health of the whole body. If we affirmed the willful foot, we might also give permission for humans to be selfish. Whatever my argument is, it is not about giving any such permission (though I have questioned how selfishness or self-will can be used as a technique to differentiate the moral worth of humans). I would translate Pascal’s account of the mischievous foot into an ecological fable quite differently. It is not that humans are the foot but that they have treated the earth as the foot, as the part that must be willing to submit. To make the earth into a foot is not only to assume that it will become part of the human body, as an extension or limb, but that the earth must be productive, must support or carry the whole social body, the body of the occupier. A more ethical ecological relation would recognize instead the willfulness of nature. After all, we know from assembling a willfulness archive that willfulness is an attribution that humans tend to make to whatever gets in the way of an intent. Nature as the mischievous foot gets in the way: she does not agree to the human demand for submission; she does not even cope with this demand. Such an argument is implicit to Isabelle Stengers’s redescription of Gaia not as a healthy organism but “as one who intrudes.” In192

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deed, Stengers suggests she chose the name Gaia as she “wanted a name for who we may associate with the notion of intrusion” (2008, 7).19 Intrusion: a willful description for what comes back to the body. An ecological concern would be an invitation to think not only of humans as parts of a shared world but what follows this thought. The invitation might be one we can address to parts. Some partnerships are not a matter of will: they come before a willing subject, as a question of how we arrive into a world. Partness could be linked to what Hannah Arendt describes as “natality,” the shared condition of being “newcomers who are born into the world as strangers” (1958, 9), a condition which for Arendt is also the promise of a new beginning, of creativity. If to be born is to become part of a world that has already taken shape, then being born is also a parting of company: the newborn emerges not only to a world but from a woman’s body. Partness is here an interval or traveling between bodies that matter, bodies that are not simply one or singular wholes. If dwelling within is temporary, then a body, this maternal body, includes parts that will cease to be part, parts for whom unbecoming a member is birth not death. In being cut off from a body, in becoming part of a world with others, we do not just leave what we leave behind us: bodies too carry traces of where they have been. To become part of a world can be to restore the promise of this behind as a maternal as well as a material promise. And of course, not all things emerge in the same way: a mammalian beginning is one kind of beginning. But if to emerge is to emerge from, then it is by going back to from, that we can offer a new way of beginning: perhaps even a new way to begin the thought of beginning. To begin again: we would need to tell different origin stories of the human. Perhaps we would not begin with Eve coming from a part of Adam, but with the wayward parts themselves. Take the story told by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads” (cited in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield [1957] 1983, 303). We do not need to reattach the strays by assuming parts as needy. Strays can lead us astray. Wandering parts can wander toward other parts, creating new fantastic combinations, affinities of matter that matter. Queer parts are parts of many, parts that in wandering away create something. We could throw stones too into this most queer mix, or stones could throw themselves, or we could be thrown by the stones. If we are to queer the mix, humans would not be assumed as the mediating part: the part to which all other parts must relate. A willful ecology A Call to Arms

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would be one that does not require we follow the path of the will to the same place, one in which hap as well as snap can create room, room for things to be the things they are with or without other things. A queer relation offers the freedom of not having a relation, the freedom not to participate, not to be connected or stay connected.20 If this is a queer story of inter-connections, we would find in the hyphen an alternative line, a way out as well as a way in. To create room means we still have to fight for preservation; we have to fight for life; we might have to become willful to keep going; we have to keep coming up, to get in the way of an all-toohuman occupation. And we have to be willing to hear the intrusion of Gaia, which means being willing to attend to the costs of the generalization of human will. Perhaps we can listen to the sound of nature’s feet when we do not ask nature to be handy.

Becoming Army Willful parts: hands which are not handy. This book has been full of such parts, wayward parts: parts that will not budge, that refuse to participate, parts that keep coming up, when they are not even supposed to be. I have taken the arm in the Grimm story as a starting point, as a willful subject, one who has priority, who has helped me to follow a different path in the history of will. To hear a phrase as a “call to arms” is to be mobilized by that phrase. Can we hear the arms in this call? There are two noun versions of the word “arm.” The first derives from the Old English word for upper limb (earm), and from the Latin for shoulder (armus): the second derives from the Old French word “for weapons of a warrior” (armes) and from the Latin for tools of war (arma). These two senses meet in the idea of a meeting, as words for that which is fitted together. The arm is a join; to arm is to join. A call to arms is most often articulated as a call to action; it is a call to take up one’s arms as tools of war. Can we think of arms as fleshy limbs as being called?21 Can we put these arms back into the call? I want to end this book by thinking through and with the fleshiness of arms (as well as the hands that can become fists as part of this part). Arms can be willful agents; they create by reaching.22 Political struggle has transformed the arm into a sign for that struggle. The raised arm and the clenched fist are protest signs. Lincoln Cushing (2006) has written a “brief history” of the image of the clenched fist.23 He notes how fist images have been used in numerous political graphic 194

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genres including in the French and Soviet Revolutions, by the Black Panther Party and the United States Communist Party. What can we learn from its appearance? Cushing notes that initially in these images “the fist was always part of something—holding a tool or other symbol, part of an arm or human figure, or shown in action (smashing etc.)” (n.p.). Cushing suggests that graphic artists from the New Left transformed this treatment of the fist as part of something: “This ‘new’ fist stood out with its stark complicity, coupled with a popularly understood meaning of rebellion and militancy” (n.p.). The fist is not part, not even part of an arm. It is important to remember the hand of the fist: a fist is typically defined as a hand closed tightly with the fingers bent against the palm. The fist is the unhandy hand; when the fingers clench, the hand cannot grasp, or hold, or be compelled to do something. Even if the arm in previous images had been a willful part (if acting, the arm was smashing), we know from our willfulness archive how arms have been called upon to be supportive parts. An armless fist willfully inherits from a smashing arm (an arm that might be smashing a stone and a stone that might be smashing as well as smashed). The radicalism of the fist is also expressed in how it is cut off, no longer willing to be part, no longer willing to accept the subordination of its will to the will of the whole. We could also think of the use of the clenched fist within the women’s liberation movement, with this image reproduced by the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful. Here the singular fist is contained within the sign of woman. The clenched fist might be protest against the sign “woman” (by being in the sign “woman”) as well as re-signifying the hands of feminism as protesting hands. Feminist hands are not “helping hands” in the sense they do not help women help. Feminist hands, though, might be helpful in another way: helping women to protest against being helpers. Of course as soon as we say that we have to say this: any feminism that can live up to the promise of that name will not free some women from being helping hands by employing other women to take their place. Feminism—as with other forms of dissenting politics—needs to refuse this division of labor, this “freeing up” of the time and energy of some by employing the limbs of others. If willfulness is a politics that aims for no, then it is a politics that is not only about the refusal to be supporting limbs but the refusal of a social body that treats others as supporting limbs. The clenched fist can speak; it can say no, by refusing to uncurl the fingers. The fist can snap the bonds of fate. This is not to say we can or should hear the fist as a no. Raymond Williams suggests that “whilst A Call to Arms

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the clenched fist is a necessary symbol the clenching ought never to be such that the hand cannot open, and the fingers extend, to discover and give a shape to the newly formed reality” (1983, 335). Before we can create, before the fingers can extend, however, the hand must clench, must stop being a tool for those who treat other beings as tools. Can we offer a history of revolting hands? In his introduction to A Dying Colonialism, Adolfo Gilly describes Frantz Fanon’s decolonizing project: “Liberation does not come as a gift from anybody; it is seized by the masses with their own hands. And by seizing it they themselves are transformed” (1967, 2, emphasis added). Revolutionary hands are willful; in not carrying out commands, they remake the bodies of which they are part. Or think of Richard Wright’s extraordinary poem “I have seen black hands” ([1934] 1997, 143). Wright does not speak as a hand but to the hands: he speaks as a black person who has seen black hands. The poem is a testimony to hands or treats hands as testimony: I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them They were tired and awkward and calloused and grimy and covered with hangnails And they were caught in the fast-moving belts of machines and snagged and smashed and crushed. (143) The black hands are covered in skin that bear the marks of this violence; they are shaped by violence; they feel this violence. Hands can be tired out by the demand they give themselves to the owners of the machines. Hands can be crushed by the machines. The last stanza of the poem is an image of black hands raised in revolt: I am black and I have seen black hands Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers, And some day—and it is only this which sustains me— Some day there shall be millions and millions of them, On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon! (143) This image of protest is of the hands of the workers united, white hands and black hands raised in revolt. Hands in becoming a “burst of fists” offer a new horizon, one glimpsed in the affective work of the imagination, as that which can sustain bodies that bear the weight of history. This image is of many hands, “millions and millions” of hands. If these hands are joined, they join in protesting the violence against the hands 196

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of black and white workers, the violence of profit extracted from labor. If these hands are raised together, they are reaching for rather than assuming solidarity. They are reaching for the possibility of not being bound, and they reach for this together. A fist can become an army. There have been important political moments when bodies have raised their arms in protest, when bodies have become arms in protest. Think of John Carlos and Tommie Smith who both raised an arm in protest, a black power salute, at the Moscow Olympics in 1968, an act that was to have serious consequences for both of them.24 In raising an arm they become willful arms, suspended for their “willful disregard for Olympic principles.” One article describes their action as “an act of petulance” and as replacing the Olympic motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” with “Angrier, nastier, uglier.”25 We can learn so much from this replacement: how willfulness can be required not to go along with what has already been willed, the happiness of the Olympics as the synchronicity of global time. And we can note again the utility of the judgment of willfulness as a way of not hearing protest: as if what is behind the action is simply the will to oppose what has been generally willed. But arms will rise; and we will rise as arms. Of course, the raised arm and the clenched fist are not only or inherently progressive signs (and we might want to be cautious of the “progress” in “progressive”). Think of the Nazi salute. Here the raised arms become like rods, coming up in line, coming up as line. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone describes how the Nazi salute makes use of the arms as follows: “A particularly striking example is the Nazi salute: a dangly arm is briskly and promptly transformed into a solid mass as it comes up to a diagonal ending position. Not only this, but there is no hesitation in the upward movement; however flaccid the arm is to begin with, it is ever ready to rise to the occasion” (1994, 332). Arms can be a means of creating an alignment when rising is compulsory: arms when required to come up in unison can become rods, coming up as straightening out. If arms can be brought into line; they can also smash the line. They can come up at the wrong time, stay down at the wrong time. Arms can disobey; they can wander away. The wayward arm could be heard as a call to arms. Perhaps the call sounds differently if the arms are heard as subjects of the call: the call to arms as the call of arms. A call can mean a lament, an accusation; a naming, as well as a visitation (in the sense of a calling upon). Can we tell queer history as a history of arms? Can we put the “arms” back into the “miserable army” of the inverted described in A Call to Arms

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Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness? Can we hear in the sorrow of their lament a call? Perhaps to hear this sorrow as a call is to be called into action. Queer arms might then participate in bringing the walls down, the walls that almost contain misery in certain places. Arms can also matter as the “matter out of place,” to borrow an expression from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, the sign of an improper residence ([1966] 2002, 44). If you have the “wrong arms,” it means you are assumed to be in the wrong place. An example: a butch lesbian enters the female toilets. The attendant becomes flustered and says, “You are not supposed to be here.” The butch lesbian is used to this: how many of her stories are toilet stories; to pass as male becomes a question mark of your right to pass into female space. “I am a woman,” she says. We might have to assign ourselves with gender if we trouble the existing assignments. With a reassignment, she can go to the toilet. When she comes out, the attendant is embarrassed; the attendant points to her arm, saying, “So strong.” The butch lesbian allows the moment to pass by joking, giving the attendant a “show of her arms.” If with arms we come out, with arms we come in. These moments do not always pass so easily. Many of these histories of passing or of not passing are traumatic.26 Arms don’t always help us get through. When arms are wayward, they can be beaten. If we told queer history as a history of arms, we would show the material consequences of being wayward. Arms after all can be gendering assignments. J. Jack Halberstam in Female Masculinity notes with some surprise how Havelock Ellis uses the arm as a gender test in the case of Miss M: “Miss M. he thinks, tries to cover over her masculinity but gives herself away to Ellis when he uses a rather idiosyncratic test of gender identification: ‘with arms, palmed up, extended in front of her with inner sides touching, she cannot bring the inner sides of the forearms together as nearly every woman can, showing that the feminine angle of the arm is lost’ ” (1998, 80). If the arminess of the queer female arm is detected by a straightening rod, the arm is not straightened. The arm can be the fleshy site of a disagreement. Feminist and queer archives are full of images of strong arms and large hands; arms and hands become signs of bodies that are not fitting. In Mrs. Dalloway it is Mrs. Kilman’s “large hand” that “opened and shut on the table” ([1925] 1996, 96). As Jane Garrity has noted, this hand is predatory and sinister, in its attempts to possess Elizabeth: “Miss Kilman’s cannibalistic desire is synecdochially displaced into her mechanical grasping hand” (2003, 138). To assemble a willfulness archive is 198

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to be willing to transform something sinister into a promise: a queer arm exceeds the very expectation of what an arm can do or can be. To exceed an expectation is to lend a hand to the creation of form. Creative arms: they call as well as carry. Can we assemble a queer army? A queer army would not be a functional army: perhaps it would be mayhem, a state of disorder or riotous confusion. As Susan Stryker and Nikki Sullivan have pointed out, the word “mayhem” derives from English common law, referring to a crime that deprives a person of the limbs required for fighting, including hands, arms, or legs. Stryker and Sullivan show how mayhem is thus a “crime against sovereignty,” to deprive a body of the use of a member is to deprive the king of the use of a body (2009, 58, see also Sullivan 2005). Indeed, mayhem becomes a willful act that, in compromising “a particular body’s ability to be integrated” (57), is also a crime against the body politic, or what I called in chapter 3, following Mary Poovey, “the whole social body.”27 A queer army would be an army that is not willing to reproduce the whole, an army of unser viceable parts. You can be assembled by what support you refuse to give. A queer army might be a crip army of parts without bodies, as well as bodies without parts, to evoke Audre Lorde’s call for an army of one-breasted women. To call for such an army is to hear the call of the arms. A call of arms can be a recall. Just recall Sojourner Truth speaking to the suffragettes, having to insist on being a woman activist as a black woman and former slave, having to insist that abolitionism and suffrage can and should be spoken by the same tongue: “Ain’t I a woman,” she says. “Look at me,” she says, “look at my arm.” And in brackets, in the brackets of history, it is said that Sojourner Truth at this moment “bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power” (cited in Zackodnik 2011, 99).28 The muscularity of her arm is an inheritance of history, the history of slavery shown in the strength of the arm,29 the arm required to plough, to sow the field. The arms of the slave belonged to the master, as did the slave, as the ones who were not supposed to have a will of their own. No wonder we must look to the arm, if we are to understand the history of those who rise up against oppression. A history of rising up, of not being reduced to dust, shows us the affinity between those various and varied beings that have been deemed property, as objects in which the will of others resides. I have called this affinity a “stony kinship.” Willfulness is not then just a crisis in the regime of property, as I argued in chapter 1. It is a crisis, yes, but a crisis created by those who resist the regime. As Fred Moten argues, “The history of A Call to Arms

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blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). Even if willfulness is used to contain resistance, it can be how some resist that containment. The history of blackness might not only testify to the resistance of objects but might even depend upon that resistance. Those who resist being made into objects can recognize the resistance of objects. One might speculate here that subjects who have experienced being made into objects by virtue of their membership of a group are the ones who give objects the “best chance” of life because they are less likely to experience their own being as occupation. A history of willfulness would thus include a history of objects that are not empty enough to be filled by human will, objects that refuse to provide containers. Colonialism and slavery are object relations as well as embodied relations: bodies become objects, become arms, what is assumed to carry and to carry out the master’s will, becoming where the will of the master resides. In Phenomenology of Mind Hegel offers a philosophical fable of the master/slave dialectic.30 I am now ready to offer my final hand: a rereading of Hegel’s fable as a companion fable to the Grimm fable. In Philosophy of Right Hegel makes an explicit comparison between the will of the child and the will of the slave, as wills fatally tied to the object domain, thus creating the ground for my own reading, I have no doubt some would say my willful misreading, of Hegel.31 Hegel does not appear to exercise the language of will within the fable itself. However, if we read this fable alongside Philosophy of Right, which describes “phases of will” in the passage toward freedom ([1820] 2005, xxxii), we learn how to read the fable as a fable of will. As referred to in chapter 1, Hegel defines property in Philosophy of Right in terms of the will: “a person putting his will into an object” ([1820] 2005, 10). The slave is a person treated as property: the one who provides residence for the master’s will. On the grounds that slavery contradicts the idea of freedom, Hegel notes, one would or should “condemn slavery” (14). However, Hegel then seems to qualify his argument with reference to will: “It depends on the person’s own will whether he should be a slave or not, just as it depends on the will of a people whether or not it is to be in subjection” (14). This concept of willing subjection compares directly with that of voluntary servitude discussed in chapter 4. Hegel suggests that slavery and subjection are wrong: “not simply on the part of those who enslave or subjugate, but of the slaves and subjects themselves” (14–15). Moreover for Hegel, even if slavery is wrong, it is a passage “from the natural condition of man to his true social and moral condition” (15). If 200

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slavery is found when a wrong is right, then “the wrong has its value and finds its necessary place” (15). In this model, the subjection of the slave is a necessary part of a passage toward freedom. If the slave belongs to the master, and if the slave must be ready to receive the master’s will, then what does it mean for slavery to be made dependent on “the person’s own will”? The slave is both person and property; a property of will that has will. Saidiya V. Hartman has observed this paradox with reference to the captive female: she must be both “will less and always willing” (1997, 81).32 Hartman describes the “negation of the captor’s will” as “willful submission to the master” (81, emphasis in original). A willful submission is one in which the slaves are willing to extend the will of the master: “The purportedly binding passions of master-slave relations were predicated on the inability of the slave to exercise her will, in any ways other than serving her master” (84). Hartman’s analysis asks us to think of the embodied situation of the black female slave. As bell hooks observes: “The black female was exploited as a laborer in the fields, a worker in the domestic household, a breeder, and as an object of white male sexual assault” (1981, 22). She became the arms, the hands, the genitals, and the womb: parts cut off from a body in what Hortense Spillers describes powerfully as the “atomizing of the captive body” (1987, 67). Spillers shows us that not only are body parts cut off from bodies, but slaves too are cut off from their own kin, becoming unrelated or “orphaned” in order to become part of the slave owner’s family (68). Will becomes a technique for enforcing this becoming: a “severing of the body from its motive will” (67). A severing is a sentencing, as we can hear in this sentence from Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: “Pity me and pardon me oh virtuous reader. You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another” ([1861] 2008, 57).33 In her work, bell hooks draws on autobiographies by female slaves such as Harriet Jacobs to discuss how violence works through will: “If she would not willingly submit, he would use force” (1981, 25). The slaves exercise the will they are not supposed to have in submitting to the will of the master: a willing submission is thus a willful submission. How can we relate willfulness to the necessity of labor? We can now return to Hegel’s own fable, which I will not read as a universal journey of consciousness but as the master’s fable of his own journey.34 For Hegel the slave is the one who labors for the master. Labor can be A Call to Arms

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thought in terms of becoming willing to be the master’s limbs (the master is freed from the necessity of supporting his own body). The slave is for. And in laboring the slave makes things: the slave “fashions the thing” ([1807] 2003, 111). Objects acquire independence; they are sent forth. In Hegel’s fable, even if this fashioning is frightening (the creation of an “alien, external reality” [111]), in being confronted with the product of her own labor, the slave attains consciousness that would not be attained in relation to the master: “that he himself exists in its own right” as having “a mind of its own” (111). Or we could say: the slave discovers a “will of her own.” As Robert R. Williams describes, for Hegel the slave is the one who has yet to recognize “a will of its own [ein willenloser Wille]” and is thus “a will without a will of its own” (1997, 126). Even if the slave in laboring is on the way to freedom (more so than the master) that freedom is described as limited. And (we are ready for this, we expected this) willfulness then becomes the slave’s assignment: “Since the entire content of its natural consciousness has not tottered and shaken, it is still inherently a determinate mode of being; having a ‘mind of its own’ (der eigene Sinn) is simply stubbornness (Eigensinn), a type of freedom which does not get beyond the attitude of bondage” ([1807] 2003, 112). Having assembled a willfulness archive, we can hear what is at stake in the Hegelian judgment: the ones who resist the will of the master in acquiring a will of their own (the acquisition is the resistance) are judged as selfwilled or willful. The judgment is an expression of the threat of the slave’s independence to the master’s own freedom, which is and which remains: freedom from the necessity of toil.35 We can create a new fable if we deviate at certain points. The slave recognizes that she has a will of her own, a will that belongs to herself and not to the master. She recognizes will through her laboring body. The master in treating the slaves as arms ceases to use his own arms. They become flaccid organs. This is the scandal of the colonial relation. The arms confront the master who henceforth cannot mention them. It is the arms that are taken up in the rebellion of the slaves, arms that are not only involved in the creation of objects, but are shaped by the labor of that creation. This is Truth’s truth: this is how a demand to “look at my arm” speaks back to the master. But Hegel cannot look: he can only describe the slave’s consciousness of independence as a form of bondage. Hegel’s fable is a master’s fable precisely because he cannot recognize the arms, let alone their agency; he can think of the slave’s bid for freedom only in relation to objects, a freedom that can thus be 202

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diagnosed as fatality in its tie to the objective domain, as not snapping the bond. We have another ending to Hegel’s story, another way of telling the Hegelian story. Stubbornness or Eigensinn, which we can translate as willfulness if we follow a grim convention, is only judged as bondage by those requiring the arms of others to complete the end of their own freedom.36 If arms do not appear in the fable (we know why, now we know why) we can still liberate the arms: to liberate the arms from the Hegelian dialectic would be to liberate them from an absence. The arms can smash the Hegelian dialectic. This would be one way of describing Frantz Fanon’s decolonizing humanist project.37 Fanon recognized in Jean-Paul Sartre’s exercising of the Hegelian dialectic how blackness can be dissolved as the “objective” phase passed through on the way to universal freedom. Perhaps being on the way is an alternative to being in the way. Or perhaps not: whether on or in the way, some become what is (or must be) overcome by going that way. Fanon remarks, “My effort was only a term in the dialectic,” an effort that becomes the loss of a hand, “every hand was a losing hand for me” ([1967] 2008, 101).38 We cannot let Fanon keep losing his hand. This history of lost hands is one we must keep in front of us. The arms that built the master’s house are the arms that will bring it down. Audre Lorde entitled an essay with a proclamation: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (1984, 110–13). In that unflinching “will never” is a call to arms: do not become the master’s tool! When the arms come up, they come up against walls, what keeps the master’s residence standing. No wonder willful arms offer their own form of wisdom. No wonder arms have a kinship with stones: building the walls, bringing them down. Bringing the walls down is not easy; history has become concrete. Arms in the labor and effort of what they come up against show us what is not over, what we do not get over. It can take willfulness to insist on this not over because the masters will not admit this world as their residence. To recognize the walls would get in the way of their residence, their standing. This is why willfulness requires a collective struggle: becoming army. Effort is shared. Effort is unbecoming. What a history: becoming army as unbecoming the arms of the social body. What a history. A history is condensed in the charge of willfulness. We can not only accept this charge but keep it alive. The arm that keeps coming out of the grave can signify persistence and protest, or perhaps even more importantly, persistence as protest. We need to give the arm A Call to Arms

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something to reach for. Or perhaps we are the ones being reached by the arms. After all, we know some of us are only here now on these grounds because arms in history have extended our reach. Oh this some can we change the sum: can we gather, those gathered as nots, as not human? Oh this some can we change the sum: is this what it means for willfulness to become an inheritance, a way of recognizing what made possible the very grounds of our existence? But we will need, we still need, we shall need to proceed with caution. Willfulness is not a ground upon which we tread. When willfulness becomes a ground, translating a wrong into a right or even into righteousness (to be righteous is to be morally upright), then arms can become rods, coming up only to straighten things out. After all, when arms come up, they disturb the ground. Can we learn not to eliminate the signs of disturbance? Disturbance can be creative: not as what we aim for, not as what grounds our action, but as the effect of action: disturbance as what is created by the very effort of reaching, of reaching up, of reaching out, of reaching for something that is not present, something that appears only as a shimmer, a horizon of possibility. When the arms refuse to support and carry, they reach. We do not know what the arms can reach.

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Notes

Introduction. A Willfulness Archive 1. This translation uses the English spelling “wilful.” I have in this book used the American spelling as it allows us to see the “will” in “willful.” I should note also that in the German story the child is not given a gender. In this English translation of the German story, the child is “she” but in some other translations the child is “he.” I will address the willful child in this book as “she” because I would argue willfulness tends to be registered as a feminine attribute. However, I hope to show how the gendering of will as well as willfulness is complicated (see chapter 2). Boys and men can be called willful, although that call might sound differently and have different effects. 2. I explore the relation between property and the will in the final section of chapter 1 with specific reference to Hegel and Marx. 3. Classical and early modern texts cited are referred to using book number, chapter number (where relevant) and page number. 4. From Oxford English Dictionary Online (2008). All dictionary definitions used in this book are from this edition. 5. Probably the only text I have come across that foregrounds “willfulness” in offering a history of the will is Richard E. Flathman’s Willful Liberalism. However his book does not involve a discussion of willfulness as an attribution: it is rather a defense of a style of liberalism, a refashioned liberalism that is in the “free spirit” of Nietzsche, focusing on the creativity and self-making of individuals (1992, 208). Flathman does offer some important readings of voluntarism, including theological voluntarism, and this book provides a useful contrast to Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (1978). His approach to the “semiotic of the will” could also be related to my emphasis on will and willfulness as a grammar (1992, 158), although he uses this method primarily to avoid thinking of the will as a “single entity and force” (159), while my interest is in developing a model of how the will is socially, affectively, and unevenly distributed between persons and things. My argument also attempts to disentangle willfulness from individualism. For a useful edited collection debating Flathman’s willful liberalism, see Honig (2002). 6. In this section and the book that follows, my argument rests on teasing out the relationship between two words/concepts “will” and “willfulness.” I should note that

in other languages the words that are roughly equivalent to willfulness are not “will words.” I would suggest that this does not mean the argument can only be made in English, although it can certainly be made more easily and more neatly. Take for example the German word eigensinnig, which is the word used in the Grimm story. This word means “own-self” (or a sense of one’s self) rather than self-will. However, it is this sense of “own-ness” that is conveyed by the word “willful” (see chapter 4). The German educational literatures on breaking the will of the child (see chapter 2) thus refer to the problem of eigensinnig as that which must be eliminated from the child. In Germany there has been some interesting work on eigensinnig that offers a reclaiming of that term in a way I am suggesting we can reclaim willfulness. For example, see the book edited by the German social historian Alf Lüdtke, The History of Everyday Life, which includes the following on eigensinnig in the glossary of terms: “Key term in Lüdtke’s analysis of workers’ everyday life, denoting willfulness, spontaneous self-will, a kind of selfaffirmation, an act of reappropriating alienated social relations on and off the shop floor by self-assertive prankishness, demarcating a space of one’s own. There is a disjunction between formalized politics and the prankish, stylised, misanthropic distancing from all constraints or incentive present in the everyday politics of Eigen-Sinn. In standard parlance, the word has pejorative overtones, referring to ‘obstreperous, obstinate’ behaviour, usually of children. The ‘discompounding’ of writing it as Eigen-Sinn stresses its root signification of ‘one’s own sense, own meaning’ ” ([1989] 1995, 314). The reclaiming of terms for “problem subjects” will depend on linguistic and cultural histories (that can be treated as resources). Note also in the German case, a word that is a more direct translation for willfulness would be eigenwillig (self-will). There is a fairy tale in English by Francis Edward Paget about a spoiled child called Prince Eigenwillig: a boy who inherits the German name for willfulness, in whom we can meet this name in person. And oh: what a sorry tale! In the end Prince Eigenwillig says to his mother, “I won’t do anything you tell me. If you had not spoilt me I shouldn’t be in all this trouble now” (1846, 117). His fate is typical for willful children: punishment by death. He is turned into a ball by the fairy’s wand. My point in referring to this story is to suggest that fairy tales and folklore may provide an interesting site of cultural translation and could be explored as a transcultural willfulness archive. 7. Ryle’s aim is to refuse the concept of “a faculty” of “the will.” He writes: “I hope to refute the doctrine that there exists a Faculty, immaterial Organ, or Ministry, corresponding to the theory’s description of the ‘Will’ and, accordingly, that there occur processes, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as volitions” ([1949] 2009, 50). As I will point out, however, there is a long history of reflection on the will that does not treat will as a faculty of the subject. 8. For example, many recent publications on the will address the question of whether the neurosciences can accommodate a concept of free will, or whether they demonstrate the truth of determinism, or become another occasion for supporting compatibilism. Some typical and telling titles include The Volitional Brain (Libet, Freeman, and Sutherland 1999); Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (Gazzaniga 2012); Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? (Murphy and Brown 2009); My Brain Made Me Do It (Sternberg 2010). See Rose (2007) for a discussion of these literatures from a Foucauldian perspective. Because my primary interest is not whether or not something called free will exists, but how the will comes into existence as an idea in relation to willfulness, I will

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not be engaging with these literatures on the free-will-versus-determinism controversy directly. However, I do engage with the histories abbreviated in the shorthand “free will” (the histories, in others words, that mean freedom and will have tended to be thought together), while also recognizing that there have been other ways that will and freedom can be thought (given that some approaches to the will explicitly reject the concept of freedom, while some approaches to freedom attempt to detach freedom from the will). 9. Another example would be Vernon J. Bourke’s (1964) Will in Western Thought: An Historic-Critical Survey. Although this offers a “long view” of the will in philosophy, it does not really offer a history of will as an idea, but rather groups together different approaches to the will (the will as rational appetite, will and intellectual preference, and so on). It is a useful reference point but not comparable to Hannah Arendt’s offering, which raises the question of what it means to think “the will” historically. More recently, Giorgio Agamben has offered in spoken lectures an “archaeology of will,” proposing that modernity is the transformation from “I can” (the Greek focus on potentiality) to “I will” (understood as a modular verb) engaging with early works in Christianity (such as Augustine and St. Paul) and the relation of will and commandant. He challenges the usual reading that the Greeks could not think the concept of will by relating the emergence of will to the resolution of the problem of potentiality (and impotentiality). While I think this argument is thought provoking, my own approach will suggest that the will has a more complicated career than can be expressed by a simple transition. See also chapter 1, note 16, for further reflection on the relation of “I will” to “I can.” And finally also relevant here would be Regenia Gagnier’s cultural history of individualism focusing on the late nineteenth century. Gagnier offers an “anatomy of the will” (2010, 1) and is one of the few writers I have come across to consider the biological, social, and individual will (see especially 87–115). 10. For Arendt a history of the will is a history of the faculty of will. She argues, as do many others, that the faculty of the will was not known in Greek antiquity, though she does include Aristotle in her account insofar as his “notion of proairesis” is a “kind of forerunner of the Will” and “can serve as a paradigmatic example of how certain problems of the soul were raised and answered before the discovery of the Will” (1978, 6). I would include those who have approached the will in terms other than as a faculty of the subject within my understanding of the history of the will (such as Lucretius, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche in his later work). 11. It is surprising that Foucault does not focus on the will given the centrality of the confessional mode to History of Sexuality, volume 1. An obvious reference point would have been Augustine’s Confessions. J. G. Merquior has also noted how Foucault might have made the will into an explicit aspect of his argument about the rise of the “confessional subject” (1985, 139). Foucault does reflect on Augustine’s City of God in his contribution to “Sexuality and Solitude,” focusing on the image of the erection and the association of sexuality and disobedience in Augustine (Foucault and Sennett 1981). I will be taking up the question of sexuality and the will in relation to this same passage from Augustine in chapter 3. 12. Nietzsche’s “genealogy of man” is described as a “genealogy of the will” by Werner Hamacher. He notes: “The central problem, with which the genealogy confronts its historiographers, consists in constructing the passage of the will from its eccentric position, where it is not yet will, into the centre of itself” (1990, 33).

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13. Nietzsche singles out Schopenhauer at this point as the philosopher who “has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to us” ([1886] 1997, 12). Indeed, Schopenhauer develops the argument that the Kantian thing-in-itself should be understood as the will. This argument could be understood as so extreme that “the will” becomes far from straightforward. As Gilles Deleuze argues, Schopenhauer “in drawing out the extreme consequences of the old philosophy” is “not content with an essence of the will” but makes “the will the essence of things” (2006, 77–78). Arguably then Schopenhauer in making the will the one and only thing we can and do know also makes the will into the strangest thing. For further discussion of the strangeness of Schopenhauer’s will, see the section “Stones Matter” in my conclusion to this book. 14. The project of following the queer associations between will and error can be connected to J. Jack Halberstam’s (2011) important reflections on “the queer art of failure.” There is a queer potential in not reaching the right points. 15. This is actually the title of her section on Augustine: “Augustine, the First Philosopher of the Will.” 16. This wonderful description “teeth of time” is how Robert Hooke in Micrographia (1655) describes bookworms (cited in Greenblatt 2011, 83). The material significance of parchment to the history and other histories should not be underestimated. That so much depended upon the capacity of parchment to survive the “teeth of time” becomes another way of offering an account of the intermingling of sheep, goats, and humans in history (as well as worms, since the “teeth of time” do destroy some parchment), as elegantly and sheepishly explored by Sarah Franklin in Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (2007). 17. There has been a turn to Lucretius in the humanities: in addition to Stephen Greenblatt’s account of the history of the book, a history in which the human hand plays a part (a hand that in reaching out finds something assumed to have been lost), we also have Michel Serres’s The Birth of Physics ([1977] 2000) influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense ([1969] 2001), which offers a philosophical interpretation of the priority of ancient materialism. Both of these texts make the history of thought “swerve” by acknowledging the matter of the swerve. In the area of scholarship often named as “the new materialism” Lucretius has been given a place as a writer who shows us how matter is the site of agentic potential as we can witness in Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) as well as Vibrant Matter (2009). And in queer theory too, for example, in Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things (2009), we can find Lucretius, written about in this case through the lens of Serres and Bennett, as a way of rereading the matter of sexuality and gender in Renaissance texts. 18. I will return to the matter of stones (and why stones matter in the history of will) in the conclusion of the book. 19. Augustine makes this comparison in relation to human sin: better to sin freely then not to sin unfreely. 20. For educational treatises, I would include both core texts in educational philosophy (in chapter 2, I discuss the work of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and James Mill) as well as more popular educational manuals written for parents as well as children. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of these manuals focused on the problem of willful children: examples include Alice Price, A Willful Young Woman ([1887] 2009); Helen Sherman Griffith’s Her Willful Way: A Story

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for Girls ([1902] 2009), and Henry Marcus Cottinger’s Rosa, The Educating Mother ([1887] 2009). All of these books are now available to contemporary readers as they can be accessed via Google Books and have been reprinted using optical character recognition software. They have been valuable in giving me a sense of how far the figure of the willful child (in particular the willful girl) traveled. I have not been able to decipher the extent to which the texts were distributed and read during this period and have thus not developed my argument through readings of them. It is important to my argument about how willfulness came to matter to engage with materials that reached wide audiences. 21. Observant readers might note that I do not work with George Eliot’s most celebrated novel, Middlemarch, even though it tells the story of another willful heroine, Dorothea Brooke, who ends up (pun probably intended) marrying a character Will. With thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for being such an observant reader! I have worked with the texts that captured my interest; and Daniel Deronda’s willful heroine, Gwendolyn Harleth, I found much more compelling as a character, and one who seemed to have more to say to Maggie Tulliver in my imaginary conversation between willful girls. 22. I would agree with John Smith that the relative absence of the will as a theme within feminism can be related to the kind of subject “the will” has been assumed to belong to. At the same time, feminists in reflecting on the gendering of will have offered another way of conceiving of willing as a social activity. See chapter 2 for discussions of the gendering of will. I am indebted to John Smith’s detailed historical work on sexuality and the will in chapter 3 of this book. 23. Theodor Adorno was thus able to associate the triumphalism of Nazism directly to the concept of the will: “A will, detached from reason and proclaimed as an end-initself, like the will whose triumph the Nazis certified in the official title of the party’s congresses, such a will, like all ideals, that rebel against reason, stands ready for every misdeed” ([1966] 1973, 272). No one who has seen the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935, directed by Leni Riefenstahl) could fail to note the sharpness of Adorno’s critique. A well-known and astute reading of Riefenstahl’s “fascinating fascism” is offered by Susan Sontag (1974). 24. It is noteworthy that some of the strongest critics of the will (as metaphysics of the subject in the case of Nietzsche, or as the reduction of freedom to sovereignty in the case of Arendt) have ended up retaining rather than giving up a concept of will. In Arendt’s case, this can be seen in her commitment to will as a discovery; in Nietzsche’s case, through how he employs the will to understand the motors of history: the will to power. 25. For other stories that used this motif see “The Hand from the Grave,” a collection compiled by D. L. Ashliman (1999/2000) http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0779.html. Accessed January 29, 2014. 26. With thanks to Izzy Isgate whose response to a Facebook post on poisonous pedagogy helped me come up with this sentence. 27. The concept of “sweaty concepts” is inspired by the work of Audre Lorde. In the corpus of her work, Lorde creates concepts in or through a description of how it feels to inhabit this body, in this world, to “withstand” that world (see my conclusion for a discussion of “withstanding” in relation to skin and stone). I have been so energized

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by her example, and in following Audre Lorde, I also want concepts to show the bodily work of their creation: concepts can be made to sweat when we bring them back to the bodies. Indeed, when a concept comes back to the body it might transform how we inhabit bodies. Sweaty concepts might also be understood as concepts that are difficult, that demand we work hard to work with them. 28. With thanks to Flavia Dzodan for her question after I gave a lecture on willfulness in Amsterdam on January 20, 2012, which led to this formulation. 29. My appreciation to AnaLouise Keating who posted this quote in response to a Facebook status update, and whose encouragement to reread Borderlands led me further along a willfulness trail, just as I was beginning to feel the trail had become exhausted. 30. I first worked with this idea of “desire lines” in Queer Phenomenology (2006, 19). My own writing has been a desire line, a wandering away from the official paths laid out by disciplines. Not inhabiting a discipline can be an invitation: it can give us the freedom to roam.

Chapter One. Willing Subjects 1. I should note that another passage from Augustine is more typically compared to Descartes’s method insofar as it is offered as a refutation of skepticism: “They think that by not acknowledging they are alive they avoid error, when even their very error proves they are alive, since one who is not alive cannot err” (The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 20.27). If the will becomes certain, it is perhaps because doubting will becomes evidence of having a will to doubt. And perhaps becoming certain of will is also about becoming alive to error. 2. Heidegger’s critique of will as metaphysics is in fact a critique of Nietzsche’s concept of “the will to power” and offers the most explicit reading of the history of metaphysics as a history of will. As Bret W. Davis describes, for Heidegger, “the history of metaphysics not only completes itself in the modern metaphysics of will, from the beginning the project of metaphysics was in this sense a project of will” (2007, 13). The use of the will in Nazism provides the historical context for Heidegger’s critique of the will. In Heidegger’s “Conversation on the Country Path about Thinking,” the Scholar says to the Teacher he wants “non-willing,” which means being “willing to renounce willing” ([1959] 1969, 59). Heidegger offers more than a critique of the metaphysics of will: he tries to get beyond the very bind of will. Although Jacques Derrida did not tend to write explicitly on the will, his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence in Of Grammatology ([1967] 1997) could be read in these terms. Derrida also offers a way of rereading Nietzsche as not participating in the metaphysics of the will, as Ernst Behler (1991) has suggested. Doing the research for this book has also made me aware that many of the writers working in the mid- to late nineteenth century who contributed to what we might call “a psychology of the will,” some of whom I consider in the following chapter, also offered strong critiques of the metaphysical will. Henry Maudsley begins Body and Will by arguing against the model of will as “essentially a self-procreating, selfsustaining spiritual entity, which owns no natural cause, obeys no law, and has no sort of infinity with matter” (1884, 1). He then adds: “What the metaphysician has done is plain enough.” He “has converted into an entity the general term which embraces the

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multitude of particular volitions, themselves varying infinitely in power and quality, and referred them all to its cause” (17). 3. For a recent work on the psychology of will that describes conscious will as “the feeling of doing” see Wegner (2002). Wegner distinguishes between the phenomenal will and the empirical will or “the actual relationship between mind and action” (2002, 15). In this chapter, I will not be making this distinction. I will be investigating willing purely at the level of phenomena. I should add here that I read The Illusion of Conscious Will fairly late in the research process and had one of those “uncanny” moments: for in this text Wegner uses the examples of (anarchic or willful) hands and (séance) tables, which have also been central to my own project, and which I had originally thought of as rather idiosyncratic examples. There are reasons why hands and tables appear in the history of will: this book gives you some of them. 4. My use of a genealogical approach to objects is why I do not situate my argument in terms of what we could call “the object turn” or object-oriented ontology (ooo) in recent theoretical literatures despite how some of my arguments on the willfulness of objects could be placed within that turn (although they are also continuous with my own focus on objects such as tables from Queer Phenomenology onward). In Graham Harman’s contribution to the volume The Speculative Turn he argues: “For the so-called genealogical approach to reality objects have no discernible identity apart from the history of which they emerged, which must be reconstructed to know what the thing really is. Here the object is to be taken as nothing more than its history” (2011, 23, emphasis in original). This argument misrepresents genealogy as the reduction of an object to its history (to offer a history of an object is not to say that the object is this history) and permits the object to become that which is autonomous, or apart from its history (I would call this “object fetishism”). I find feminist theory a better guide in the project of making objects matter. The feminist critique of the subject is a critique of the concept of autonomy: of how the male subject is separated from the world (including the mother’s body) in order to represent itself as giving birth to itself. Just consider Donna Haraway’s description of “the self-birthing dream of man” (1997, 121). To critique the subject by making the object autonomous is to replicate the problem of a subject-centered history (objects become like the subjects they were intended to replace, as that which can stand up insofar as they stand apart). My approach is to think of subjects and objects as parts of worlds in which we are entangled; these “tangles” make worlds too messy to start with things assumed as apart from other things (though the tangle of willfulness shows how things can come apart). This is one way I have used the concept of “stickiness” (Ahmed 2004): when objects are sticky they “pick up” traces of where they have been. For an important discussion of the object turn in critical theory, see Felski (2007). 5. Brian Leiter also describes Nietzsche’s argument in Beyond Good and Evil as “a phenomenology of will,” one that does not “track an actual or causal relationship” (2009, 111). My argument is in sympathy with his: I show how phenomenology can help us to track how relationships come to be felt or experienced as causal relationships, whether or not they are. 6. One might note the similarity between Nietzsche’s descriptions of willing as a plurality of sensations to David Hume’s arguments in A Treatise of Human Nature: “By the will, I mean nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind” (1985, 447,

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emphasis in original). Willing might even be described as what we feel when we think we are willing. For Hume, famously, external causality is a kind of habit or inference of the mind; we do not “see” causality but rather the “uniform and regular conjunction” of two bodies (such as two billiard balls). Likewise, in the case of will understood as internal causality we infer it: “The union betwixt motives and actions has the same constancy” (452). Willing for Hume is a kind of habit of association preserved as or in feeling. 7. I will indeed be offering an account of bodily limbs as both willing and willful, an account in which limbs are allowed to wander from the body: in having a will of their own, limbs are not simply or only transmitters of the will. 8. We can thus understand why Henning Peucker expresses surprise as to why there are not more phenomenological studies of the will: “One wonders why there are not more studies about the volitional consciousness especially in phenomenology. Because of its descriptive and reflective-analytic approach phenomenology seems to be more suitable than any other philosophical method to investigate acts of willing and their structure” (2008, 1). Scholars have also noted with surprise that Husserl did not write more systematically on will. Dermot Moran suggests that “somewhat surprisingly” Husserl “does not analyse willing in detail” except in his lectures on ethics (2005, 131). I should note that Husserl does refer to willing and volition in his key works (especially in Logical Investigations, the second book of Ideas, and Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis) although not in a sustained or systematic way. I should also note that some of Husserl’s most important contributions on will have not been translated, including around twenty papers such as “Valuing and Values,” and “Tendencies” from his archives. As a non-German speaker I am thus dependent on the work of Henning Peucker (2008), as well as Ullrich Melle (2002, 2005) and James Hart (1992), who have all written directly on Husserl’s phenomenology of the will with reference to these untranslated papers. I should also note that other key phenomenologists have reflected more systematically on will, most notably Husserl’s contemporary, Alexander Pfänder in his Phenomenology of Willing and Motivation and Other Phaenomenologica ([1967] 1900). 9. In starting this section with Augustine I am also accepting that the history of will is inseparable from the history of Christian thought. It is beyond the scope of this book to address the specifically theological significance of Augustine’s account of the will, or to reflect on the changing fortunes of the will within Christianity. In Augustine’s City of God we are reminded that Christianity originates with the will becoming origin: the fall from grace is a fall from God’s will, a willing fall: “The first act of will, since it preceded all evil deeds in man, was rather a falling away from the work of God to its own works, rather than any substantive act. And the consequent deeds were evil because they followed the will’s own line, and not God’s” (14, 11:568). Simon Harrison offers a useful discussion of how the Augustinian concept of “the will” relates to Christian theology. As Harrison notes, if today “the chief threat to the freedom of the will is physical determinism” for Augustine’s contemporary, Pelagius, “the threat was God’s overpowering grace, and certainty of predestination” (2006, 12). Augustine’s task was to rescue free will from Pelagianism, that is, from arguments against predestination. See also Lenka Karfíková’s clear and detailed account of Augustine, which relates his ideas of will to that of grace, and explains continuities as well as discontinuities between his earlier and later writings, showing how the thesis “will as a relevant human ‘merit’ decides the eternal destiny of human beings” transformed into a thesis that “a will enslaved

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by both inherited and individual sins, . . . can be turned toward the good only through the ‘sweetness’ of affective grace, and, as such, cannot have any ‘merits’ of its own” (2012, 2). I will be returning to the early Augustinian position in chapter 2 on the good will. Many of the most significant theologians in Christian history wrote on “the will,” including Aquinas (for whom “the will” was understood as rationale appetite), Erasmus, and Calvin. Both Arendt (1978) and Albrecht Dihle (1982) in their histories of will refer to changing fortunes of the idea of will in early Christianity. In turn, Herbert Marcuse (1983) relates the increasing focus on the will of the child within the patriarchal family to the spread of Calvinism, as I will discuss further in chapter 2. 10. We could describe this internal struggle between wills as a struggle between the good and ill will, between will and willfulness and between a particular and general will. As I will show in the next chapter, a willful will is often represented as a will that is too full of want (as well as a will that is too full of will) and as an un-free or less-free will, a will that has become like a bad habit. 11. However, as I will discuss in chapter 3, in City of God Augustine reflects at length on the penis as a bodily organ that does not obey the command of the will. Sexuality ruins the distinction between mind and body. 12. I am offering a much more hopeful reading of Augustine’s description of warring wills than Hannah Arendt in her essay, “The Idea of Freedom.” She writes: “Christian will-power was discovered as an organ of self-liberation and immediately found wanting. It is as though the I-will immediately paralyzed the I-can, as though the moment willed freedom, they lost the capacity to be free” ([1954] 2006, 160, emphasis in original). I am not treating Christian will-power as a discovery; nor am I treating the will as an organ. What I am suggesting is that willing is what we do when a command has yet to be completed. This does not make willing essential for freedom but a condition for the possibility of freedom (we can withdraw from a completion). Willing is how some don’t do what they must do and can do. I will suggest in this book that “can” is often translated into demand that bodies be more capable, which as a demand might be how freedom is given up for duty. 13. The Old English word wille has many relatives that also derive from the IndoEuropean root, wel. These include Dutch willen, German wollen, Old Nordic vilja, Goth wilja. Many words in English have a “wel” and thus “will” root (for example, as I will explore in the last section of this chapter, the word “welcome”). It thus becomes interesting to explore certain words as “will words” when the “will” derivation has become forgotten. Wel is akin to the Latin velle: to wish. This Latin derivation is also evident in English “will words” (including obvious ones such as volunteer and volition but also less obvious ones such as benevolent and malevolent). 14. As with most words “will” has a complex history that I cannot fully present here. Jeremy John Smith in his history of function and form in English notes: “In Present-Day English the one-time lexical verb wille is an auxiliary signalling future tense, grammatically bound within the verb-phrase, and the semantic component volition is no longer salient. In other words, the verb has been grammaticalized” (1996, 142, emphasis added). Smith suggests that “want” can now replace “will” to imply volition. For a discussion of the history of the word “will” in relation to “shall” as future auxiliaries see Head (1858). For a good explanation of “the linguistic biography of the word will” as a “tumultuous path” see Murphy and Throop (2010, 5–6).

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15. Henning Peucker claims that this model of volition as presented in Logical Investigations, Ideas 1 and the Gottingen lecture course on ethics from 1908 to 1914 is actually maintained by Husserl throughout his writings, even though he appears to offer a different approach in his later work on genetic phenomenology. As Peucker summarizes, in this original approach Husserl “distinguishes the theoretical, the affective and the volitional consciousness, and claims that the last one necessarily presupposes the other two for the following reason: The constitution of an act of willing depends on a theoretical act which provides us with a willed object, i.e. that what the volitional act strives to realise. Moreover, there can be no act of volition without a positive evaluation of what is previously presented as that which is willed, since every willing is directed toward something that we regard as valuable or positive” (2008, 2). 16. In Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology the focus has thus been more on “I can” than “I will.” By suggesting willing depends on possibility there is also an implication that “I will” and “I can” go together insofar as you tend to will what you can (though not all “cans” are willed: perhaps willing is involved in the conversion of some “cans” from possible to actual). Edith Stein makes this point explicitly: she writes “in every free, indubitable ‘I will’ lies an ‘I can’ ” ([1916] 1989, 107). In a recent lecture, Agamben (2011) argues that “I will” replaces “I can” in the advent of modernity (see introduction, note 9). He states that today when people use the slogan “you can” they really mean “you will.” But I would argue that the history of the educable will is precisely about the intimacy of will and can. In The Man without Content, Agamben refers to the philosopher Novalis whom I also draw upon in my reflections on will and character in chapter 2. Novalis argues: “The body is the tool to shape and modify the world—we must therefore seek to make our bodies capable of everything” ([1798] 1997, 78). This passage cited by Agamben (1999, 78), is preceded by the following sentence: “The art of becoming omnipotent—the art of realizing our will totally” ([1798] 1997, 78). From this one example we can see how potentiality (or perhaps more precisely capability) becomes a will project: to will is to work on can. In my own phenomenological work I have followed both Iris Marion Young (1990) and Frantz Fanon ([1967] 2008) by focusing on the “I cannot” suggesting that gender and race become bodily distributions of capacities. Following the willful subject has helped me think more about the relation of the “can” to the “will not.” Consider how when subjects say they will not do something, it implies they can: indeed to say “I will not” can thus be to say “I could if I would” as opposed to the usual expression, “I would if I could,” and can thus be a way of affirming “can.” This is how the “will not” is often treated as a sign of willfulness: when the obstacle is her will, it is assumed she could. The one who is willful thus can do something but will not be compelled to do that thing. Another word for this refusal to be compelled into action would be stubborn. 17. The distinction between their arguments is slighter than it might at first appear. Schopenhauer, in his essay on freedom of will, also describes the object as a motive. He thus translates the claim that volition “is directed toward this object” to “it intends to change the object in some way and reacts to it” ([1839] 2005, 14). For Schopenhauer, to will an object would be to make the object the project. 18. Alfred Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social World, which draws loyally on Husserl as well as Bergson to develop Max Weber’s model of social action, takes up this idea of projection. Schutz refers to Heidegger’s use of the term, but suggests in

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a footnote that he is not committed “to the explicit meaning” Heidegger “gives to it” (1967, 79). 19. I will question this assumption through the course of the book by reflecting on will and ambivalence, as well as on how we can will ourselves to will what others will us to will (so we can as it were not want what we will). 20. Another “way in” to the phenomena of the will would be to foreground the relationship of will to fatigue. See also Sartre for another phenomenological discussion of fatigue ([1943] 1969, 454–57). Sartre offers a description of the phenomena of fatigue to demonstrate his thesis on will: “The will, far from being the unique or at least privileged manifestation of freedom . . . must presuppose the foundation of an original freedom in order to constitute itself as will. The will in fact is posited as a reflective decision in relation to certain ends” (443). 21. We can note Husserl’s own debt to William James’s work on will and fiat in The Principles of Psychology, which is especially evident in the second book of Ideas. James has described the fiat in the following way: “to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. The so-doing is the fiat” ([1890] 1950, 561). I think William James’s model of the will is more complex than some of the phenomenologists writing on the will give him credit for (see, for example, Melle 2005, 65). As Gail Weiss compares James’s work on habits with phenomenological literatures in her Refiguring the Ordinary (2008), we can compare James’s work on fiat with the phenomenological literature. I would argue for thinking the relationship between some of the models of volition offered in nineteenth-century descriptive psychology and early twentiethcentury phenomenology as a productive one. 22. We could consider the relationship of this structure of will to the Foucauldian model of self-discipline as a kind of internalization, where the subject takes on or takes in the routine gaze of the other, by disciplining itself. Here the model would be flipped: as a kind of externalization, the other is asked to take on the routine gaze of the self by willing the self. Paradoxically it is through externalization that the phantom of the will’s internality might come into being (a phantom that Nietzsche rightly calls into question), such that willing is bound up with the very creation of a boundary between internal and external. 23. This description is very suggestive, if we think of the relation to the past tense and the assignment of willfulness. In my account of “melancholic migrants” I suggested that some bodies come to be understood as lodged in the past, as backward, as insisting on staying hurt by an injury, as refusing to move forward and embrace the happiness of futurity (see Ahmed 2010, 120–59). I think willful subjects are often given the past tense: being willful as a way of being lodged in the past, unmoved by the willing embrace of the future. 24. In Queer Phenomenology, I became obsessed with tables in part because of the terms in which the table makes an appearance in Ideas. The table is the first object that Husserl describes when he is describing the world from “the thesis of the natural standpoint” ([1913] 1969, 101): “I can let my attention wander from the writing-table I have just seen and observed” (101). The table is what is within view, or within reach of the philosopher. (It is of course unsurprising that philosophy is “full” of tables, if the philosopher is seated, he or she needs something to write on. I suggested this “fullness” reveals the orientation of philosophy, not only by showing what is proximate to the body

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of the philosopher, but also because tables often enter the philosophical text in order to make a point, which suggests not only that the point of the table points elsewhere, but also that the table recedes into the background. Phenomenology has taught me how orientations are revealed by what becomes background.) Once I saw the table in Husserl, I began following them around (a pursuit that is ongoing!). In Queer Phenomenology, I offered a critique of the phenomenological method of bracketing in part because I was following the table: when Husserl brackets the writing table, its reappearance for me, as an object of perception that is singled out, meant we were further from, rather than closer to, the table’s significance or even its being (both of which are precisely about its location, and the actions it supports), which is not a separate question from the question of our being. I was offering a reading of the text itself, and was thus not treating the reduction purely as philosophical method, but as a method or frame that generates different kinds of description. I was thus attempting to offer a different angle on the text by rereading what was at stake in these two descriptions. There was still so much to say about his first description of the table as seen from “the natural attitude,” which Husserl did not make explicit in this description but which is certainly implicit, including questions of foreground and background, or front and back, as well as near and far, that are central phenomenological questions (in addition I asked admittedly supplementary questions of labor as I thought these were also at stake in the determination of which way a subject is facing). Just note how in the first description he starts with the table in front of him, and then refers to what is “behind my back.” What I was trying to show was that Husserl was revealing more about tables—and about the worlds they support and enable, including his own life world as a philosopher who is doing certain kinds of work—when he describes them from his involvement rather than when he suspends his involvement. This critique was not intended as a negative critique but rather as a reorientation of the question of orientation that was already implicit in the “thesis of the natural standpoint.” There are other ways of thinking about bracketing especially if we consider bracketing as a temporary way of suspending our presumption of the existence of the world in order to generate a more reflexive knowledge. And in fact the redescription of bracketing as a “reorientation” in the Vienna Lecture is consistent with my reading: “The theoretical attitude, in its newness, refers back to the previous attitude, one which was earlier the norm; [with reference to this] it is characterized as a reorientation” (Husserl [1936–54] 1970, 280). 25. It is interesting to note that in a footnote Marx makes a passing reference to women as commodities. He writes: “In the twelfth century, so renowned for its piety, very delicate things often appear as commodities. Thus a French poet of the period enumerates among the commodities to be found in the fair of Lendit, alongside clothing, shoes, leather, implements of cultivation, etc. also ‘femmes folles de leur corps’ ” (178), translated for us as “wanton women.” Wanton derives from wan-towen suggesting resistant to control; willful. That willful women can end up being included as commodities points to how gender may operate through the requirement to be willing as I will explore in the final section of this chapter. 26. We can understand the significance of the term “objectification”: it is not that in becoming an object a subject is without a will; rather a subject becomes an object through the imposition of the will of another; objects are thus emptied of will, or

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treated as if they have no will of their own. Unsurprisingly, then, those subjects who have historic experience of being made into objects (in advance of their arrival, that is by virtue of their membership of a subjugated group) have written most powerfully of the agency of objects. As Fred Moten argues: “The history of Blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). Moten engages fruitfully with Marx “to explore the commodity’s scream” (12). With thanks to Dhanveer Singh Brar for his thoughtful engagement with Moten’s work. See also my conclusion of this book for a development of the argument about the kinship between objects made by humans and humans made into objects. 27. One could relate this discussion of objects that resist being means to Bruno Latour’s suggestion that “nothing and no one is willing any longer to agree to serve as a simple means to the exercise of any will whatsoever taken as an ultimate end. The tiniest maggot, the smallest rodent, the scantiest river, the farthest star, the most humble automatic machines—each demands to be taken also as an end, by the same right as the beggar Lazarus at the door of the selfish rich man” (2004, 216). 28. I am implying in my phrasing that “ready-to-hand” can be interpreted as “handy” (which is the term used by the newer English translation of Being and Time). I think “ready-to-hand” is a useful term when contrasted to “present-to-hand,” but that in other contexts “handiness” is a more helpful formulation, as it picks up on a more everyday and ordinary meaning. 29. Work in feminist, queer, and critical disability studies on the entanglement of bodies and technology (“somatechics”) could be considered to proceed from this question (what happens when the body becomes that which is perceived as “not working”?) as a question that can be asked but does not only need to be asked through Heidegger. See Murray and Sullivan (2009) as well as Cadwallader (2010). 30. I will return to the implications of Silas’s mechanical relation to objects in my discussion of the somatization of the division of labor in chapter 3. The gloss on this relation becomes less glossy in this context. 31. I am suggesting here that readiness is not only experienced as the recession of thingliness as implied by Heidegger’s distinction between the ready-to-hand and present-to-hand: that we can appreciate something, even be hyperaware of something as a particular thing, because of what it allows us to do. This is not to say that when we become absorbed in a task we do not lose sight of things. 32. I will show in the next chapter how this mechanism can also explain selfperception: when you cannot carry out a will, you can turn to yourself as the site of resistance: one’s own will can be experienced as willfulness, as getting in the way of an action intended. 33. One might note here how the language of will can be exercised when gender becomes fatalism. Take the expression: “boys will be boys.” Here the language of “will” or “will be” is used to describe a necessary and inevitable course of nature that happens independently of human volition. I would suggest that gender becomes in this use of will not only fate but fatality: a sentencing to death. See also my note on Mrs. Dalloway in The Promise of Happiness, which considers the relation of consciousness of gender to consciousness of death (2010, 246), of how becoming gendered can be experienced as the cessation of possibility.

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34. In this description we can hear the echo of Jacques Derrida who, in The Postcard ([1980] 1987a), described how it is always possible for a letter not to reach its destination. Working with will has allowed me to reframe this possibility in more corporeal terms: that bodies might not reach what they are aiming for. 35. There are some examples of writers who have developed the idea of “the social will,” but in each case their writings have not been significantly taken up such that this idea has almost “dropped out” of theoretical discourse. Examples include Ward (1892), Lloyd (1902), and Hayden (1909). The latter is the only book-length manuscript. Regenia Gagnier in her reflection on individualism in relation to late nineteenth-century thought offers a brief but useful analysis of the “social will” (2010, 110–15). An interesting project would be to track “the will” as an idea within the history of sociological thought. For an edited collection offering an anthropological reflection on “the will,” see Murphy and Throop (2010b). A number of the essays in this collection draw on phenomenology as an intellectual resource and explore how concepts of will and willing vary across culture and context. 36. The term “concurrence of wills” has a specific meaning within jurisprudence. Oliver Black explains: “A concurrence of wills might relate to the making or performance of, or to the compliance with, agreement” (2012, 267). Black suggests this term has become canonical in eu jurisprudence (266). 37. In the conclusion to Queer Phenomenology I offered an image of bodies in unison, arm in arm, as a different politics of the side: being beside does not demand one to take sides (2006, 169). I suggested here that “beside” involves work: “you have to keep up.” My argument here develops my understanding of what it means to “keep up,” showing how keeping up can involve an asymmetrical requirement. My own language implied this even if I did not make this point explicit: even when we are arm in arm, some bodies come to be ahead of others. This coming ahead (which in chapter 4 I retheorize as becoming heads) is not inevitable. But we need to recognize how and when that happens by not assuming arm in arm as evidence of corporeal equality. 38. The implication of the description in this paragraph is that we need a model of the social that is not about harmony or agreement, or even about “withness,” although it would include all of these. When the social is defined in these terms, then the one who is not in agreement becomes antisocial. The aim of my work has been to offer a model of the social that includes antagonism and disagreement as well as that which does not pass between, or is shared among, bodies. See also note 29 from chapter 1 of The Promise of Happiness for an explanation of how we need a different model of the social to explain how affect does not simply travel between bodies, without conversion, perversion, and deviation (2010, 239). 39. One of the texts cited in studies of attunement is Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant, which as a study of developmental psychology focuses on the “affective attunement” between mother and child ([1985] 2000, 138–69). As a model of interaffectivity, Stern’s work is enormously valuable and compelling: he focuses on how inter-affectivity is not the repetition of gestures, or imitation, but the “performance of behaviours that express the quality of feeling of a shared affective state without imitating the exact behavioural expression of the inner state” (142). I think some curious consequences follow for us if we reflect on how this affective description can become

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prescription. Social experience (being with others) would be referred back to an idea of the mother/infant relation as “first relation” to the extent that this relation is defined in positive terms. Stern is not arguing of course that attunement is everything (if his work is angled in this way it is partly due to how he is attempting to shift attention from the focus on separation within developmental psychology). But we can still reflect on what follows attunement becoming an ideal as well as an idea of social affect. It would be worth exploring further the relation between expression and feeling. Stern writes that attunement is an expression of “the quality of feeling of a shared affective state.” Perhaps affective training is training in expression: by expressing the quality of shared feeling, we share a feeling of quality. Shared feeling might be what we create when we “express” things in the right way. For a recent study of political mood that draws on Stern’s concept of affective attunement, see Flatley (2012). 40. Henri Lefebvre notes that rhythm tends to be thought of as “natural, spontaneous with no law other than its unfurling” but that as rhythm always implies measure, it can be understood as “a project” (2004, 8). 41. Ferdinand Tönnies’s reflections on the sociality of will focus on agreement: “We can say that anything which is in agreement with the inner character of a community relationship constitutes its law, and will be respected as the true, essential ‘will’ of the people” ([1887] 2001, 33). Translation: the social will is the will of those in agreement. 42. In The Promise of Happiness, I offer an approach to “conditional happiness” drawing on a reading of Rousseau’s Émile, which has also been a key text in my analysis of will (see chapter 2). I would now propose that conditional happiness rests on conditional will (to make your happiness conditional on others depends on willing the same way). In this respect Willful Subjects could be read as a prequel to The Promise of Happiness. Because willing is associated with “bringing something about,” willing becomes directive: your feelings would become conditional on others if you shared a direction toward an object that is being “brought about.” I should note as well that the concept of “conditional will” has a long history. In Risto Saarinen’s very helpful analysis of conditional will in medieval thought, he refers to Alexander of Hales (1185–1245), who wrote that a conditional will [voluntas conditionalis] is when “we do not will a thing as such but will it only under particular conditions” (cited in Saarinen 2004, 78). I am interested in when the conditions in which we are willing to will x include the condition that others too are willing x. 43. I am aware that this speech act can be used in quite different contexts and can have quite different force, as well as effects. For example, imagine two children ready to jump, but cautious. The caution registers ambivalence about an action they might consciously intend. When one child says to another, “I will if you will,” this speech act could function as a form of encouragement or an “egging on.” There can be kindness in encouragement especially if the action being intended is one that a subject is committed to, and when the caution is about anxiety, fear, or a lack of confidence. But what if the caution is wisdom: what if the action is one that might compromise the child? How we judge conditional will probably depends on the judgment of will: on whether or how we judge the merits of an action. 44. Even though Foucault does not generally use the language of will, his more “positive” model of power developed through the corpus of his work, which focuses on

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yes rather than no, on creating something rather than prohibiting something, could be understood in these terms: power as going “with the will.” Also relevant would be Bruno Latour’s description of power: “Power is always the illusion people get when they are obeyed. . . . [They] discover what their power was really made up of when they start to lose it. . . . It was made of the wills of all the others. . . . Power is a consequence and not a cause of collection action” (1986, 268–69). I don’t disagree with his argument that power can be an illusion but would add that power is not illusory precisely because it is made up and out of the wills of others. This making up is how momentum occurs. I would thus also add that a consequence can become a cause: in other words, once people have accumulated power through obedience they can “in effect” cause obedience. See the first section of chapter 2 for further reflections on power and obedience and the first section of chapter 4 for a consideration of willfulness and disobedience. 45. In early English “nill” was the opposite of “will” (as a contraction of ne will). I should add here that “willy nilly” is now more typically used to mean something that happens in an unplanned or haphazard fashion. This hap-pier-meaning does derive from the former one even if they have quite different connotations. The idea of with or without will contains a sense of oscillation, of going this way or that way. 46. Nick Davies, “Enquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anyone into Prostitution,” Guardian, October 20, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20 /government-trafficking-enquiry-fails. Last accessed January 30, 2014. I recognize that sex trafficking and sex work are complicated political issues. To respond to the problem of this reduction of force to what is “against the will” by assuming that sex workers are forced to be willing could also amount to a wrong (insofar as it would involve not hearing some of the testimonies of sex workers themselves). I thus have sympathy with Laura María Agustín’s (2007) critique of the assumption that “migrants who sell sex” are passive victims who need rescuing. I do think, however, to be critical of the production of “willing subjects” of sex work might require a substantive feminist critique of sex work as a social system that regulates the bodies it recruits (just as we need a feminist critique of other forms of labor relations, including marriage, as techniques for regulating the subjects it “willingly” recruits into a social system). 47. Appeals to “willing subjects” can thus function in similar ways as appeals to “happy subjects” (such as in the specific and well-known formulations of the happy slave and the happy housewife): as ways of demonstrating nothing is wrong. What is not admitted are the wrongs that secure the apparent states of being willing and happy, and the extent to which the will and happiness of others are far from transparent or even available. The fact that “happiness claims” can be used to justify situations of extreme violence and subjection might tell us something about what “will claims” can do. 48. We might also need to address the social and legal conventions that make hearings of speech into judgments of the subjects speaking: some women might be assumed to be willing in advance of what they say, and thus in advance of whether they say yes or no, others not. Muslim women in Western secular contexts, for example, are often assumed to be forced rather than willing. Politics does not begin with yes and no: there are histories in which these two words become “given” as qualities of persons and groups (as if this body is a yes, that body is no). 49. For a discussion of the methodological and affective implications of tangles for feminist media research, see King (2012).

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Chapter Two. The Good Will 1. I am not suggesting here that models of the will as corporeal and determined only emerged in the nineteenth century. There is a long history of associating will with passivity as much as activity, and with the body as much as the mind. A medieval example would be Aquinas, who describes will in “The Ladder of Being” (1993) as a “passive ability” and “the activity of willing a being affected’ (17.172), suggesting that “will doesn’t move itself but needs to be moved” (17.174). I am suggesting that the developments in the sciences of the mind in the nineteenth century did not dislodge the moral status already afforded to willing (its status, that is, as “higher”). I should add that I do recognize that these literatures are not necessarily a critique of Kant (whose argument rests on a distinction between the moral will and a sensible will that would be subject to laws of determination). I would argue there is a case for reading George Eliot in relation to Kantian ethics, in particular, the strong opposition she implies between duty and inclination as I discussed in The Promise of Happiness (2010, 64, 245). For a reading of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in relation to Kantian ethics see Newton (2011). For a discussion of the idea of the will in the Victorian period see Reed (1989). 2. I would suggest that the concept of “weakness of the will” acquires a particular hold in the nineteenth century; it could be argued to be a much “older concept.” Some scholars understand this concept as having a classical root in discussions of akrasi (acting against one’s better judgment), which is often translated into “incontinence.” Socrates famously argued that “no one goes willingly goes toward bad things” in Plato’s Protagoras (for a good discussion, see Sevkic 2009). The question of whether “weakness of the will” is a meaningful concept has been debated considerably in moral philosophy. An influential text that argues for the efficacy of the concept is Donald Davidson’s essay “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” which was first published in 1969 and is reprinted in Davidson (1980). For a recent summary and discussion of this literature, see Mele (2012). For a useful discussion of “weakness of the will” in Renaissance and Reformation thought, as well as medieval thought, see Saarinen (2011, 2004). 3. By this I mean “weakness of the will” might no longer operate as a specific medical diagnosis because it has become part of normative (and thus background) language for understanding ourselves and others. 4. It is interesting to note that the psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins in his influential work on negative affects uses the example of the child-rearing literatures that rested on Calvinism and “breaking the will” of the child ([1962–63] 2008, 206). This would be another way of showing how the history of willfulness is inseparable from a history of affect. And we could also recognize how affects are not only “learned” (to learn from association is to learn negation) but might become embodied at the scene of learning. 5. If the Grimm story reflects the increasing emphasis on paternal authority within Calvinism, and thus the centrality of the child’s will as a way of transmitting the authority, it begs the question of why the agent in the story is the mother and not the father. Elisabeth Weber has addressed this paradox, noting how in the early nineteenth century when the story was first published by the Grimms, it offers an “archaic remnant” in treating the mother as cruel rather than loving. Weber suggests the Grimm brothers were aware that the motif of the hand coming out of the grave in folklore also related to trespass and patricide (1999, 181). It might be then that the crime of willfulness relates

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to the death of the father: the mother can become the rod by taking up the empty place. It might also be that if the threat of willfulness relates to independence, as Weber suggests, then the child’s relative proximity to the body of the mother is how willfulness becomes criminal: a part that refuses to be part of her body. I take up the part of willful parts in chapter 3. 6. Note the significance of this argument given that the words “will,” “want,” and “wish” derive from the same root, as I pointed out in the previous chapter. We could think of a history of the will as a history of the evacuation of wanting from willing, but also a history of how will triumphs over want as the proper and higher mode of social activity. 7. Miller gives an account of coming across Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze Pädogogic (Black Pedagogy) first published in 1977 in her book (1987, 9). Unfortunately, this book is not translated into English. I have thus drawn on Alice Miller’s development of Rutschky’s argument. 8. I only realized in the later stages of writing this book that “J. Sulzer” as he is referred to by Alice Miller is in fact the Swiss philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer whom Immanuel Kant refers to favorably in a note in Groundwork (Kant [1785] 2005b, 71). One should not assume too much here about the relationship between Kant’s and Sulzer’s writings on education. However, reading this note renewed my sense that “poisonous pedagogy” should not be assumed as radically discontinuous from other philosophies of education of the period. See Phillip Olsen who also notes this apparent “correspondence” between Kant and Sulzer but clearly differentiates their pedagogies, given Kant’s emphasis on example over inducement and his respect for human freedom (1993, 197). I am not so sure the difference is as stark as Olsen hopes for here, perhaps because I am less sure of the distinction between freedom and force. However see note 10 of this chapter which shows how Kant differentiates his own methods of avoiding willfulness from those that focus on punishing children. 9. It might seem that poisonous pedagogy is “far away” from current educational practices in Europe and the United States. Of course we do know there are a range of practices, and I would suggest that poisonous pedagogy remains one of them. In the United States the book To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debi Pearl could be described alongside the works discussed by both Miller and Rutschky. Take the following description of how they disciplined their four-month-daughter: “She was too unknowing to be punished for disobedience. But for her own good, we attempted to train her not to climb the stairs by coordinating the voice command of ‘No’ with little spats on the bare legs. The switch was a twelve-inch long, one-eighth-inch diameter sprig from a willow tree” (1994, 9). For her own good: in evoking the title of Alice Miller’s book, I was left thinking how much we need to keep reading that book and reflecting on institutionalized violence against children. To Train Up a Child has certainly generated controversy, but it remains available for publication even if some of the punishments of children advocated are in direct contradiction with the law. It is certainly not a solitary publication. Furthermore, there are some educational manuals that still focus on the problem of willfulness or the “strong-willed” child. Even if these methods are different from the texts we would describe as “poisonous pedagogy” (historically or in contemporary contexts) the will of the child remains the problem. Take, for example, Carl E. Pickhardt’s The Everything Parent’s Guide to the Strong-Willed Child (2005). There is no doubt that in

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this book willfulness is made more ordinary: “Every child has willful moments” (xiii) and the problem of willfulness is not attributed to the intrinsic nature of children. The narrative constructs a difference between strong-willed children and “other children” as a difference of degree rather than kind: “They differ only in the degree to which need for self-determination rules their lives” (xiii). I was struck by how the narrative begins by an evocation of poison: willfulness becomes like poison, “a tiny amount of arsenic in your drinking water will do you no harm, but a significant amount will be lethal. The same is true for willfulness” (xiii). Maybe the difference between these materials and poisonous pedagogy is also a difference of degree rather than kind. I should add here as well that the problem of the willful child is still evoked more generally in public culture. In chapter 3, I discuss how social problems are often attributed to the failure to discipline the children and how quickly the rod is mourned as a lost object (and thus retained as a good idea). One last thing: I pointed out in my introduction that this book is written in light of my own experience of being called a willful child. More than a calling is at stake. My own father was violent (and his father reportedly was violent toward him), and parts of my childhood did involve living in fear of this violence. This is a common and shared history. There was one particularly bad experience when I was beaten with my own ruler. The ruler had holes in it: intended as different shapes you could trace onto paper. Those shapes became shapes left on my own skin. I remember that feeling of being marked by violence. This history when with us, we carry with us. For me, going over the materials of poisonous pedagogy has been to stay close to the skin. There is an ethics to this proximity. 10. For Kant the task is to avoid the necessity of breaking the will: he thus differentiates discipline from punishments given in anger and also challenges the idea, common at the time, that the child must kiss the hand of the parent who punishes him ([1899] 2003, 89): “For the child surely does not look upon the rod with any special favour” (40). The task of education is not to break the will of children but to bend it such that it can yield to natural obstacles (54). It would be worthwhile to think of poisonous pedagogy not only in terms of the use of the rod as a way of not spoiling the child (contrasting with the Kantian model which is not to spoil the child in order to avoid dependence on the rod) but as demanding the child love the rod that beats her. 11. One could reflect further here on the relation between will and affect. Rather than thinking of affect as simply passing from one to another (see Ahmed 2010 for discussion of the concept of contagion) the implication here is that one can be willing or unwilling to be affected by another (this is not to say that being unwilling to be affected is successful, that it means being unaffected). In other words, education (in the general sense of being orientated or cultivated) involves acquiring the will to be affected in the right way. Ferdinand Tönnies, whose work I discussed in chapter 1, describes the sociality of will in affective terms: “Mutual understanding rests upon intimate knowledge of the other, reflecting the direct interest of one being in the life of the other and willingness to share in his or her sorrows” ([1887] 2001, 33). If we acquire the will not to be affected, then the will might play a crucial part in the creation of strangers (for example, we might become unwilling to feel sad in response to the sadness of those whom we recognize as strangers). It is perhaps a good thing that “the will” can fail as a defense mechanism. 12. I am insistent on this point (that poisonous pedagogy is not remote) as some of the responses to my use of the Grimm story have been that the story itself is an

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anachronism. One person said the rod was “very eighteenth century” as if the story of the rod (and thus also of the child beaten by the rod) is simply behind us. It is not. Sometimes we have to insist on points in order to make them. 13. This quote from Novalis has not only been widely cited, it has also been misattributed: William James, for example, attributes the quote to John Stuart Mill in The Principles of Psychology ([1890] 1950, 125). Novalis’s descriptions of character circulate widely in our scholarly and literary archives. Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss draws on another character quote from Novalis: “The tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character’ says Novalis in one of his questionable aphorisms—‘Character is destiny.’ But not the whole of destiny. . . . Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home” ([1860] 1965, 420). There has been a revival of interest in the work of Novalis in part, I suspect, because of the recognition of the affinities between early German romanticism and poststructuralism. See Kennedy (2008). 14. For a very clear account of the history behind this idea of habit in William James, see T. Bennett (2009). One important area of research will be how these distinctions (between, for example, habit and will or between instinct and habit) became the basis for techniques of liberal governance. 15. Prior to this image of “the steady hand,” Locke uses “the strict hand” a number of times. Perhaps both these hands are affective as well as temporal forms: they are perhaps cooler and more moderated techniques than the rod, though they still aim at disciplining the child. 16. This description is from the cover of the book and is attributed to Christian History magazine. 17. In a minor but suggestive text, we have a very good example of the cheery moods of obedience. “Jane was a willful girl. She did not submit cheerfully to those whom it was her duty to obey, but was always contriving to how she could have her own way, as much and as often as possible” (Trowbridge 1855, 16). This story of the willful girl borrows from old lexicons. What happens? Jane along with other girls from the school are told not to go to the orchard. The teacher makes this command because the apples in the orchard are ripe and she knows the girls will be tempted to eat them. In this tale about forbidden fruit, the story of Jane becomes a thread in the weave of the stories of willful women, returning us to Genesis, to the story of a beginning, to Eve’s willful wantonness as behind the fall from grace. The willfulness of women relates here not only to disobedience but to desire: the strength of her desire becoming a weakness of her will. And in the narration of the story we get another sense of the kind of girls who are diagnosed as willful. For it is when Jane is “determined” to go to the orchard and eat the apples that she declares her intent by using the language of injustice: “She declared that it was very unjust in their teacher not to permit them to play there” (17). It is as if the very tendency to use the language of injustice is explained as a symptom of willfulness. Is there a critical tendency to diagnosis the very tendency to use the language of injustice as willfulness, as if we say it because we are that, as if this saying was always a cover, covering over our own will by masking it as a social conscience? I will return to this question in chapter 4. In the end, Jane’s friend Lucy tries to dissuade Jane from her course of action, but her “obstinate will” carries her in this direction, as if her will has acquired its own will,

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even if she becomes reluctant to follow the course. She is carried by her will to the wrong place. When the teacher realizes this disobedience, what does she do? She addresses not the guilty party but the class of children as if they are all guilty parties. She gives them a lesson on the right of some to govern: “Whose will should govern in this classroom?” And then, “I see from the looks on your faces that you do not wish to be governed by the will of any one of the pupils who attend it” (19). Only then does the teacher speak of the willful disobedience of one of the children. The children identify with the teacher by making Jane’s willfulness into an obstacle to their collective will. And the moral lesson is assumed by Jane as a willingness to become willing: “She also resolved that she will try never to be willful again” (20). Jane assumes in the firmness of a resolution a will to eliminate willfulness from her own character. 18. Virtue as moral character is, of course, central to Aristotelian ethics. For Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, “the virtue of man also will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well” (2.6.39). For a good introduction to character from an Aristotelian perspective see Sherman (1989). 19. Jeffrey Sklansky offers a useful reading of the work of William James, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall in terms of the development of a “new psychology” in the United States. He suggests: “In an age of titanic organizations and impersonal forces apparently beyond individuals’ control, James, Dewey, and Hall championed free will. But they redirected willpower away from controlling labor and property, toward controlling belief and habit instead” (2002, 8). 20. Gregory Moore in his book on Nietzsche suggests in a footnote, following Hans Erich Lampl, that Nietzsche was familiar with Ribot’s work and “incorporated elements of it into his own text” (2002, 128). 21. Another comparable approach (that draws on Ribot’s work) would be offered by the philosopher Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will. Bergson also challenges the idea that bodily movements are caused by will (for Bergson the will needs to be thought in terms of duration and not antecedence). Bergson notes that the movements that accompany attention “are neither the cause or result of the phenomena; they are part of it; they express it in terms of space, as Ribot has remarkably proved” ([1889] 1910, 27). The idea of body movements as the spatial expression of phenomena could be related directly to the concept of will as testimony. See also note 27 of this chapter. 22. These cases are not Ribot’s own but are derived from the case notes of other physicians. 23. It is unclear as to whether Freud read Diseases of the Will, though reportedly this book was found in a collection understood to be part of his library (see Macmillan 2002, 274). But if Ribot’s idea of “diseases of the will” did not prosper (Valverde 1998, 3) the Freudian model of the subject certainly did. At one level the Freudian turn can be understood as a turn away from a psychology of will toward a psychology of the drives. However this description might underestimate the extent to which the language of will is exercised within the psychoanalytic enterprise. Leslie Farber notes how will and resistance were interwoven in Freud’s work on hysteria. Farber suggests that Freud turns toward “the will” when Dora turns away from him, and “recognised one of the limits of psychotherapeutic influence to be the patient’s own will and understanding” (2000, 88). Farber points out: “There is a force in her [Dora] that says ‘no’ to this mutual creation. To this force he gave the name allocated to it by history, namely will” (115).

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See also Tauber (2010) for a discussion of Freud in relation to philosophers of the will including Schopenhauer and Kant. 24. Counter-will is also used by Freud to describe hysterical symptoms: when the patients produce precisely the thing they do not want. Scholars have noted how this term disappears from Freud’s work, and explain this disappearance at least in part as a result of the “depersonalisation” of the unconscious. By implying some relation of counter-will to willfulness, I might also be suggesting how the counter-will can be a social will, and thus depersonalizing as well as personalizing. For discussion see Thompson (1995, 10–11). 25. In Diseases of the Will, Ribot does not refer to sexuality or sexual perversion. However, we could speculate on how his differentiation of two primary classes of will pathology (insufficient and exaggerated impulses) would relate to the problem of homosexuality. Homosexuals could be described as weak willed in both cases: not only as having insufficient impulses toward the right sexual objects, but as having exaggerated impulses toward the wrong objects (and lacking the coordination required to inhibit these impulses). 26. John Smith summarizes the argument: “Schopenhauer argues that less evolutionary endowed men turn to young boys as . . . the lesser of two evils compared to the depravation and degeneration of the species that would occur if they were to mate” (1995, 9). This is how a “will to life” (or the will to reproduce life) can turn “to a pleasure that denies propagation” (9). I will pick on the relationship between willing and reproduction in chapter 3. 27. We can note the similarity between the portrait of the strong will offered here and the portrait of obedience discussed in the previous chapter. This similarity is telling. It is important to add here that Ribot is not treating the “I will” as the cause of action (his whole psychology is a disputation of the concept of will as internal causality). Ribot suggests the “I will” “testifies to a condition but does not produce it” (1874, 133). The conditions Ribot is referring to are the “psycho-physiological” labor of deliberation that engenders consciousness and movements or inhibitions. I find this concept of will as testimony very suggestive. Perhaps Willful Subjects offers another way of hearing that testimony. I should add that “testimony” is also what I have been calling a “will word”: deriving from Latin, testamentum, “a will, publication of a will.” The “I will” makes a will public. 28. I am focusing here on proximities. But one could also say that things have qualities that make them appear attractive or repulsive, even if we are attracted and repelled by different things (see Ahmed 2010, 22–23, for discussion in relation to Locke and the pleasures of taste). William Miller observes in The Anatomy of Disgust: “The greasy and sweet continue to allure with their taste. They have the capacity to make us eat more of them than we wish: they are will-weakening or will-deviating” (1997, 122). Of course this wish (or not wish) can be part of the allure. Perhaps an allure of something is not only how we are affected by things, but the tension between how we are affected and how we wish or will to be affected. 29. I am not suggesting here that “fatness” is inherently negative: rather we live in a fat-phobic culture whereby fatness is given a negative affective value, as an end that is to be avoided. For important feminist critiques of anti-fat attitudes see Murray (1998) and Tischner (2013). Fatness is often pathologized as the consequence of a weakness of will.

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30. For a good discussion of Gwendolyn’s will in relation to ner vous disorders, affect, and imagination, see Wood (2001, 141–62). 31. I will return to the role of Gwendolyn’s hands in the conclusion of this book. 32. I explore the status of this “own” in chapter 4. 33. Kempis could certainly be read as key to the Christian genealogy of will. In this book he suggests that the category of the will, in referring to the self, is already willful. Will is represented as a kind of self-referentiality: insofar as the human being wills, then the human being tends to will what is in agreement with his or her own desire: “True it is that every man willingly followeth his own bent and is the more inclined to those who agree with him” ([ca. 1418–27] 2006, 221). To will is to follow your own bent (again: no wonder there is something queer about will). For Kempis willfulness and pride are the same mark: “To refuse to hearken to others when reason or occasion requireth it is a mark of pride or wilfulness” (14). The moral task is to give up the will by obedience to God’s will: to will, in other words, whatever God wills. 34. It is worth noting how Maggie’s renunciation of will is expressed through her hair: “Maggie in spite of her own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment was obliged to give her way to her mother about her hair, and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times” (309). If Maggie cuts her hair in a rebellion against a command, then her submission of will becomes a submission to femininity and the cruelty of its fashion. There is a much longer story to be told about hair and willfulness. For a useful discussion of hair in the Victorian novel, see Ofek (2009). 35. The desire to be thought of as clever might be treated as self-willed (as wanting an agreeable idea of oneself reflected back to oneself) but self-willed in a distinctly feminist way (an attribute of cleverness for girls might be an agreeable feminist idea that is disagreeable to others). There are many points within the novel of sympathetic identification with Maggie’s cleverness. 36. For a good discussion of the significance of the gypsy narrative, see Myer (1996). 37. One of the most interesting discussions of the gendering of the will that attends to this tension between will and willfulness is offered by Kathryn Schwarz in her reading of representations of femininity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. Schwarz notes: “Will is not simply the mechanism for a single choice between submission and rebellion, or for a sustained refusal to engage at all. The friction between willing and willful animates feminine social subjectivity, and if isolated masculine privilege risks stasis, this vitality offers a hazardous cure” (2011, 9). I should add here that work on the Renaissance period generally, and on Shakespeare in particular, explores the queerness of the will. Scholars have focused on sexuality and the will in Shakespeare’s sonnets with its will puns. See Freinkel (2002) for discussion. 38. I thank my Facebook friends for discussions on my wall that led to the idea of “too too” (if you can be too much or too little, then the much and the little might not be the point of too, the too might be the point of too). 39. This translators’ introduction is excellent and refers to other work by Herbart, not all of which is translated into English. The Science of Education would be a very useful text to engage with as part of the education of will literature. Despite this challenge to the Kantian concept of duty, Herbart’s pedagogy rests at least in the first instance on the right of the parents to use force. Herbart’s starting point is that the child “enters

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the world without a will of its own” such that “parents can make themselves master of it as of a chattel” (1893, 95). He argues that “subjection should be brought about by force” (95). Only later does education become about the development of a “many sided” moral character. I should add here that Herbart’s educational psychology was extremely influential and Husserl’s phenomenology could be read as following many of his insights. Thanks to Bettina Bergo for making me aware of this history. For brief discussion of Herbart in relation to phenomenology, see Gurwitsch (1966, 59–61). 40. See my discussion of spontaneity and will in the previous chapter, and how spontaneity as subjective time relates to synchronicity as social time. 41. Judith Butler points out that Arendt in reclaiming Kant from Eichmann does not then stress the categorical imperative, but aesthetic judgment and, in particular, reflective judgment (2012, 156). It is worth noting here that in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a reflective judgment, even if it is under the law, has to be made in advance of the law: it “is therefore in fact only a principle of reflection upon objects, for which we are objectively quite in want of a law” ([1892] 2005a, 173, emphasis added). Perhaps Arendt is implying a conditional commitment to Kant: to privilege a form of judgment that is in want of the law might imply to want something other than the moral law as the basis for ethics. Arendt was writing the third section of The Life of the Mind on judgment at the time of her death. See Arendt ([1982] 1997) for a discussion of Kant’s political philosophy in relation to Critique of Judgment. 42. See also William Connolly on Kant and evil. Connolly suggests that if subjects have a “propensity” to evil the question that must follow for Kant is: “Could the eruption of violence sometimes be an effect within the organization of will itself of childhood terrors and abuses undergone when the will was being formed and shaped?” (1999, 120, emphasis in original). In Willful Subjects I give a history of these terrors and abuses as intrinsic to the history of will. Connolly is suggesting here that Kant almost admits the possibility that “the will” cannot be separated from these histories, an admission that would render impossible any final distinction between pathological and moral will: “To accept that dangerous thesis might be to admit, worldly, sensuous elements into the very structure of will” (120, emphasis in original). 43. See Dekel (2010) for a reading of Daniel Deronda’s Zionism. Mikhal Dekel also notes in a reading of early Zionism how diasporic Jews were defined outside the Kantian categorical imperative (2010, 11), which supports my own suggestion of how Kantian ethics can become a technique for “rebinding” a national body.

Chapter Three. The General Will 1. Peter Hallward has argued for a return to the language of the general will, which involves at least in part a direct restatement of Rousseau’s confidence that the general will tends to be right. Hallward argues that “to say that the general will is strong does mean that it stifles dissent or imposes uniformity. It means that in the process of negotiating differences between particular wills, the will of the general interest eventually finds a way to prevail” (2009, 22). Note here the problems of associating the general will with strength (defined here in evolutionary terms of “what will prevail”), but also how Hallward attributes agency to the general will, as if it has a life of its own that is independent from its parts. I would describe this as an attribution of agency to a

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concept. The problems of this attribution became clear when Hallward on January 31, 2011, published an article in the Guardian with the title “In Egypt and Tunisia: The Will of the People Is Not a Hollow Cliché.” In the article Hallward suggests that the uprisings in the Middle East can be understood as concrete examples of “the general will.” Self-conscious about the ease of this description, he notes: “Routine reference to ‘the will of the people’ has long been one of the most formulaic turns of phrase in the modern political lexicon.” Hallward differentiates the will of the people as a turn of phrase from the “actual mobilization of that will.” Such a mobilization, he argues, moves us beyond any formal definition of democracy: the general will’s generality depends on “popular participation and empowerment before it is a matter of representation, sanctioned authority or stability.” When the will of the people is asserted, when a will allows a people to persist through resisting the authority of a governing body, then, Hallward claims, we move from will to way: “The cliché remains hollow until adopted in practice: ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way.’ ” Hallward uses here some of the exact phrasing in this response to the Arab spring that he had used in an article written before the Arab spring. When the concept of the general will is mobilized, historic events that we might expect would exceed our analytic frames are read not only within those frames but are used to establish their truth value. Political action, including action that is to come, becomes narratable in terms of the concretization or “filling” of what would otherwise be an empty phrase. What does it mean for a political movement to be “filling” an expression whose history could be argued to mobilize a referent that resides elsewhere, which as an elsewhere might be where “we are” as the ones who exercise that vocabulary and even write under its name? 2. Patrick Riley, in The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic, states his project as follows: “a study of the transformation of a theological idea, the general will of God to save all men, into a political one, the general will of the citizen to place the common good of the city above his particular ill as a private self, and thereby to save the ‘polity’ ” (1988, ix). He finds antecedents to Rousseau in Pascal, Malebranche, and Bayle, among others (iv). Riley shows how Pascal’s descriptions that I drew upon in this chapter relate not only to “bodies in general” as well as “natural bodies” (19), thus prefiguring Rousseau in important ways. Indeed, Riley notes the continuities between Pascal and Rousseau specifically on the question of happiness, of how the general will (or even “one will”) is what makes the members of the body happy (22). 3. This association of the particular will (or willful will) with sin and error clearly extends the Augustinian framework discussed in the introduction to this book. I am interested in how this distinction between particular will and the general will became a primary moral distinction between bad and good within Christian thought, and how that distinction is then carried into a secular framework. 4. The history of the idea of the social body might be difficult to separate from the history of the body in parts. For a useful collection of essays on body parts in the literary and cultural texts of the early modern period in Europe, see Hillman and Mazzio (1997). 5. We can note that the demand that the guest wills in accordance is discussed in chapter 1 is a demand not only that the guest is willing to be in agreement but that this agreement is “affective.”

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6. The implication of this “traffic of ideas” is that biology and sociology have historically been entangled in ways that might not always be obvious. For a useful collection discussing the traffic of ideas between biology and sociology, see Maasen, Weingart, and Mendelsohn (1995). It is worth noting that Marx understood his model of social history as a paralleling Darwin’s model of natural history as a history of organs. Marx argued: “Darwin has directed attention to the history of the technology of nature, that is, to the formation of organs of plants as instruments for the production of the life of plants and animals. Does not the history of the formation of the productive organs of social man, the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention?” ([1867] 1990, 493). I will be reflecting more on the relation between the will and “productive organs” in the following section. I will also be developing the argument about the history of productive organs in my next research project on use and disuse. 7. Gregory Moore points out that Nietzsche is also influenced by the work of the physiologist Michael Foster whose Text Book of Physiology (1877) describes automatism and irritability as characteristic of living matter, such that even an amoeba is described as “having a will of its own” (2002, 39). In more complex organism, volition has a compound structure. We might also note the connection between Nietzsche’s model of will and that of Théodule Ribot discussed in chapter 2. For a discussion of this connection see Cowan (2008, 10). 8. Another model of the commonwealth in relation to the will is offered by Fichte who proposes that “as a will, that which we seek must have itself for its own object, and its own perfection as its ultimate object. The commonwealth is the very harmony of all. Thus the commonwealth is the will we seek and as will wills itself which is the harmony of all” (cited in Bourke 1964, 160). 9. For a discussion of happiness dystopias see the final chapter of The Promise of Happiness (2010). We could also think of National Socialism as a dystopia of the strong will. I am not suggesting that Nietzsche is endorsing or calling for a society of the strong willed although it is hard not to notice the enthusiastic intonation in his description of the strong will relative to the weak will. If we read Nietzsche’s model of the aristocratic body as a genealogy of the general will, then we do not need to assume he is calling for this body but accounting for how such a body has been called into existence. As such, Nietzsche could help with a critique of models of equality that do not recognize how inequalities become given in the materialization of bodies. Both ways of reading Nietzsche are possible. I personally, however, find the concept of “will to power” no more convincing than Schopenhauer’s concept of “will to life.” 10. My argument locates a wrong in the very requirement to become part and contrasts with, but in my view does not contradict, Jacques Rancière’s model of wrong as “the part of those who have no part” (2004, 38). I would suggest Rancière’s argument implies a gap between two ways of being part: those who are parts of a social body but have no part in a political body. We can draw here on Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body where she discusses the emergence in the nineteenth century of a distinction between the social body “and the political domain, to which the concept of a body politic properly belongs” (1995, 8). My focus on wrongs concerns membership in the social body: being counted as parts of this body is how some parts are given a supporting and thus subordinate role in the preservation of the life and happiness of a whole. I relate the wrong of becoming part directly to the naturalization of the division of labor. This

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argument of the wrong of becoming part builds directly upon my discussion in chapter 1 of how antagonism and disagreement at the level of the social are concealed by attunement: the requirement to become part (as a willing requirement) is often what disappears from view as an effect of labor, thus creating the impression of the social as harmony and synchronicity. 11. We could, for example, follow the word “selfish” around, reflecting on who it gets attached to. See, for example, Imogen Tyler’s (2007) reflections on the figure of the “selfish feminist.” Those who do not follow conventional scripts of marriage and family, or who challenge those scripts, are often accused as putting themselves first. I also explore how queers are diagnosed as selfish or narcissistic: as living for ourselves as opposed to living for others. 12. We could return to my discussion of the gendering of will and willfulness in the previous chapter. Perhaps the argument could be remade in these terms: to become a boy is to be given permission to acquire a will of your own as the freedom not to be supportive. 13. If we think of these examples through the contrasting of “stomachs” we might evoke one of Aesop’s fables, “The Belly and Its Members,” an early use of the classical metaphor of the body politic. Depending on the version, either the feet or the hands complain because the stomach is receiving all the nourishment. The fable has been interpreted and used in different ways throughout history: as pointing to the willfulness of the stomach as that which compromises the well-being of all, or to the ways in which the stomach is wrongly judged as willful because the stomach in being nourished nourishes all. My own use of stomachs suggests that willfulness falls as a judgment only on some, and that we learn from how willfulness falls: the stomach of the bankers becomes swollen precisely because the bankers’ stomachs are viewed as nourishing not themselves but all, while the assumption that public sector workers have (or would have) swollen stomachs because they are feeding themselves (or aiming to feed themselves) is what prevents the nourishment of all. Some parts become, in other words, “all,” while other parts become “not all.” With thanks to Robin Celikates for referring me to this fable. 14. With thanks to Sarah Franklin for this reference. 15. I am suggesting here that how the workman’s tool extends his arm can be related to the fact that the worker has become the arm of the social body. Other bodies are freed from this task, as freedom from the necessity of being extended this way. Rather than reflecting only a general relation of humanity, the example thus shows us the somatization of a class relation. However, I do think Bergson’s method of challenging the organic/technological distinction is extremely useful. We could think of the arm/ rod distinction through his model: how arms become natural instruments and rods become artificial organs to avoid the assumption that arms are not part of the history of technology, or that rods are not part of the history of biology. For an important set of reflections on the relationship between biology and technology, with specific reference to how biology has become understood as technology, see Franklin (2013). 16. In religious history the handmaid not only becomes the hands of the master but also is the one who gives her womb to others (the Virgin Mary was described as “handmaid of the Lord”). The concept of woman as handmaid was craftily satirized in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

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17. The first season (hereafter series) of Downton Abbey would be interesting to analyze in terms of the will and the social body. I was struck how the story of the transformation of a middle-class man, Matthew Crawley, into an appropriate heir for an aristocratic family is narrated through his relation to servants and their hands (his transformation is from being unwilling to willing to bear the relation). In the first place, Matthew Crawley is uncomfortable with ser vice and wants to dress himself, to use his own hands. But he is encouraged by the lord to see his discomfort as harming the servant, as leaving the servant with nothing to do. His acceptance of the servant is treated by the servants and the aristocrats as necessary for general happiness (the maintenance of the household) as well as the happiness of the servants (as the subordinate parts of the household). It is very noticeable in this first series, how many characters express a desire to be useful, a desire that creates an affective bond between the (under-worked) aristocratic women with the (overworked) servant class. The desire to be a useful member, to contribute to the social body, is what keeps that body going by ensuring that some are willing to be feet as well as hands. 18. He adds: “How can we show that we are the lords of creation but by reducing others to the condition of machines, who never move but at the beck of our caprices” (Robbins 1993, 17). I was reminded reading this quote of Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the working classes as capricious that I referred to in the conclusion of chapter 2. The irony of this discussion is that Kant had a servant to bend to his own will; to free up his hand for writing (Kant’s servant was named Martin Lampe). Another way of responding to this history would be to reassign the upper and middle classes as those who exercise willful will (see chapter 4, note 5, for an explanation of why I did not make this reassignment). The moral power to judge is not only the power to decide whose will is willful but the power to command others to will one’s will. Perhaps what we might call “bourgeois will” becomes moral will, a will that eliminates its own desires and inclinations, because others exist to carry out those desires and inclinations. 19. I think this might be why some of the most positive representations we have of willful children are also of children who happen to be orphans, and thus have a certain freedom from the family (including from the requirement to reproduce the family line). I am not saying all representations of orphans are positive: far from it. In many literary depictions, orphans receive a negative charge in wandering away from a line of descent, which is often but not always sympathetically rendered as the sadness, loneliness, and misery of desertion. Laura Peters in her excellent book, Orphan Texts, cites one definition of orphan from the oed: “one who was ‘bereft of protection, advantages, benefits, or happiness, previously enjoyed’ ” (2000, 1). I would suggest that given the sadness the figure of the orphan is charged with, the attribution of willfulness might work differently: willfulness can convert what is ordinarily deemed a negative into a positive state (making wandering away into something to be embraced). Pippi Longstocking would be a case in point. She is described in the afterword as “gloriously, wonderfully naughty” (Lindgren [1949] 1996, 117, emphasis in original), which is itself a rather glorious and wonderful description (these two words are not often attached to naughty). Right from the beginning of the story, Pippi’s adventures are directly related to the absence of parents: “She had neither mother nor father, which was really very nice for in this way there was no one to tell her to go to bed just when she was having most fun, and no one to make her take cod-liver oil when she felt like eating peppermints” (1). Pippi rather

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hap-pily (Ahmed 2010) can follow her own whims. There is a colonial context to this story—Pippi’s father is represented as traveling to faraway islands: Pippi imagines that he has “come ashore on a desert island, one which has lots and lots of cannibals” (2). If this image of the land faraway is a colonial fantasy, it shows how the father in becoming stranger can allow Pippi to make her own family, one that could be described as a queer family: a mouse and a horse are her companions. Queer family making is not here separable from colonial world making. I wonder whether Pippi is popular with children because she is the willful child’s own fantasy rather than a fantasy of a willful child. And as fantasy she might also offer us an alternative set of values in which curiosity, play, and caring for the diversity of living forms can and do matter. Thanks to Ulrika Dahl for sharing with me her reflections on Pippi. My apologies to Pippi for only giving you a note, but please feel free to run out of here with your own two feet! Go anywhere and everywhere my willful friend! 20. How does this positioning of will in opposition to duty relate to my argument about a will duty? I have been exploring how parts must be willing to do the right thing. The will can thus become a duty in being defined against willfulness and inclination. The monk here is using will to indicate willfulness and inclination. This switch of places can still leave things in place. My arguments in Willful Subjects develop my thesis in The Promise to Happiness (2010), which explored how happiness, which is often defined as an inclination, can become a duty (or a switching point between duty and inclination). Perhaps what is being turned on by happiness is the will. 21. A primary way we would understand marriage in relation to will is through the idea of contract. Hegel described a contrast in will terms in Philosophy of Right: “The means by which I hold property, not by virtue of the relation of an object to my subjective will, but by virtue of another will, and share in a common will, is contract” ([1821] 2005, 23). Feminist political theorists such as Carole Pateman have offered analyses of the institution of marriage in terms of “the sexual contract,” one that challenges the idea that free wills are the origin of contract as a fiction. Pateman cites Pufendorf: “Whatever right a man has over a woman, inasmuch as she is his equal, will have to be secured by her consent, or by a just war. Yet since it is the most natural thing for marriages to come about through good will, the first method is more suited to the securing of wives, the second to that of handmaids” (1988, 51). We can hear a history of will here: if not willing then forced, if not consent then war. 22. On her turn to Florence, Romola seeks out Tessa and her children, and when she finds them she says: “But be comforted my Tessa . . . I am come to take care of you always” ([1863] 1998, 534). Here Romola effectively takes the place of Tito as the head of the household but a head who offers care and protection: a feminine head. In the epilogue we are offered a rather queer picture: Tessa sitting alongside Romola talking to Lillo, Tessa and Tito’s son, about the possibility of his future, of what he could become. For a discussion of how the ending of Romola offers an “all female household” that falls short of describing this household as queer, see Sheets (1997). 23. Not all travel will be cast as wandering: travel with a purpose might be deemed necessary for an ethical life, for maturity. Or perhaps wandering is permitted or permissible when it is temporary: the European bourgeois male subject might wander, might even “sow his seeds,” as long as returns home and settles down. How odd that you grow up by settling down. Wanderers become willful when they refuse to make plans to settle

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down, to project their future as settled (as a willingness to settle). Wandering as a refusal to settle gets “in the way” of settlement. We learn that the very activity of settling is a way of directing or being directed. In return for the promise of membership, parts must be willing to return. 24. I am focusing here on the willful wanderer as body or body part. The willful wanderer can also be a mind. Recall in the previous chapter how the educated will is defined against the weakness of a wandering attention: to wander is to lack discipline, to lack the very capacity to attend to an object that is already in danger of receding from view (your attention is what endangers the object). Indeed, in Payot’s The Education of the Will wandering is associated not only with the figure of the vagabond but also with manual work: “With the majority of manual work, the thoughts are free to wander like vagabonds wherever they will” (1914, 378). This description of manual labor is selfevidently written by someone not engaged or required to engage in manual labor! For Payot the laboring parts are parts that can wander, and that suffer from weakness of the will. A wandering mind is too full of hap, too affected by what happens, too easily influenced or seduced by the proximate, too willing to receive. To acquire a good will is to acquire a will toward the general: the will not to wander away from the path that is or should be followed. To pursue your own end is not to pursue the right end. 25. For a closer reading of The Well of Loneliness please see the chapter “Unhappy Queers,” in The Promise of Happiness (2010). 26. Even if this idea of hysteria (or the very idea of hysteria) is “obsolete” in medical terms, the diagnostic history of hysteria is still with us. The danger of wandering from femininity (as wandering away from what is anticipated to cause happiness) is ever present as a social diagnostics. Telling feminist stories about hysteria remains a crucial aspect of a willful feminist inheritance. As Elaine Showalter suggests, “Above all the hysteric is someone who has a story, a histoire, and whose story is told by science. Hysteria is no longer a question of a wandering womb, but of a wandering story, and of whether that story belongs to the hysteric, the historian, the doctor, or the critic” (1993, 336). Another way of writing a history of willful women would be as a history of the hysteric. See also chapter 2, note 24, for a discussion of Freud’s use of the language of will to describe the resistance of hysterical patients to psychoanalytic treatment. 27. Augustine also makes the analogy between the individual body and the political body in terms of a command structure. He draws on Cicero’s On the Commonwealth, which suggests, in Augustine’s terms, “that the members of the body are governed like children, because of their ready obedience, while the perverted elements of the soul are coerced like slaves under the harsher regime” (City of God, 14.23.586). The differentiation between willing children and willful slaves is used to justify different techniques of governance for an individual as well as for a political body. See also the last section of my conclusion to this book for a discussion of the relation between the will of the child and the will of the slave. 28. I am not saying here that the penis cannot be a willful part; this material from City of God shows us precisely how the penis can stand up, on its own, as it were. We could also return to Freud’s use of counter-will referred to in chapter 2 to describe impotence. The penis can in not standing up also become a willful part, one that might matter by thwarting not only a sexual will, but the reproductive will. William James’s own description of weaknesses of the will evokes the problem of impotence: “the hope-

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less failures, the sentimental, the drunkards, the schemers, the ‘dead-beats’ whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never got to holding their limp characters erect” ([1890] 1950, 110). The penis might become a willful part when it becomes a limp member. But we should not make this member the standing member: what other members can only stand in for. 29. I very much admire Judith Butler’s essay “The Lesbian Phallus” for how it shows both the plasticity of the phallus and its detachment from the penis. Butler includes the arm in a chain of phallic symbols: “Consider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolised by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a pelvic bone” (in Butler 1993, 88). One might note that the arm comes first in this fleshy chain of body parts. But even if the arm comes first, I wonder if the arm can matter differently. I wonder if lesbian arms have their own dissenting history. If we think of arms as symbols for what we have, we could miss what we have: we could be missing lesbian arms in all their fleshy potential. See my conclusion for further discussion. 30. As Walter Kaufman notes, Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner paraphrases Bourget’s definition of decadence (which becomes rather fetchingly redescribed as “an anarchy of atoms”) but does not acknowledge him although he does praise Bourget’s work elsewhere ([1950] 1974, 73). 31. The legislation Marx is referring to here was consolidated in the Vagrancy Act of 1824. This act stated: “Every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or wagon, . . . and not giving a good account of himself or herself . . . shall be deemed a rogue and vagabond, and may be imprisoned for up to three months on conviction by a magistrate.” Not surprisingly the wording of the act makes frequent use of “willfully” as an adjective attached to persons and things: see Vagrancy Act 1824, http:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo4/5/83/section/4?view=plain. Accessed February 2, 2014. 32. In describing class as well as race as a disciplinary technique, I am suggesting class can be understood not only as a relation to the means of production but as a system for justifying the social division of labor as an expression of a natural division. When the bodies of the working classes are treated as intended for certain kinds of labor, then the capacities of these bodies become resources for the extraction of wealth. I am thus cautious about the currency of what I would call a loosely Spinozian framework in which the focus is on “increasing capacity.” I indicate loosely as I think the ethical implications of Spinoza would be better understood through Stoicism with the strong commitment to the rational pursuit of moral perfection (see DeBrabander 2007), which as an ethics is much more demanding than increasing capacity. I would also argue that “increasing capacity,” as a moral directive, is a problem in its proximity to other social directives: the laboring body has always been directed by this requirement, as a requirement that bodies become more capable. We might even need to think of increasing incapacities for the work that reproduces the system in order to revolt against the system. In The Promise of Happiness (2010) I challenged this model primarily through how it assumes a distinction between joy (increasing capacity for action) and sadness (decreasing the capacity for action). But I now think the problem begins not with the affective distinction but the economic distinction of “increase” and “decrease.” This binary logic is partly a problem given that organisms are complicated bundles of cells: a decrease

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in a capacity for one thing can be understood as (almost simultaneously) an increase in a capacity for something else. After all, to have qualities can mean being capable of doing some things because you are incapable of doing others (for example, if a material is incapable of conducting heat then it can be used to build airplanes). In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire there is a productive emphasis on incapacity: “The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to a command. It needs a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth” (2000, 216). However, in Hardt and Negri’s later text Multitude, the emphasis is on living labor as creative capacities. Even if the latter more explicitly addresses how “labour can be corralled by capital” (2004, 146), the former approach has more to teach us about the colonization of the life world by capital (as well as other social forces that demand bodies do things). To unlearn these histories we might need bodies that are creatively incapable. A wider aim of my work has been to question the tendency to affirm capacity as positive action or as the potential for positive action. 33. For a discussion of slavery in relation to the will, see the final section of my conclusion. 34. Definition is from The Free Dictionary, http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/catalepsy. Accessed February 2, 2014. 35. This slogan “go home” was recently deployed in an advertising campaign on vans by the British government. The slogan is charged, carrying with it a racist history, and needs to be heard as such. It was noticeable how the explanation or justification of that campaign exercised the language of will: that illegal immigrants (and even this combining of words carries a history) are encouraged to “go home” voluntarily, which as an injunction, evokes the force that it seems to suspend: go home voluntarily or we will be “forced to be forced” to eject you (the slogan printed on the side of the bus was “go home or face arrest”). This campaign has since been judged by the Advertising Standards Agency (the UK’s independent regulator for advertising across social media) as “misleading.” But the agency also neutralized the damage by saying that “it was unlikely to cause serious or widespread distress or offence.” Racism becomes reduced to the causing of offense by being posited as not likely to cause offense. 36. The implication here is that citizenship becomes not only a requirement to will but a requirement to will in the right way: citizenship presents itself as a moral as well as a civic requirement. We can thus consider how my argument in the previous chapter that gave a genealogy to the good will could also be extended to think through what we can call simply “the national will.” Consider this description of Kantian ethics from the editor’s introduction to Max Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy: “Man had to be tamed if he was to be transformed into a citizen; the moral law has to be imposed onto his wayward will” (Stark [1953] 2008, x). The wayward will of the child/would-be citizen became that which must be straightened out (citizenship as poisonous pedagogy). 37. There is a paradox here: the veil is often seen as a willful part, one that refuses to become part of secular culture, because it is taken as a sign that the Muslim woman is not allowed a will of her own. In other words, the veil becomes a willful sign of willessness. Perhaps the Muslim woman herself becomes both will-full and will-less. No wonder her body has become monstrous in the secular imaginary. I will return to the question of the veil in chapter 4.

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38. I would suggest willfulness could be judged as melancholic: a subject refuses to give up on a loved object that has been pronounced dead by others. See also the chapter “Melancholic Migrants” from The Promise of Happiness (2010). I noted here how the unconventional daughter of the migrant family becomes a conventional form of social hope. Willfulness gives us another lens to understand this claim: migrants who refuse to give up allegiance, to what gets coded as tradition, become the willful children of the national family. 39. See Nicholas Watt and Hélène Mulholland, “Immigrants who fail to integrate have created ‘discomfort,’ says Cameron,” Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics /2011/apr/14/immigrants-fail-integrate-discomfort-cameron. Accessed February 2, 2014. 40. See also chapter 1, note 48, for a related discussion of some individuals and groups come to be seen as willing, others as forced, whatever they do, or say. 41. I put “riots” in quote marks here because when these events are described as such, the description becomes a way of containing the social and political significance of the unrest. It is important to remember that the civil unrest was triggered by the police shooting of a black man named Mark Duggan on August 4, 2011. The framing of the disturbances as riots is also a way of obscuring the political significance of protest. 42. This comment was made by the British tabloid journalist Richard Littlejohn and was widely repeated across the media. See Richard Littlejohn, “The Politics of Envy Bound to End up in Flames,” Mail Online, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate /article-2025021/UK-riots-2011-The-politics-envy -bound-end-flames.html. Accessed February 2, 2014. 43. Thanks to Sarah Trimble for her thoughtful provocations on how responses to “the riots” fixated on feral youth. 44. Mihir Bose, “Riots are Elsewhere, so Thought Britain Till the Hoods Came out in London and Beyond,” see http://www.mihirbose.com/index.php/riots-are-elsewhere -so-thought-britain-till-the-hoods-came-out-in-london-and-beyond/. Accessed Februrary 2, 2014.

Chapter Four. Willfulness as a Style of Politics 1. Even this formulation is not quite accurate: the point of the diagnosis of willfulness is that the same actions can be judged as willful in some and not in others. Willfulness, I have been suggesting, is as much a judgment of “the who” that acts as it is a judgment of an action. 2. It might also be in feminist and queer fairy tales that willfulness is embraced or claimed: the very attribute that was punished in our grim histories becoming sites for creativity and resistance. See, for example, Carter (1990), which includes a section entitled “Brave, Bold and Willful,” and Bender (2005), in which willful conveys a rather magical sense of the creation of new and entangled forms. 3. Another interesting way of tracking the legal and political history of willfulness would be through vandalism. Vandalism is typically defined as the willful destruction of what is beautiful and venerable. It is from Vandals, a name of the Germanic tribe that sacked Rome in 455 under Genseric, from Latin vandals, from the tribe’s name for itself (Old English: wendlas, from wandal or “wanderer”).

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4. I do recognize that Hobbes’s arguments on obedience in relation to the sovereign will are more complex than I present here. As Susanne Sreedhar has noted, although many have viewed his work as “a prescription for virtually unconditional obedience to the Will of the great Leviathan,” Hobbes’s account of the right to self-defense (the right to disobey the command to kill or harm oneself) extends to the other rights (2010, 1). Sreedhar makes a case that Hobbes offers a “theory of resistance rights” (2). 5. My own strategy has not been to reassign the rod as willful will in part as I want us to lose confidence in our capacity to designate actions as willful. I have shown how willfulness as a judgment tends to fall upon the fallen. Rather than arguing that the sovereign will is willful, I affirm the negated term “willful” as mattering to those it falls upon. 6. I have learned a great deal from the feminist readings of Antigone, especially the work of Judith Butler (2000a) and Bonnie Honig (2013) on the vexed questions of kinship and mourning. I cannot do justice to the complexity of their arguments here. I am nevertheless interested in the relation between will and grief implied by Sophocles’s play. We learn from Antigone’s sister Iseme that Antigone has strength of will because she is willing to will against what the city wills. Iseme says: “I do them no dishonour, but to act against the city’s will I am too weak” (78–79, 5). The Chorus of course gives Creon the right to will as he does, as sovereign: “Such is your will, my lord; so you requite Our city’s champion and our city’s foe. You being sovereign make what laws you will, Both for the dead and for those of us who live” (211–14, 9). There are at least three wills named in this story: Antigone’s will (described as insolence), Creon’s will (as sovereign will), and the will of the city. It is of course the nature of sovereignty that the will of the sovereign is identified as the will of the city (“make what laws you will”). But the play shows the gradual separation of these two wills in the mourning for Antigone, as articulated by Creon’s son Haemon: But it falls to me, Being your son, to note what others say, Or do, or censure in you, for your glance Intimidates the common citizen; He will not say, before your face, what might Displease you; I can listen freely, how The city mourns this girl. “No other women,” So they are saying, “so undeservedly Has been condemned for such a glorious deed. When her own brother has been slain in battle She would not let his body lie unburied To be devoured by dogs or birds of prey. Is this not worthy of a crown of Gold?” The son alone can say what others do not say, the “common citizens” (687–93, 24–25). The son can say: “the city mourns this girl” (693, 25). “This girl” has already disobeyed the sovereign will by publicly mourning her brother. This intimacy between willfulness and mourning shows how mourning, to borrow from Douglas Crimp’s (2004) words, can be “militancy.” In mourning the wrong body you disagree with the commanding will. A willful gift is here a mourning gift. The will of the city is identified with the will of Antigone in mourning Antigone. As Arthur Schopenhauer has suggested, identification often takes place by feeling another’s woe: “I feel his woe just as I ordinarily feel my own” ([1840] 1995, 143). To mourn Antigone is to identify with her grief. To inherit this

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play willfully would be to mourn the death of the willful subject, to mourn the wrong body as the wronged body. 7. It is crucial to note how the charge of willfulness is not the only significant charge. An act of disobedience can still agree with wider social norms. For example, Tina Chanter has usefully explored how Antigone’s disobedience of Creon’s command relates to her desire to distinguish her brother from the slaves (2011, x). What orientates a disagreement can thus even be an orientation toward other norms that might matter insofar as they do not seem to be operative (but are operative in this not seeming). 8. I noted in my introduction how Foucault admits he has not dealt with the question of will and that he should have done so in reflecting on power. It is thus worth acknowledging that in another essay, Foucault does speak of power in relation to will: “At the very heart of the power relationship and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of will and the intransigence of freedom” (1983, 219). Recalcitrance suggests a stubborn resistance to authority. Intransigence refers to those not coming into agreement. We can decipher a lot from this description: if for Foucault the will would be at the heart of power, then the will would be related to disobedience and disagreement. I think Foucault’s will, however unarticulated, is a willful will. 9. Max Stirner is one of the few writers who not only tracks the rebelliousness of “own” but also shows how “self-will” can be used as a technique for dismissing others. For example, he reflects on the moral of Romeo and Juliet: “The family casts of its bosom those willful ones that grant more of a hearing to their passion than their piety” ([1845] 1993, 221). Stirner is a key figure in the history of anarchism (Bargu 2011). To tell this history would provide another way of assembling a willfulness archive. I have not chosen this way as I am interested in how willfulness becomes a style of politics for those who are assumed to embody that quality whatever they say or do. My project thus works through the assertion of particulars—female, of color, queer—in feminist, antiracist, and queer politics (all of which have anarchic as well as socialist dimensions) with the aim of showing how those lodged as particular dislodge the general. Nevertheless, anarchism would offer another route on a willful journey. For a companion project on anarchist archives, see Elena Loizidou (2011). See also Landstreicher (2009) for a discussion of anarchism in terms of willful disobedience. 10. A no might be what we have to achieve: the capacity not to be compelled by others. The opening lines of Albert Camus’s The Rebel remain very powerful: “What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation” ([1951] 2000, 19). Camus reminds us how the no (for example, the slave “who cannot obey some new command”) is both an achievement and an affirmative act in its self-orientation: “He stubbornly insists there are things in him which ‘are worthwhile’ and which must be taken into consideration” (19). In the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011, dir. Rupert Wyatt) the audible sign of the beginning of the revolutionary movement of the apes was Caesar saying no: the signing, the first word, logos, as the signing of the ape taking over the planet of the human, which is simultaneously the sign of not being willing to bear the tyranny of the human. In this case, the tyrants do not think their subjects even have the will (to bear or not to bear): their right is assumed as the necessity of force, a force that does not reveal itself as force. 11. I agree with Peter Hallward’s (2011a) description of Fanon as a philosopher of the will. However, I also wonder if “willfulness” probably better captures the dissenting

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logic of Fanon’s own political sensibility as well as his arguments. My feeling would be that Fanon would have diagnosed how quickly the general will can be an instrument of rule, even though he exercises the vocabulary of popular will. After Fanon, a number of philosophers of decolonization have taken up the will as both a primary category of thought, and as key to political action. A recent example would be Enrique Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics, which focuses on the “will-to-live” and how the strength of the will of individuals can be joined together (2006, 14). 12. See Arendt (1972, 53–57) for a discussion of civil disobedience in terms of willingness to pay the penalty within the context of U.S. law. 13. Henry David Thoreau in his classic essay on civil disobedience describes the problem of an “undue respect” for the law: “You may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admiral order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences” ([1849–1862] 1993, 2). Being respectful of the law might lead us to follow paths that our own will would not take us on. Disobedience might require giving up respect for the law, including the moral law, as I discussed in the conclusion to chapter 2. 14. I am indebted again to Jeanne Theoharis for the following quote from Rosa Parks: “Four decades later I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott. . . . I was just one of many who fought for freedom” (2005, 125). 15. The way in which Rosa Parks became a symbol has been related to her respectability by Jeanne Theoharis among many others. What is at stake, perhaps, is the gendering and class nature of militancy: Rosa Parks was certainly militant, but did not look like what militants were assumed to look like (angry, aggressive, etc.) which made her able as well as willing to become a symbol for civil rights. See also my discussion in the next section about how willfulness conjures up an image of a certain kind of person that often means willful actions are more easily performed by those who do not fulfill this expectation. 16. For a discussion of black women radicals in the period before 1960, see Gore (2012). For a relevant discussion of Rosa Parks’s action see Butler (1997a) and Lovell (2003). Judith Butler affirms Rosa’s act of civil disobedience: “When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any of the segregationist conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy” (1997a, 147, emphasis in original). Butler has been challenged by some critics for the implication that Rosa Parks’s acts have a volitional quality. Terry Lovell, for example, argues: “Butler appears to be attributing it to some quality inherent in Parks’ performance. She uses the active voice (‘she endowed,’ not ‘the act was endowed’) but we are left to speculate on whether that endowment resided in the words exchanged, the bodily stance, or in some social quality of the performance of the act, or whether anyone who refused to give up their seat could likewise be said to be acting with authority” (2003, 7). In contrast, Lovell aims to put Parks’s act into a historical lineage: “The authority of Rosa Parks’s act was retrospective, the outcome of the process of group formation that was social and collective. It was the willingness of the black community in Montgomery to accept Parks as a suitable ‘standard bearer’ for their cause—a willingness that was evident after the action in which she refuses to give up her seat that contributed critically

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to the authority Butler ascribes to the act” (11). I am offering a combination of these arguments: Rosa Parks’s action did help to create the possibility it was reaching for; it did in this sense have a volitional quality, which is what made the action available to be “picked up” by the black community. 17. A note on timing: I began this project on willfulness after I completed my research into diversity in institutions, but before I finished the book On Being Included (2012) that derived from that research. My project on will and willfulness gave me tools to interpret the data I gathered for this earlier book, in which I introduced the concept of “institutional will” to explain how things get stuck even when institutions seem willing to change. In turn, this earlier research on diversity provided an important background for rethinking willfulness as political work. Although I only draw on the data in this section, the research into diversity informs many of my arguments in Willful Subjects, in particular my approach to how will is unevenly distributed, which we can characterize as a support system: how for some, less effort and energy is required to complete an action as their being is more supported; while for others, more energy and effort is required to complete an action as their being is less supported. For all quotes drawn from my interviews with practitioners I am giving the relevant page numbers for On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) as this research is more systematically presented here. 18. This suggestion that habit is “still willing” refers us back to Husserl’s argument on acquisition as how a subject is still willing discussed in chapter 1: the past is not simply being recorded as memory, but is being actively reaffirmed. 19. Tanya Titchkosky (2011) offers an understanding of the politics of disability in relation to embodiment and space by drawing on phenomenology. For other important phenomenological considerations of disability see also Diedrich (2001), Price and Shildrick (2001), and Sandahl (2002). 20. I first described this labor of insistence in The Cultural Politics of Emotion: It is no accident that compulsory heterosexuality works powerfully in the most casual modes of conversation. One asks: “Do you have a boyfriend?” to a girl or one asks, “Do you have a girlfriend?” (to a boy). Queer subjects feel the tiredness of making corrections and departures; the pressure of this insistence, this presumption, this demand that asks either for a passing over (a moment of passing that is not always available) or for indirect or direct forms of selfrevelation (“but actually, he’s a she,” or “she’s a he,” or just saying “he” instead of “she” or “she” instead of “he” at the obvious moment). No matter how “out” you may feel or how (un)comfortably queer you may feel, those moments of interpellation get repeated over time, and can be experienced as a bodily injury; moments which position queer subjects as failed in their failure to lived up to the “hey you too” of heterosexual self-narration. (Ahmed 2004, 147) Following willful subjects has allowed me to develop the thesis: that the uneven distribution of the pressure of insistence is how norms become “affective” as well as effective. 21. There might seem a contradiction here with my argument in chapter 3 that queerness is what fails to recede in the generalization of will. A queer phenomenology can explore how things move in and out of the background in a dynamic way. So while the gaze passes over heterosexuality, and while this becoming background is what

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can ground mobilities and motilities (the “can do” as the comfort and ease of moving through a space that has already assumed one’s shape), the gaze can also bring heterosexuality to the front, as what “knocks on the door” of consciousness. To be the recipient of an action (in this example, to be waited upon) is to receive an attention that has already been given. Those whom the gaze passes over in such instances might have to be willful just to be on the receiving end. 22. Please note I am not saying here that we necessarily notice categories when we come up against them (an experience of coming up against can sometimes be survived by not noticing what we are coming up against) or that this is the only way we notice them (we can be aware of categories in play and subversion). For further discussion, see the conclusion of On Being Included (2012). 23. I am not assuming the equivalence of these words: they can slide into each other but they are also distinct from each other. The word “willful” and the word “stubborn” can often refer to similar kinds of behavior (when people are too attached to their own will such that their will stops them from being willing to do something for another). However, as words they do have different affective as well as temporal qualities. We can explore the differences between them through animal associations. The notion of willfulness is often conveyed through the image of a goat: not only an animal that is imagined by humans as individualistic (I pointed out in chapter 2 that the word “capricious” derives from goat) but also one who moves fast, is mischievous, who gets everywhere. The notion of stubbornness is typically conveyed through the image of a mule: as an animal that won’t budge, that sticks its hooves into the ground when a human attempts to pull it forward. Willful wills might have that impulsive and light temporality, and stubborn wills a slow and heavy temporality. But both wills are wills that won’t be compelled by others. 24. I acknowledge here that “individualism” is also a complicated political idea and is often reduced in order to be dismissed (rather like willfulness in that respect). There can be radical and conservative individualisms (indeed, there have been) just as there can be radical and conservative models of community. For a discussion of the contested political history of individualism, see Lukes (1973). 25. This is a familiar technique of racialization. See a related discussion in the conclusion of On Being Included about race as a technique of viewing as a blunt instrument (2012, 181). The others are seen as the other (for example, as could-be Muslims, could-be Middle Easterners, or could-be terrorists) as the others are only seen as a blur. Racial instruments: you catch by loosening, you sharpen by blurring. 26. It might be a Western idea to think of the individual as a Western idea (one that is given to “the others” when they become individuals). This is another way that empire becomes narratable as gift (see Nguyen 2012, for an excellent discussion of empire as the “gift of freedom”). When the individual becomes an imperial gift, then it is as if before empire we were an undifferentiated mass who needed the West to sort ourselves out, acquiring lines and edges that allowed us to differentiate ourselves from and to each other. I would thus propose that it is a Western idea that Muslim women are not individuals such that if Muslim women act “like individuals” it is a sign they have become Western (the “like” of course tells the story, as if some can only be individuals by being like). I am super-aware of the implications of these dynamics coming from a mixed background: when I talk of myself as part of a family of feminists, a family of

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willful women, or even a family of strong female individuals, it is often assumed I am referring to the English not Pakistani side of my family. But I am not: it is my Pakistani aunties, Muslim women, whom I think of as my most willful foremothers. They might be loyal and devout to Islam (as we know loyalty and devotion can mean very different things in different hands) but they certainly taught me how to stand up to men and to name patriarchy whatever the consequences. They taught me that my mind is my own. I mentioned in the acknowledgments of my first book that my eldest auntie, Gulzar Bano, was the first woman who spoke to me about feminism. Feminism can become a willful familial inheritance. 27. Heidi Mirza (2013) has recently shown how Muslim women think of the veil as a second skin. For a discussion of Muslim women’s ethical practice as a form of habit or habituation, see also Mahmood (2004 [2012]). It might seem that my suggestion that Muslim women become willful is at odds with Mahmood’s own critique of the use of “autonomous will” to frame questions of freedom (11–12). However, I think our arguments are in sympathy. I am suggesting that once the veil has become a willful sign, what was previously experienced as habit becomes a matter of will. This can be a profoundly alienating experience for Muslim women living in Western secular contexts. See also Bilge (2010) for a good discussion of how the French headscarf debates are often framed in terms of subordination versus agency (defined in terms of free will) and resistance. I also thank Loubna Bijdiguen for her important doctoral research on representations of the veil in Morocco and France from which I have learned a great deal. She shows how the veil becomes a history of associations. She picks up on, for example, how in the French context the veil becomes an “ostentatious” (ostentatoire) religious symbol, which then travels into the Moroccan press. Ostentatious as a word implies a dressy form of willfulness. Loubna Bijdiguen is one of a new generation of Islamic feminists who will teach us not only about the materiality of the veil but how the veil as sign or symbol is made out of materials. 28. Indeed, in the UK in the midst of another controversy about the veil, one commentator from the Muslim Women’s Network Shaista Gohir on Women’s Hour bbc Radio 4, on September 16, 2013, described the Muslim women who insist on wearing the niqab as “stubborn about being stubborn.” What is implied is that some minorities are experienced as being willful not only for the general body but also for other minorities whose aim is to become part of that body. 29. An action can be encountered as willful that is for the actor not willful but simply ordinary: to designate such an action as willful in this case would be to make a diagnosis both of what is behind the action and of the nature of the action. For instance, when I was younger someone said to me that in not shaving my legs I was “making a feminist statement.” My unshaved legs, you could say, were encountered as willful impositions on the world of willing legs. I hadn’t actually thought I was making a feminist point, though perhaps I was, in not assuming female legs had to be shaved legs. But in a way the ordinariness of unshaven legs is what is rendered impossible by the charge of willfulness: if not to shave is to be willful, then your legs cannot become part of the background. They assume the role of making a point. It can be tiresome: to be the point or to be perceived as making a point! I remember at the time the pressure of femininity: how any acts that were not “expressing” my compliance would appear as imposing my will on what is otherwise assumed as a neutral and even happy occasion.

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30. I found this novel because reviews compared it to Mrs. Dalloway, a novel I wrote about in The Promise of Happiness (2010, 70–75). As with Mrs. Dalloway, we have a whole life depicted in a single day; in this book too, unhappiness seems to seep into the tasks of that day. I should add that the scene in this book that I am describing as a feminist killjoy scene is quite unlike any in Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps because Mrs. Dalloway as a character is too busy caring for the happiness of others: so careful that she does not speak of the causes of her grief or speak in a way that might cause others grief. 31. It is significant that doing research on willfulness led me back to the radical feminist tradition (and in particular the radical lesbian feminist tradition). The figure of the “radical lesbian feminist” is very often charged with willfulness. And the charge might in some way relate to an unwillingness to yield. This is not to say there are not problems with or in this tradition of work: I cannot read Mary Daly without forgetting Audre Lorde’s letter to her about racism (1984, 66–71), though I would also note Lorde at the end of this letter addressed herself as “a sister hag” (71). But not to read that tradition because of these criticisms (which could also be directed to other less radical feminist work as well as non-radical and nonfeminist work) is to give up a willfulness inheritance too quickly. 32. See also Sue Campbell’s discussion of the attribution of bitterness. She writes: “The bitter are accused of blocking the good will that would be exercised toward them if they were not bitter” (1997, 170). It is not only that some bodies become blockage points, but that those bodies are viewed as causing their own blockage, and thus depriving themselves of the good will of others. 33. I would argue that sexist culture is reproduced through techniques of differentiating between women who are unwilling and willing to participate in sexist culture. These techniques for differentiation are techniques of power. As I argued in chapter 1, some become willing in order to avoid the costs of not being willing. And, to use my terms from chapter 3, a feminist will might be called a non-reproductive will: you become willful when you are not willing to reproduce a culture that is given through being reproduced. 34. If this history of willfulness as a history of disagreeable women seems rather far from the history of sovereign will discussed in section 1, just remember the figure of Antigone. Disagreeable women are right at the heart of the ruler’s history. 35. Thanks to Elena Loizidou for teaching me to hear the significance of this laughter. 36. I am aware of one writer working in Germany who uses the word eigensinn to describe postcolonial agency: Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur, whose work has not been translated into English. Johnston-Arthur’s work is referred to by Jin Haritaworn as follows: “My ‘identity’ concept therefore resembles more closely Johnston-Arthur’s (2007) use of the Austrian-German term ‘Eigen-Sinn’. Literally translated as ‘sense of self’, its composite means ‘stubbornness’ or ‘unruliness’. This evokes what is at stake in inventing ourselves from the ashes of multiple, and repeated, onslaughts of pathologisation” (2008, n.p.). With thanks to Jin Haritaworn for this reference. 37. A related book would be Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981) which also explores eigensinn in relation to the German worker’s movement. This text is not as yet translated into English. With thanks to Robin Celikates for the reference. 38. I think the relation between withdrawal and willfulness is very interesting: through willfulness one could “withdraw” mentally from the situation. One could also think about willfulness as involving physical acts of leaving or exiting a situation you do

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not want to support. For example, Paolo Virno argues that civil disobedience functions as exit or defection: “In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game” (2004, 70, emphasis in original). 39. My memories of being called willful relate to experiences at school as well as at home. In one instance, I recall “contradicting” the teacher (on a point about grammar). I learned that the teacher has a right to be right and the first right meant that if the second right was wrong the teacher was still right. I was sent to the headmistress’s office for my disrespectful attitude to the teacher’s authority. I often ended up in that office: the fate of many willful children one suspects. I find it curious that the sore point was grammar. These experiences were perhaps a lesson in the grammar of the will. I dedicate this note to Jason Edwards in and with willful affection. 40. The discussion here is a fleshing out of what is at stake in how some bodies become guests, those who come after, that was first discussed in chapter 1 in relation to conditional hospitality and conditional will. Note here how conditional hospitality also differentiates between guests, some of whom but not all of whom are treated as strangers. Racialization explains how some guests become strangers, and not others. My aim in using this example is not to make it stand out as exceptional but to treat it as exemplary. I also think it shows us how “not participating” can be a willful political stance. 41. The conference website no longer exists, and the statement is thus not available. However, the statement is usefully parodied on the following website, which includes some of the original quotes I am using here (2011), “Sexual Nationalisms,” http://seck shoowalnationalisms.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/sexual-nationalisms/. Accessed February 7, 2014. I have benefited from reading some very insightful blogs on this event including comments by Mikki Stelder (2011). See also Haritaworn (2012, 78) for a description of these events. 42. The word “uppity” is probably the most explicitly racialized of willful words, particularly in the context of U.S. politics. As Adia Harvey Wingfield and Joe Feagin note, in describing how President Barack Obama is read through a white racial frame, “the word ‘uppity’ has long been used by racist whites to describe African Americans who ‘don’t know their place’ ” ([2010] 2013, 88). The word “uppity” has a very specific political genealogy, but can be related to other willful words that imply a racial and social hierarchy: just being is judged as being above oneself, such that to know one’s place requires adjustment and submission. Such judgments are often expressed in action. 43. Audre Lorde is talking specifically here about living with cancer. She makes in her work a direct comparison between living with cancer and living with antiblack racism. The comparison is effective, showing us how racism can be an attack on the cells of the body, an attack on the body’s immune system. Her attitude to death has taught me so much about what a willful stance can mean: a way of not turning away from what compromises one’s existence, a way of refusing to be compromised. 44. Elena Loizidou offers an excellent account of how Judith Butler offers a critique of “formal universalism” (2007, 121–23). Indeed, it is Judith Butler’s critique of Hegel that can allow us to link more explicitly the relation between universalism and the general will. As Butler describes with characteristic precision: Hegel is clearly exposing what happens when a faction sets itself up as the universal and claims to represent the general will, where the general will supersedes

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the individual wills of which it is composed and, in fact, exists at their expense. The “will” that is officially represented by the government is thus haunted by a “will” that is excluded from the representative function. Thus the government is established on the basis of a paranoid economy in which it must repeatedly establish its one claim to universality by erasing all remnants of those wills it excludes from the domain of representation. (2000b, 22) The universal is haunted by the will whose exclusion it both demands and conceals. Perhaps Willful Subjects has given this ghost a history. 45. I could extend this critique to Badiou’s formal universalism resting on set theory. If this book was read as a willful subject returning Badiou’s address, it might say: “Hey, I am not part of your set!” We can use our particulars to challenge the very form of universality, which is only empty insofar as it extends from some particulars and not others while “emptying” the set from the very signs of this extension (the universal is an emptiness that cannot receive other particulars—just like the emptiness of the French secular nation based on laïcité cannot accommodate the particularity of the veil). My argument extends over a century of feminist challenges to universalism. We have to keep up the challenge as the critiques of universalism do not seem to get through: I would describe universalism as a theoretical brick wall, which is to say, a wall that exists in the actual world of theory. I realized what is at stake in Badiou’s and Žižek’s work for those of us who want to dislodge the universal, which I have in this book primarily addressed in terms of the general will, when I read John D. Caputo’s introduction to an edited collection on Saint Paul and the philosophers in which he lavishes praise on both. Caputo writes: “Each segment of identity politics creates a new market of specialty magazines, books, bars, websites, dvds, radio stations, a lecture circuit for its most marketable propaganderizes, and so on” (2009, 6). He later describes “those who practice identity politics” as “expressing their own will to power” (7). I do not need to make explicit what is at stake in how identity politics—and Caputo mentions “women’s rights, gay rights, the rights of the disabled” before moving on to anti-defamation organizations (6)—is reduced to expressions of self-will or the will of the market: Willful Subjects demonstrates these stakes. Note simply this: Žižek and Badiou do not need to create a “segment of identity politics” to guarantee their lecture tours. The universal is handy. See also note 57. 46. For a good discussion of sexual stigma in relation to Erving Goffman’s theories as well as The Well of Loneliness, see Love (2007, 102–5). 47. The expression “hydra headed willfulness” is used in Shakespeare’s Henry V, although it no longer appears in contemporary editions of the play. 48. To say “I will not” is still to exercise the vocabulary “I will.” Branka Arsić offers a useful reflection on the relation between the said “I would prefer not to” and the unsaid “I will not.” As she points out, the narrator responds to the enigma of Bartleby’s speech by reading both Edwards’s treatise Freedom of the Will and Joseph Priestly on necessity (2007, 14). She points out that Edwards is offering a challenge to John Locke given his full identification of will and preference. From this perspective, “ ‘I would prefer not to’ is the formula of the power of the will, the performance of its ‘pure’ act” (2007, 15). In effect Arsić is arguing that Bartleby in effect says “I will not” by saying “I would prefer not to.” I am tempted to let Bartleby not say what he does not say. After all, in becoming

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a vagrant, Bartleby has a wretched ending: perhaps what we can give back to Bartleby is a faithful reproduction of his own preferences. In other words, we would address him as a preferring (not to) subject rather than a willing (not to) subject. 49. Like all fictional figures, Bartleby can do different things in different hands. One colleague said to me that senior men in her department evoke Bartleby when they are asked to do any administration, the mundane work that is least valued by public institutions such as universities: they say “I prefer not to.” Such speech act is also saying yes to the social order that means that some more than others will do the housework. In these hands, which have been freed by preference, the speech act becomes a strategy that maintains rather than challenges the somatic division of labor discussed in chapter 3. 50. For a discussion of questions of racism in how spaces were experienced within the Occupy movement in the United States, see Todd (2011). It is worth including Slavoj Žižek’s (2012) response to the Occupy movement: “In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called ‘class struggle essentialism’ for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, ‘capitalism’ is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.” My arguments in this book could be read as providing a critical response to Žižek’s claims. 51. For example see the following website: http://disoccupy.wordpress.com/2012 /04/24/for-people-who-have-considered-occupation-but-found-it-is-not-enuf/. Accessed February 3, 2014. 52. See Peter Tatchell (2011), “Protest against the edl on Saturday,” http://www .petertatchell .net /politics /protest-against-the -edl -defend -the -muslim -community .htm. Accessed February 3, 2014. 53. Peter Tatchell (2011), “Tatchell Gets Muslim Hostility and Support,” http://www .petertatchell.net/religion/tatchell-gets-muslim-hostility-&-support-at-anti-edl-demo .htm. Accessed February 3, 2014. 54. You might hear a resonance with Heidegger’s description of obtrusiveness drawn on in chapter 1: something becomes obtrusive when it “stands in the way” of our concern. There is a politics to what and who is deemed to stand in the way. 55. The idea of social connection as electrical was crucial to Durkheim’s work on religious life. He describes “how the heat or electricity any object has received from an external source can be transmitted to the surrounding setting” ([1912] 2001, 24). The transmission depends on assembly: “Once the individuals are assembled their proximity generates a kind of electricity” (162). Perhaps once we have been assembled by willfulness, we can generate more of a charge. 56. For this formulation, thanks to my Facebook friends. 57. For further discussion of how identity politics have become a negative charge, see my book, On Being Included (2012), in particular the conclusion. There are many ways we can account for the charge. I have had many experiences of this charge in my participation in discussions on Facebook from which I have learned a great deal. To bring up the question of racism or sexism—even just to put words like that on the table—is often described as a form of identity politics. This is interesting: pointing to structure is treated as relying on identity. Perhaps we are witnessing the effacement of structure under identity not so much by those who are involved in what is called “identity politics” but by those who use “identity politics” to describe the scene of an involvement.

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58. With thanks to Jonathan Keane for this formulation. For a unique approach to the “recalcitrant” and “rearguard” as queer temporalities, see Freeman (2010, xvi). 59. With thanks to Sirma Bilge both for this reference and for her many thoughtful suggestions. 60. We could return as well to my discussion of the good will in relation to Zionism in Daniel Deronda. I noted in chapter 2 how Daniel’s moral voice, a voice that speaks with confidence about duty, is one that calls for the creation of Israel, a gathering of a diasporic population into a singular body. Could Israel be an example of a national body that asserts its right to exist by assuming its own willfulness? Is Israel an example of how a national body can “feel like an arm, but act like a rod”? Of course, if we were to make this case, then we would have in front of us a range of more or less sympathetic responses. We could imagine sympathetically a history of persecution, of how it feels to have to persist just to exist, as a way of understanding how the task of policing the nation is imagined as self-defense, even if we do not agree with that policing, or even agree with the assumption of the moral right (of any nation) to exist. Or we might be less sympathetic and think of this claim to arminess as allowing the purposeful and intentional oppression of Palestinians, of how a rod can present itself as an arm in order to keep beating the others. I am less sympathetic.

Conclusion. A Call to Arms 1. This phrase, for example, was picked up by Stuart Hall in his influential essay on cultural studies and its theoretical legacies (1992). David Harvey has questioned how this phrase became “a law of human nature” asking “why we might willingly draw a metaphor from incarceration” and calls for an optimism of the intellect, in others words, calls for us to think of alternatives (2000, 17). Personally I can understand why some of our richest metaphors come from incarceration. However, I doubt whether any faculty can be the faculty of optimism or pessimism. What pessimism and optimism do depends on the objects they invest in (see Ahmed 2010, 172–80). 2. For a good discussion of Gramsci’s optimism and pessimism that relates his arguments to the specific intellectual and political context in which he was writing, see Manders (2006). He describes the Gramscian spirit: “Doubt everything and concede nothing” (2006, li). 3. This book could be read as showing the intimacy of willfulness and the unconscious. I find Shoshana Felman’s description of the unconscious very helpful: “the inherent irreducible difference between consciousness and itself” (1987, 57). Willfulness might be the charge of this difference. Willfulness exposes the failure of the conscious subject to be fully present to itself. Furthermore, the depositing of willfulness in certain places could be one way of thinking of a social unconscious: what cannot be admitted by consciousness is put in that deadly place, as if she can be made to “go away.” Willfulness becomes then the return of the repressed: when parts acquire will they become symptoms. 4. Accounts of willful hands and arms are not only in fiction. The term “anarchic hand” is sometimes used to describe a medical condition: “The willful hand is described as ‘anarchic.’ The anarchic hand grasps doorknobs or picks up a pencil and starts to scribble with it. People with this syndrome are upset by the actions of the hand: ‘It will

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not do what I want it to do’ ” (Frith 2007, 75). One could certainly imagine the alarm of one’s hand acquiring a will of its own. 5. For a discussion of the demonizing of the left side, and the implications of this for bodily as well as social symmetry, see Ahmed (2006, 13–14). I would speculate: willful subjects are subjects of the left. 6. I borrow these terms from Nearing and Nearing’s use of the striking figure of the “unused arm” that I referred to in chapter 3. I am suggesting what is diagnosed as degeneracy can be understood in more positive political terms: as not being useful to the body that reduces bodies to use. 7. Finding this novel was one of the joys of the research: what I think of as “hap joy.” I happened to find it in a charity shop, and happened to take the book on holiday. Research is full of hap: and if we pick up materials that have an uncanny resonance with our arguments, then it can be important to allow them into the world of our work. 8. See also Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on how the blind man’s stick becomes incorporated into the body, extending the reach of the arm: “The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to it, which comprises beside the arm’s own reach the stick’s range of action” ([1945] 2002, 166). For a discussion of Merleau-Ponty on habit and embodiment, see Ahmed (2006, 132–34). 9. There are many ways in which we can think of feminism as a politics of changing hands. One of my favorite reading groups was called feminist classics and what I loved about it was how our discussions were as much about the books themselves (the copies, worn down, different editions, stains and impressions) as they were about the content of the arguments. We not only had the books to reflect with as material objects, but our stories of how we had acquired them. In doing feminism we not only pass these books around but can be shaped by this passing. My thanks to all the feminists who shared this space at Lancaster University: I have no doubt this experience changed my hands. 10. We can hear the echo of Heidegger here. In What Is Called Thinking, Heidegger wrote: “the hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained by being an organ which can grasp” ([1954] 1976, 16). The hand is more than part. Beyond the grasp, the hand for Heidegger “reaches and extends, receives and welcomes,” “carries,” “designs and signs” (16). The hand when no longer reduced to instrument becomes free to express itself. I think of this signing hand as an unhandy hand: one that is not required to support the body. Heidegger’s re-orientation to the crafty nature of the hand (handiwork) rests on a problematic distinction between human and animal as Derrida (1987b) carefully analyzed, as if what makes humans human is the freedom of the hand as freedom of thought (as opposed to the prehensile organ of the animal). For a discussion of the significance of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s handy opposition between human and animal see Lawlor (2007). For a helpful philosophical investigation of the hand see also Tallis (2003). Also with Home Truths, we could think of the freedom of the hand in relation to the question of disability. It is the reduction of body part to function (the functional body) that makes the disabled body dysfunctional as well as incomplete. Freedom from hand for Clare is freedom not to be completed by having a hand; while for Alice, freedom to hand is freedom not to be completed by a hearing ear. The hand becomes liberating when we are liberated from the requirement to become fully functioning beings. Different body parts can be thus be the seat of this freedom from function.

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11. With thanks to Patricia Spallone and David White for pointing me to Ann Oakley’s wonderful book and for their kind and gentle encouragement. 12. Audre Lorde is strongly critical of what she calls the “tyranny of prosthesis,” but she remains sympathetic to the women who choose to wear them, recognizing that “each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape” ([1980] 1997, 8). 13. This affinity might be carried by the words themselves, by how the words “crip” and “queer” become sites of potential insofar as they retain a negative charge. I noted in chapter 4 how Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the potency of queer in terms of how it “cleaves” to the scene of childhood shame. The potency of queer is how it keeps bringing up a difficult history. Alison Kafer explores how the word “crip” is a charged word. Drawing on Nancy Mairs’s essay on wanting people to wince at the word, she suggests “this desire to make people wince suggests an urge to shake things up, to jolt people out of their everyday understandings of bodies and minds, of normalcy and deviance” (2013, 15). Queer and crip could both be understood as willful words that work by holding on to a charged history. 14. The website of this project is available here: http://www.thealternativelimb project.com/#. Accessed February 4, 2014. 15. It would be possible to read this section as part of a “new materialism” or a new “material feminism.” However, I would argue that there is nothing new about the materialism I am offering here: I consider my own work as indebted to decades of feminist scholarship on how bodies and worlds materialize. I wholeheartedly reject the argument that “matter” did not matter to earlier work in feminist studies. Perhaps matter mattered right from the beginning, given how matter was intertwined with woman and the maternal. Who could forget Adrienne Rich’s instruction to “begin with the material,” from her “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” first published in 1984: “Begin, we said, with the material, with matter, mma, madre, mutter, moeder, modder” (1986, 213). For further discussion and explanation of what I consider to be the problematic genealogy implied by claiming a “new materialism,” see Ahmed (2008). As I hope is made clear in the final section of this conclusion, I consider Black studies a key materialist history, one that tends to be erased from new materialist literatures. 16. Hasana Sharpe is careful to note that the analogy bequeaths wisdom to humans rather than implying they are “dumb as rocks” (2011, 67). A she points out: “All beings include a power of thinking that corresponds exactly to the power of their bodies to be disposed in different ways” (66). There is thus “a power of thinking that belongs to the stone” (67). Schopenhauer and Spinoza are probably closer than it might seem from a first reading of Schopenhauer on Spinoza. 17. We could go even further: we might even have to lose the stone to make room for other findings. It might be important to recognize that even designating something as a stone is an all-too-human designation. Tim Ingold describes: “Suppose that I find a stone, and wonder whether I might use it as a missile, for hammering, or perhaps as a pendulum bob or paperweight. For none of these purposes need the stone be modified. But the tiny insect hiding behind the stone never perceived its ‘stoniness’: it simply perceived concealment, and responded accordingly” (1986, 3). In this book, Ingold remains relatively committed to the difference between humans and other animals as a difference of consciousness and intentionality. But what I find so evocative about

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this description is both the reminder that “objectness” is an orientation toward what we encounter rather than what we encounter, as well as the implication that activities are also perceptions for subjects of all kinds: we might perceive something as a dwelling insofar as we are aiming to dwell, a concealing insofar as we aim to conceal, and so on. Whatever we think of and call a stone might have its own projects or leanings. A less human occupation might be one that takes occupation more seriously as a life activity or praxis. I use “less” and “more” advisedly: the most human occupations in my view are often the ones that proceed from the thought that humans can escape human occupation. 18. The parable was posted on the “Hearts on Fire: A Spirituality blog” in 2012 http://heartsonfire33.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/the-parable-of-the-willful-stones/. Accessed February 4, 2014. 19. This is why for Isabelle Stengers ecology is not a “science of functions.” As she explains: “The populations whose modes of entangled coexistence it describes are not fully defined by the respective roles they play in human entanglement.” As a result, Stengers explicitly rejects the whole/part relation to describe ecology: “Interdependent populations do not make a system in the sense that they can be defined as parts of a large whole” (2010, 34). For another ecological argument that focuses on heterogeneity, see Guattari ([1989] 2000). 20. If there has been an ecological turn in queer theory, it is not necessarily best described as a turn of thought, or as the beginning of a new relation, but as the bringing out of the ecological implications of queer sensibilities. For an example, see the collection by Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010). See also Gandy (2012). 21. In retrospect, it took me some time to notice the arms in the phrase “call to arms.” The first time I presented any of the material from this research (which included the Grimm story) at the Lesbian Lives conference in Dublin in February 2010 someone said to me afterward that she thought my conclusion (about becoming willful subjects, feminist killjoys) was “a call to arms.” The paper was affirming a militant style of radical lesbian feminism so this description made sense to me. But I did not even hear the arms in the description at that point! But once I did hear the arms, this phrase acquired a whole new meaning and resonance. 22. Henri Bergson, in offering a model of “creative evolution,” makes use of the image of the arm: “Let us think rather of the action like that of raising the arm; then let us suppose that the arm, left to itself, falls back, and yet that there subsists in it, striving to raise it up again, something of the will than animates it” ([1911] 1920, 261). I also want us to think of the arm in creative terms, although I am explaining this creativity in different (although sympathetic) terms. See Fujita and Lapidus (2007) for an excellent discussion of how Bergson makes use of hands and arms in developing a nonorganic vitalism in the corpus of his work. 23. Lincoln Cushing, “A Brief History of the Clenched Fist Image,” http://www.docs populi.org/articles/Fist.html. Accessed February 4, 2014. 24. It was the forty-fifth anniversary of John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s protest on October 16, 2013, just as I was doing the final edits on this book, and I have learned considerably from the discussions in the media about the context and consequences of their protest. See, for example, Zirin (2013). See also Hartmann (2004) for a good discussion of the significance of this protest in the context of U.S. race politics.

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25. “The Olympics: Black Complaint,” Time, http://www.time.com/time/magazine /article/0,9171,900397,00.html#ixzz2764WeqrK. Accessed February 4, 2014. 26. For discussions of bathrooms as places of gender policing, see Cavanagh (2010) and Halberstam (1998, 20–29). 27. With thank to Nikki Sullivan and Susan Stryker for this essay that demonstrates how the body politic requires the integration of functional parts. The word “mayhem” would offer another lens with which to consider the history of willfulness. As the legal historian William Winthrop described, “mayhem” is an “inflicting upon any part of the man’s body, of such an injury as to render him less able to fight or defend himself against his adversary.” Thus while “to cut off or disable a hand, an arm and a leg or to strike out or blind an eye” was considered mayhem, “to deprive a person of his ear or nose was held not to be, since such an injury would disfigure only and would not incapacitate for war-service” ([1896] 2000, 676). However horrifying these histories of bodily injury, we also learn from them how resistance might involve incapacitation. 28. Teresa Zackodnik is citing here from Frances Dana Gage’s Reminiscences in which Gage, a leading feminist, reformer, and abolitionist, gives us this account of Truth’s speech as well as “bodily testimony” that has been crucial to how it has been remembered. It is important to note the status of this description as citation: our access to Sojourner Truth’s address is through the testimony of others, in particular, the testimony of white women. Zackodnik notes that other accounts of this event did not include references to Truth baring her arm (2011, 99). We learn from this to be cautious about our capacity to bear witness to the labor and speech of arms in history: we might only be able to read (of) the arms through the mediation of other limbs. 29. Readers might note the connection between the muscular arm of the black woman slave (who has to insist on being woman) and the strong arm of the butch lesbian (who in this anecdotal example is a white woman and who has to insist on being a woman). As I pointed out in chapter 4, some have to insist on belonging to the categories that give residence to others. To hear the echo in these accounts of insistence is not to assume an analogy. But it is to make a connection: if gender norms operate to create a very narrow white feminine body ideal (including an idea of the female arm) then differently embodied others will fail that ideal, although how they fail the ideal, and the consequences of that failure, will depend on multiple histories. Arms not only have a history; they are shaped by history, such that arms make history flesh. It is the arms that can help us make the connection between histories that otherwise do not seem to meet. Intersectionality does not need to be assumed to refer to identity; when an arm is a meeting point, intersectionality becomes army. 30. It is widely argued that “lord and bondsman” is a more accurate translation into English of Hegel’s terms and these are the terms used in my own edition. I would argue that “master and slave” are important words to retain given the political histories they translate. Please note I am only reading the section “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness” in my willful version of Hegel’s fable ([1807] 2003, 104–12). 31. In Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues: “We may call the will objective, when it is wholly submerged in its object, as. e.g. the child’s will, which is confiding and without subjective freedom, and the slave’s will, which does not know itself to be free, and is thus a will-less will” ([1820] 2005, xlv). Both the child and the slave have wills that lack will. My reading thus shows the importance of the parent/child relation to the slave

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and colonial relation: the slave becomes the child of the master/parent, the one whose willfulness is assumed as the moral justification of violence. 32. For another important discussion of slavery in relation to the category of the will, see Edlie L. Wong’s book Neither Fugitive nor Free which has as its archive the freedom suits, that is, the lawsuits “involving the valets, nurses and maids who accompanied slaveholders into free soil” (2009, 2). Wong follows Saidiya Hartman in reflecting on the peculiar and double status of the slave in Southern law: treated as persons in criminal cases, but as property in all others (3–4), creating a set of contradictions that was “built into the freedom suit’s procedural form” (4). Slaves were treated as having a will of their own (in the case of crime) and as not having a will of their own (in all other cases). In the conclusion of this book, Wong discusses the introduction of passports as “political documentation of citizenship” to the free black Americans, and how they were used to distinguish between willing and willful blacks: the “State department withheld its protection from free blacks who acted on their own will to travel abroad but granted it to those who travelled as subordinates to white masters” (250). As such the department “distinguished between legitimate (will-less) and illegitimate (willful) forms of free black travel abroad and it sought to delimit citizenship and enforce the racial subordination found in slave law” (250, emphasis in original). See also Stephen M. Best who discusses the figure of the fugitive slave as the one assigned as a willful subject and who thus exposes the fiction of willessness: “It projects a willful subject when the will-less is in suspension, fabulates a subject not owned when the owned escapes” (2004, 81). Not surprisingly then the figure of the “willful slave” does haunt the archives: slaves would be willful if they showed signs of having a will. A history of slave resistance could thus also be told in terms of willfulness. As James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton note in discussing the work of Frederick Douglass: “Slave men found many ways to assert themselves; even the threat of self-assertion could be effective. One man reported that he avoided being sold at auction by meeting the gaze of suspecting buyers directly as they inspected him, an obvious sign of a willful slave” (1993, 137). Returning to my discussion of civil rights and disobedience in chapter 4, we can understand how black resistance involved a will to receive the willfulness assignment. 33. Indeed, Jacobs shows how a willfulness charge is brought against her by Dr. Flint: “If I have been harsh with you at times, your willfulness drove me to it. You know I exact obedience from my own children and I consider you as yet a child” ([1861] 2008, 81). 34. Reading Hegel in this way is a way of framing the account as a fable. If anything, there has been a retreat from reading Hegel’s philosophy in terms of masters and slaves, even understood as philosophical figures, which we can partly understand as a retreat from the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s ([1947] 1969) framing of Hegel in these terms. For example, Robert R. Williams argued that Kojève’s reading of Hegel was a “distortion of recognition” by reducing recognition and its dialectics to the master and slave (1997, 10). I would suggest that we need to re-recognize the status of Hegel’s fable as fable by restoring the referent. I thus share Paul Gilroy’s commitment to reading the master/slave dialectic as pointing us back to the history of slavery, as a history which is in front of us, which we still have to front up to. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy shows how Hegel’s fable demonstrates the “intimate association between modernity and slavery” (1993, 54), or between the very idea of freedom (often rendered freedom of will) and the enslavement and subjection of others. Other writers such as Paget Henry and Lewis Gordon have

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argued that the master/slave dialectic cannot refer to African slaves given that for Hegel the “Negro is without self-consciousness” (Henry 2004, 201, see also Gordon 2008, 197). I have learned from these important readings. Whether or not Hegel could refer to the slave/bondsman as African given his own system, I think we can make this reference on his behalf (to restore the referent is thus a creative act). My reading suggests that we learn about the dialectic as the master’s dialectic given how the slave’s consciousness of freedom is understood as restricted. 35. See Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the distinction between work and labor: “Because men were dominated by the necessities of life, they could win their freedom only by the domination of those they subjected to necessity by force” (1958, 58). Arendt is describing the institution of slavery in antiquity. I would suggest that the international division of labor could also be described in these terms: some become free by requiring that others are subjected to necessity through labor. However, I am unconvinced by Arendt’s distinction between the working hand (which creates useful and durable objects) and the laboring body (which creates only natural things that “swing in changeless, deathless repetition” [96]). After all, the laborer is handy or even gives a hand to the social body as I discussed in chapter 3. The difference in our arguments might partly be that by “necessity” I would include not only biological requirements (for the reproduction of life) but also social requirements (for the reproduction of existence): the durable objects generated by what Arendt calls work can thus be tools for reproducing a social body (work not only creates objects, but shapes the bodies of those who work). 36. I recognize that I am not reading Hegel properly here. For Hegel the master is not free and requires the recognition by the slave; any freedom that involves bondage is not freedom which, as Cynthia Willett notes for Hegel, is “realized only in the symmetry of mutual recognition” (1995, 123). Willett reads Hegel alongside Frederick Douglass asking the question: “I wonder whether Hegel comprehends the slave from the perspective of the slave or, on the contrary, reduces the position of the non-European slave to a function in a master European discourse” (119). This question recognizes the functionality of the figure of the slave for the philosophical fable. My reading is an answer to Willett’s question: the discourse of the master/slave dialectic is the master’s discourse. I would go further by rebutting specific points: the master does not require recognition from the slave (the master gets that from the other masters). If anything recognition is the master’s fantasy of what he wants from the slave (that allows him to survive his role in the dehumanization of the slave). After all, the master’s idea of freedom (and the time that has been “freed” to reflect on freedom is in my view intrinsic to the master’s idea of freedom) depends upon the capacity to exploit the labor of others for his own ends. Take Hegel’s own definition of freedom: “The Will is free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself (for as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone—wills the Will” ([1837] 1861, 461). The fantasy of a free will would be supported by the “anything alien,” including the arms of the slave, as forms of material support that cannot be recognized as it would contradict the fantasy. This concept of freedom is dependent on what I described in chapter 3 as the somatization of the division of labor. My arguments throughout this book have shown how the will cannot and does not exclude what is alien (to summarize this alien is to evoke the alien as figure). Any will has a history that always depends on alien wills that might or might not be recognized. As Angela Davis (1971) shows in her important lectures, the slave’s libera-

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tion requires the rejection of the master’s idea of freedom. The slaves in rejecting the master’s idea of freedom do not want recognition from the master: bodies that become unwilling to be the arms of masters are willing much more than recognition. When we hear willfulness as a claim to freedom, we give a different version of the fable. 37. I describe Frantz Fanon’s project as humanist quite deliberately. N. Katherine Hayles in her work on post-humanism cites C. B. Macpherson’s work on possessive individualism: “The human essence is freedom from the wills of others” (1999, 3). Thus for Hayles “the post-human is post not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will” (1999, 4). I agree with this “no a priori way” though I would also want to think of how “others” have challenged the “self-will” of human freedom in claiming a will of their own. This willful claim to will is not about demarcating one’s own will from other wills but rather refusing to be the other or alien will that gives support to human freedom. It might even be that willfulness as a claim is not about the “post-human” as it derives from the struggle of those who have been designated as other than human to be recognized as human. A willful humanism might suggest we are not in the horizon of a post if some are still struggling to be human. A post might be postable from the vantage point of having been human. The struggles of the “not human humans” (which cannot be reduced to the struggle to be humans but does involve the struggle for a will of one’s own, a struggle not to be a property of humans including possibly humans who think of themselves as post-human humans) might simultaneously be transforming what it means to be human in a planet shared with many others. 38. It is worth asking here how my reading of Hegel relates to Frantz Fanon’s own reading in Black Skin, White Masks. In a footnote Fanon argues that Hegel’s master/ slave dialectic does not correspond to the situation for the black man. He suggests that the master does not want recognition from the slave but work. But he also suggests that the black man is “less independent” than the Hegelian slave as “he wants to be like the master” such that rather than “turning toward the master and turning away from the object” he “turns toward the master and abandons the object” ([1967] 2008, 172). I have read Hegel’s fable as containing the slave’s independence by framing that independence as holding on to the object. The trajectory of Fanon’s work and life is how the becoming of freedom is about turning away from the master. Fanon in other words enacted the independence that Hegel could not register as anything but bondage. For a good discussion of Fanon on the master/slave dialectic, see Bulhan (1985).

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276

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Index

abulia, 77–78 Adam Bede (Eliot), 43, 45–47, 106, 117 Adolphe Blanc (character), 117–18 Adorno, Theodor, 81, 209n23 Aesop, 231n13 affective realm, 31, 175; alignment with good will of, 68, 223n11; of feminist killjoys, 2–3, 152–60; of particular will, 101–2, 104, 229n5; of usefulness, 232n17; of the willful subject, 18, 82–83, 152; of words for willfulness, 150–51, 242nn23–24 “After Amsterdam” statement, 158–60 Against Our Will (Brownmiller), 55 Agamben, Giorgio, 207n9, 214n16 Agustín, Laura María, 220n46 Ahmed, Sara, 159. See also specific titles Alexander of Hales, 219n42 ambivalence, 37–38, 77–78, 215n19 Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Husserl), 36, 212n8 anarchic hand syndrome, 248n4 anarchist will, 239n9 The Anatomy of Disgust (W. Miller), 226n28 anatomy of the will, 207n9 Anderson, Benedict, 127 Andry, Nicolas, 72 Angell, James Rowland, 81–82 anger, 115 angle of the arm, 198 the angry person of color, 167

Antigone (character), 137, 238–39nn6–7, 244n34 anti-immigration rhetoric, 127–29, 236n35; conditional hospitality of, 127–28, 236n36; gay imperialism and, 166–68; on Islam, 165–68; on the unwilling migrant/otherness, 128–29, 236–37nn37–38; veil debates in, 121, 150–52, 236n37, 242–43nn25–28 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 21 Aquinas, 212n9; on obedience, 63–64; on passivity of will, 221n1; on sovereign will, 136, 142 Arab spring, 228n1 Arbeitswissenschaft, 110–11 archaeology of will, 207n9 archive of willfulness, 13–21; bodies as part of, 18–19; broken threads in, 155; as challenge to formalist universalism, 160, 245–46nn44–45; desire lines of, 21, 210n30; on education, 14, 20, 205n6; Eliot’s works in, 14–15, 209n21; Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in, 15, 200–204, 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38; partiality of, 18; philosophy and not philosophy in, 14–16; on power relations, 16; as praxis, 16, 20; sweaty concepts of, 18–19, 209n27; transcultural sites of, 205n6; “The Willful Child” (Grimm and Grimm) in, 1–2, 13–15, 17–18; the willful subject in, 17–18, 21

Arendt, Hannah, 205n5; on anxious willingness, 37–38; on Augustine, 9, 29, 208n15; on contingency of “here,” 39–47; on duty and obedience to moral law, 92, 228n41; history of will of, 5–6, 207nn9–10, 209n24, 212n9, 213n12; on immediacy of desire, 80; on natality, 193; on will as intention, 36, 214n17; on work and labor, 254n35 Aristotle, 207n10, 225n18 Arlington Park (Cusk), 153, 244n30 arm (as term), 194 arms and hands, 172, 194–204, 211n3, 248n60; in anarchic hand syndrome, 248n4; call to arms of, 194–204, 251n21; capitalist labor of, 106–12, 231n15, 234n24, 235n32; as clenched fists, 194–97, 251n24; disuse of, 111; in gender assumptions, 198–99, 252nn28–29; loss and disability of, 109–11, 175–85, 249n6; as phallic symbols, 120–21, 235n29; reaching of, 200–204; of servants and handmaids, 111–12, 231–32nn16–18; in “The Willful Child,” 1–2, 13, 18, 53, 98, 100–101, 111, 120–21, 123, 178, 203–4; willful parting gifts of, 176–85. See also political will/willfulness; the rod Arsić, Branka, 246n48 Artifical Parts, Practical Lives (Serlin), 109 Ashliman, D. L., 209n26 Assagioli, Roberto, 84 attunement/harmony, 49–54, 95, 147 Atwood, Margaret, 231n16 Augustine, 32, 207n11; calling upon will by, 26–30, 212n9; on desire, 9, 28–29, 119–20, 208n15, 213nn11–12, 234nn27–28; on existence of the will, 60; on happiness, 4; on political bodies, 119–21, 234n27; on the possibility of evil, 11–12, 185–86, 208nn18–19; on possibility of virtue, 119–20; on the subject in will, 23, 210n1; on will and error, 8–9, 229n3

278

INDEX

Badiou, Alain, 160, 246n45 Bartleby: The Scrivener (Melville), 163–64, 246–47nn48–49 Bayle, Pierre, 229n2 Beauvoir, Simone de, 3 Behler, Ernst, 210n2 Being and Time (Heidegger): on projection, 36–37, 214n18; on the willful hammer, 42–43, 217n28, 217n31, 247n54 “The Belly and Its Members” (Aesop), 231n13 Bender, Aimee, 237n2 Bennett, Jane, 10, 12, 208n17 Bergson, Henri, 107–8, 225n21, 231n15, 251n22 Berlant, Lauren, 7, 80, 155, 174 Bernasconi, Robert, 27 Best, Stephen M., 252n32 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 7, 26, 102–3, 211n6 Biesalski, Konrad, 110–11 Bijdiguen, Loubna, 243n27 Bilge, Sirma, 243n27 Biological Relatives (Franklin), 102 The Birth of Physics (Serres), 208n17 Black, Oliver, 218n36 The Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 253n34 Blackman, Lisa, 49 blackness. See race/racism Black pedagogy, 64, 222n7 Black Power movement, 141–42, 194, 197, 251n24 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 255n38 bodies and body parts, 18–19, 217n29, 243n29; Augustine on, 9, 28–29, 119–20, 208n15, 213nn11–12, 234nn27–28; capitalist manual labor of, 106–10, 122, 231n15, 234n24, 235n32; disabilities of, 109–11, 147–48, 177–84, 241n19, 249n6, 250n13; diversity work of, 144; impulsive tongues of, 176–77; injury to, 189–90; as models of general will, 101–4, 117, 230n7; as political bodies, 119–21, 234n27; in political protest, 161–68, 194–204; prosthetics for, 109–10, 177–84; reproductive duty of, 112–21, 193; of

rioting children, 130–31, 237nn41–42; as servants and handmaids, 111–12, 231n15; spatial adjustments for, 147–48, 241n19; stigmatization of, 161–62; stomachs and belt tightening of, 105, 231n13; unbecoming traces of, 126, 193, 203; as vagabonds of capitalism, 122–30, 235nn31–32; willful parting gifts of, 176–85, 248n4; as willful wanderers, 116–17, 233–34nn23–24. See also arms and hands; the social body Body and Will (Maudsley), 60–61, 210n2 Body Parts (dir. Red), 178 Boétie, Étienne de La, 138–39 Bonaparte, Felicia, 85 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa), 21 Boss, Medard, 49 Bourdieu, Pierre, 93–94 Bourget, Paul, 121, 235n30 Bourke, Vernon J., 207n8 Boyd Barrett, Edward John, 62, 83–84 Braidotti, Rosi, 174–75 breaking the will, 63–68, 221n4 Brimstone, Lyndie, 3 broken pots, 43–48, 50, 154 Brouwer, Dan, 161 Brownmiller, Susan, 55 Buber, Martin, 142 Butler, Judith: on Antigone, 238n6; on Arendt’s discussion of duty, 92, 228n41; on formal universalism, 245n44; on Nietzsche, 31; on the phallus, 235n29; on protesting bodies, 162–63; on Rosa Parks, 240n16 call to arms, 194–204, 251n21; the clenched fist of, 194–97, 251n24; laboring will of, 201–4, 252n33, 254–55nn35–38; mayhem and, 199, 252n27; wayward queer arms of, 197–200 Calvin, John, 63, 212n9 Calvinism. See Protestantism Cameron, David, 129 Campbell, Sue, 244n32 Camus, Albert, 239n10

The Cancer Journals (Lorde), 184 Capital (Marx), 122 capitalism, 105–12; bodily labor of, 106–10, 122, 231n15, 234n24, 235n32; division of labor in, 230n10; fat cats’ belt-tightening in, 105, 231n13; loss and disability in, 109–11; willful migrants of, 122–30, 235nn31–32 Caputo, John D., 246n45 “Caring for War Cripples” (Biesalski), 110–11 Carlos, John, 197, 251n24 Carnal Thoughts (Sobchack), 179 Carrie (dir. de Palma), 178 Carter, Angela, 237n2 Cartisian Mediataions (Husserl), 27 The Case of Wagner (Nietzsche), 235n30 Castañeda, Claudia, 69 Césaire, Aimé, 141 Chanter, Tina, 239n7 character building, 68–75, 91–96; plasticity of children and, 69–73; Rousseau on self-will and, 73–75; self-help in, 75–84, 225n19, 226n27; the steady hand in, 71–73, 92–93, 224n15, 224n17 the charge of willfulness, 134, 137, 168, 173 Charles I, King of England, 135–36 children: character building in, 69–73; as feral rioters, 130–31, 237nn41–42; inherited willfulness of, 113–21, 130; as subject-to-come, 123–24; as willful orphans, 232n19. See also education of the will Christian thought, 212n9 Cicero, 234n27 citizenship, 126–29; as community of strangers, 126–27; conditional will and assimilation in, 127–29, 148–52, 236–37nn36–38; diversity and, 148–49 City of God (Augustine), 119–20, 207n11, 212n9, 213n11 civil disobedience, 141–43, 240n13, 244n38 Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Thoreau), 240n13

INDEX

279

civil rights movement, 142–43, 240nn14–16 Clare (character), 178–84, 249n10 class, 232n18, 235n32 clenched fists, 194–97, 251n24 the clinamen, 10 clumsiness, 45, 50–51 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 186 collective will, 56. See also social will command. See obedience concurrence of wills, 48, 218n36 conditional will, 53–54, 127–29, 219nn42–43, 236–37nn36–38 Confessions (Augustine), 26–30, 207n11, 212n9 Connolly, William, 228n42 continuity of will, 29–31 “Conversation on the Country Path about Thinking” (Heidegger), 210n2 Cooke, John, 135–36 corporeal will, 60, 221n1. See also bodies and body parts Cottinger, Henry Marcus, 208n20 Crimp, Douglas, 238n6 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 228n41 The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed), 129, 241n20 Cushing, Lincoln, 194–95 Cusk, Rachel, 153 Daly, Mary, 153, 244n31 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 84–91, 209n21; Daniel as ethical subject of, 95–96; Gwendolyn’s guilt in, 59–60, 85–88, 140–41, 176–77, 180–81, 209n21; Gwendolyn’s renunciation of desire in, 88–91; Zionism in, 96, 228n43, 248n60 Darwin, Charles, 102, 230n6 Davidson, Donald, 61 Davis, Angela, 254n36 Davis, Bret W., 210n2 Davis, Michael, 14 Dekel, Mikhal, 228n43 Deleuze, Gilles, 120, 188, 208n13, 208n17 demonstrating bodies, 47, 56, 161–68 Dentith, Simon, 73

280

INDEX

depersonalized willfulness. See objects of will Derrida, Jacques, 13, 218n34; on conditional hospitality, 53; on humans and animals, 249n10; on metaphysics of presence, 210n2 Descartes, René, 8, 210n1 desire lines, 21, 210n30 determinist models, 5, 60–61, 206n7, 221n1 Dewey, John, 225n19 Dihle, Albrecht, 212n9 disability, 109–11, 175–85, 241n19; political activism on, 185, 250n13; prosthetic body parts for, 109–10, 177–85, 249n8; spatial accommodations for, 147–48, 241n19 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 72 Diseases of the Will (Ribot), 61–62, 68, 230n7; on affective state of willing, 76; on strong will, 81–82; on two classes of will pathology, 226n25; on weaknesses of will, 76–79, 176, 225nn20, 225nn22– 23; on will as testimony, 226n27 dismissal, 133–34, 168–69 disobedience, 134–43, 237n3; accepting the charge of willfulness in, 134, 137, 168, 173; in acting for change, 141–43, 239nn10–11; as reluctance, 140–41; sovereignty vs. tyranny in, 135–39, 238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60; wayward queer arms and, 197–204. See also political will/willfulness diversity work, 143–52, 158–60, 241n21; insistent labor of, 149–50, 241n20; institutional will and habit in, 145–48, 241nn17–18; integration and, 148–52; spatial adjustments and, 147–48, 241n19; two meanings of, 144; walls encountered in, 144–46 Dollimore, Jonathan, 9, 116–17 Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Franklin), 208n16 Dorothea Brooke (character), 209n21 Douglas, Mary, 198 Douglass, Frederick, 252n32, 254n36

Downton Abbey, 232n17 Dr. Strangelove (dir. Kubrick), 177 Duggan, Mark, 237n41 Dumont, M. Léon, 70, 147 Durkheim, Émile, 247n55 duty, 91–93 A Dying Colonialism (Gilly), 196 ecological considerations, 192–94, 251nn19–20 Edelman, Lee, 125 The Educating Mother (Cottinger), 208n20 education of the will, 14, 20, 208n20; affective alignment with good will in, 59–62, 68, 91–93, 223n11, 228n42; as character-building project, 68–75, 91–96; German literature on, 205n6; methodology for, 82–84; obedience and violence in, 62–67, 91–92, 103, 130–31, 221n4, 223n10, 226n27, 227n39; plasticity of children and, 69–73; poisonous pedagogy in, 2, 64–68, 140, 222nn7–9, 222n12; Rousseau’s utopian model of, 73–75; self-help in, 75–84, 225n19, 226n27; sinfulness of the child and, 62–63; the steady hand in, 71–73, 92–93, 224n15, 224n17 The Education of the Will (Payot), 62, 82–83, 234n24 Edwards, Jason, 245n39 Edwards, Jonathan, 72, 246n48 Eichmann, Adolf, 92, 228n41 eigensinnig, 157, 202, 203, 205n6, 244n36, 244n38 Eliot, George, 3, 14–15, 85–91, 209n21; on feminine renunciation, 88–91, 227n34; on free will and determinism, 60, 221n1; gendering of willfulness by, 87–88, 90–91, 227n37; on manual labor, 106; on reproductive duty, 114–16; on solitude and belonging, 124–26; sorrowing wanderers of, 117; on willful broken objects, 43–47. See also Daniel Deronda Ellis, Havelock, 121, 198 El-Tayeb, Fatima, 159

Émile (Rousseau), 73–75, 86, 97–98, 103, 219n42 Empedocles, 193 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 235n32 The Enchantment of Modern Life (Bennett), 208n17 Engels, Friedrich, 55–56 English Defence League (edl), 165–66 Epicurean atomism, 10 Erasmus, 212n9 error of will, 4, 6–9, 98, 229n3; Nietzsche’s critique of, 6–7, 25–26; spatial and temporal aspects of, 8–9 An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children (Sulzer), 64–66 ethics, 32, 91, 95–96 everyday will, 19–20. See also the willing subject The Everything Parent’s Guide to the Strong-Willed Child (Pickhardt), 222n9 evil and ill will, 11–12, 95, 228n42 Experience and Judgment (Husserl), 31 experience of will, 24 family and kinship, 113–21, 192, 232n19; belonging in, 125–26; marriage and female subjection in, 115–16, 233nn20–22; mourning in, 238n6; queer willfulness and, 117–18, 121, 232n19 Fanon, Frantz, 214n16, 239n11; on colonial labor, 112, 203, 255nn37–38; on political will, 141, 196 Farber, Leslie, 84, 225n23 fatigue, 38, 215n20 fatness, 226n29 Feagin, Joe, 245n42 Felix Holt (Eliot), 117 Felman, Shoshana, 248n3 Female Masculinity (Halberstam), 198–99 feminism, 249n9; attributions of willfulness in, 90–91, 121, 134, 155; clenched fist of protest in, 195; new materialism of, 185–95, 250n15; radical lesbian tradition of, 244n31, 251n21; will and willfulness in, 175, 227n37

INDEX

281

the feminist killjoy, 2–3, 152–60, 170; acts of self-preservation of, 160, 169; collected examples of, 152–53; political acts of, 157–60, 245nn39–41; the snap of, 155–57; willful words used for, 153–55, 157, 160, 244n33, 244n36, 244n38 feminist snap, 155–57 feminist theory, 21; on bodies and technology, 217n29; on identity politics, 160, 171, 175, 247n57; on making objects matter, 211n5; on power relations and gender, 16, 54–56, 220n48, 233n21; reclaiming of the haggard in, 153, 244n31; willfulness of, 134 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 104, 115–16, 230n8 fists, 194–97, 251n24 Flathman, Richard E., 205n5 “Footmen” (Hazlitt), 112 force. See power relations formal universalism, 160, 171, 245–46nn44–45 For Your Own Good (A. Miller), 2, 66 Foster, Michael, 230n7 Foucault, Michel: on genealogy of the subject, 6, 207n11; on orthopedics, 72; on power relations, 137–38, 219n44, 239n8; on self-discipline, 215n22 Franklin, Sarah, 102, 208n16 Freadman, Richard, 26–30 “Freedom of the Will” (Mill), 68–69 free will/freedom: accountability implied in, 6–7; as cause of sin, 27–31; debates on determinism vs., 5, 60–61, 206n7, 221n1; forcing by general will of, 97, 103, 105; happiness and, 118; power relations of, 16, 54–56; Rousseau’s model of, 73–75 “Frenzy, Mechanism and Mysticism” (Bergson), 107–8 Freud, Sigmund: on counter-will and impotence, 77, 226n24, 234n28; on hysteria, 234n26; language of will of, 225–26nn23–24; Little Hans story of, 120 Frye, Marilyn, 56–57, 134

282

INDEX

full will, 29–31 futurity of willing, 31–39 Gage, Frances Dana, 252n28 Gagnier, Regenia, 207n9, 218n35 Gaia, 192–94 Gandhi, Mahatma, 142 Garrity, Jane, 198–99 Gatens, Moira, 14 gay imperialism, 166–68 gender: feminist accounts of, 16, 54–56, 220n48, 233n21; in labor of transgendered individuals, 149; muscular arms and, 198–99 gendering of will/willfulness, 20, 205n1, 209n22, 231n12; in Eliot’s characters, 87–91, 227n37; female renunciation and, 88–91, 227n34; in hysteria, 118–19, 234n26; language of will in, 217n33; marriage and female subjection in, 114–17, 233nn20–22; of reluctance to yield, 153; of veiled Muslim women, 121, 150–52, 236n37, 242–43nn25–28 genealogical approach to objects, 25–26, 211n4 The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 6 general will, 20, 47, 97–131; attribution of agency to, 228n1; the body as model of, 101–4; capitalist message of, 105–12; citizenship and nation in, 126–31, 236–37nn35–38; forcing of freedom by, 97, 103, 105, 129; happiness and, 100, 103; mediating parts of, 98–99; obligation of the part to the whole in, 20, 97–104; political form of, 103; reproduction and inheritance in, 112–21, 143, 193; transformation from religious to secular realm of, 99–104, 229n2; willful parts of, 97–98, 104–12, 117, 175–76, 230–31nn10–11, 234n28 The General Will before Rousseau (Riley), 229n2 George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Psychology (Eliot), 14 German Fascism, 66 Gilbert, Margaret, 47–48

Gilly, Adolfo, 196 Gilroy, Paul, 253n34 Ginger and Rosa (dir. Potter), 172 giving up, 38 Gohir, Shaista, 243n28 Goldberg, Jonathan, 208n17 good will, 57, 60–62, 84–96, 248n60; attribution of, 93–94; duty and obedience in, 91–93; vs. ill will, 94–95; social harmony and, 95–96; spontaneity of, 91–92, 95. See also education of the will Gordon, Lewis, 253n34 Gordon, Peter E., 5 Gorris, Marleen, 155 Gramsci, Antonio, 173–74, 248n2 Grandcourt (character), 86–87, 176–77 Greenblatt, Stephen, 9–10, 208n17 Gregory, 63–64 Griffith, Helen Sherman, 208n20 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 1–2, 13–15, 17–18. See also “The Willful Child” Grosfoguel, Ramón, 171 Guattari, Félix, 120 Gwendolyn Harleth (character): guilt of, 59–60, 85–88, 140–41, 176–77, 180–81, 209n21; renunciation of desire by, 88–91; weak-willed nature of, 85–86 Gynecology (Daly), 153 habit, 147, 224n14; vs. assimilation, 151; character-building and, 70–71; Husserl on, 26; institutional will as, 146–48, 241nn17–18; virtue as, 73, 225n18; willfulness as, 169–70 habituation, 148 Hage, Ghassan, 128–29 the haggard, 153, 244n31 Halberstam, J. Jack, 163, 198–99, 208n14 Hall, G. Stanley, 225n19 Hall, Radclyffe, 117–18, 198 Hall, Stuart, 248n1 Hallward, Peter, 16, 228n1, 239n11 Hamacher, Werner, 207n12 “The Hand from the Grave” (Ashliman), 209n26 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), 231n16

hands. See arms and hands hap joy, 249n7 happiness, 3–4; vs. apartness, 117–18; as duty, 114, 233n20; general will and, 100, 103; racism and, 167–68; will and, 8–9 happiness dystopias, 230n9 Haraway, Donna, 17, 44, 211n5 Hardt, Michael, 235n32 Hardy, Thomas, 107 Haritaworn, Jin, 159, 166–67, 244n36 Harman, Graham, 211n4 Harrison, Ross, 135–36 Harrison, Simon, 23, 212n9 Hart, James, 212n8 Hartman, Saidiya V., 201, 252n32 Harvey, Davidk, 248n1 Hayles, N. Katherine, 255n37 Hazlitt, William, 112 Hegel, G. W. F., 23; on bodily unity, 101; Butler’s critique of, 245n44; on contract will, 233n21; on habit, 146; master-slave dialectic of, 15, 200–204, 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38; on property, 41, 200; on wayward inheritance, 113 Heidegger, Martin, 49; on the hand, 249n10; on metaphysical will, 24, 210n2; on projection, 36–38, 214n18; on the willful hammer, 42–43, 217n28, 217n31, 247n54; on willing backwards, 39–40, 215n23 Hekma, Gert, 159 Henry, Paget, 253n34 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 91–92, 227n39 Her Willful Way: A Story for Girls (Griffith), 208n20 Heterodoxy Club, 133–34 heterosexuality, 150, 241n21 Hill, Thomas E., 91 The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke), 205n6 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 207n11 Hobbes, Thomas, 135–36, 238n4 Hochschild, Arlie, 52, 108 Home Truths (Maitland), 178–85, 249n7, 249n10

INDEX

283

homonationalism, 167 homosexuality: radical lesbian feminist tradition of, 244n31, 251n21; Schopenhauer’s explanation of, 78, 226n26. See also queer will and willfulness Honig, Bonnie, 238n6 Hooke, Robert, 208n16 hooks, bell, 201 hopefulness, 173–74, 248n1 Hopkins, Samuel, 72–73 Horton, James Oliver, 252n32 Horton, Lois E., 252n32 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 106 “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” (Davidson), 61 Hume, David, 101, 211n6 hunger strikes, 161 Husserl, Edmund, 25–26, 212n8; on acts of willing towards an object, 35–39, 214n16; on affirmative recalling of will, 31; on Augustine’s self-investigation, 27; on consciousness, 150, 241n21; on habits of the will, 26, 241n18; on intentionality of will, 33–34, 214nn15–16; on the near sphere, 41, 83; on protention, 39 the hydra myth, 163, 246n47 hysteria, 118–19, 234n26 “I cannot,” 214n16 “The Idea of Freedom” (Arendt), 213n12 Ideas (Husserl), 25, 212n8; on acts of willing, 34–35, 215n21; on the natural attitude of resolution, 33–34, 214n15; on the table, 214n24 identity politics, 160, 171, 175, 247n57 “I have seen black hands” (Wright), 196–97 The Illusion of Conscious Will (Wegner), 211n3 imagined community, 127 An Imitation of Christ (Kempis), 88–89, 227n33 immigration, 127–29. See also antiimmigration rhetoric Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 201

284

INDEX

inclination, 91 individualism, 150–51, 242n24, 242n26 Ingold, Tim, 250n17 inherited will, 113–21, 143 institutional will, 146–48, 241nn17–18 The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Stern), 218n39 Investigations into the Enigma of Male-toMale Love (Ulrichs), 78 Inwood, Brad, 5 “I prefer not to,” 164, 246–47nn48–49 Jacobs, Harriet, 201, 252n33 James, William, 38–39, 215n21; on the feeling of effort, 79, 84; on habit, 70–71, 147–48, 224n14; on impotence, 234n28; new psychology of, 225n19; on will exercises, 83–84 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 176–77 Johnston-Arthur, Araba Evelyn, 244n36 judgment of willfulness, 15, 19, 20; as killjoy of the future, 47; normative basis for, 81–82 Kafer, Alison, 250n13 Kant, Immanuel, 208n20; on aesthetic judgment, 228n41; categorical imperative of, 92, 228n43; ethics of, 32, 91; on moral education, 91–95, 228nn41–42; on moral will, 221n1; on respect, 93–94; on spoiled children, 67, 94–95, 223n10; Sulzer and, 222n8; on virtue of volition, 60, 87; on working classes, 232n18 Karfíková, Lenka, 212n9 Kaufman, Walter, 235n30 Kempis, Thomas à, 88–89, 227n33 Kierkegaard, Søren, 30 killjoys, 2–3, 47, 170. See also the feminist killjoy King, Martin Luther, Jr., 142 King, Stephen, 178 Kojève, Alexandre, 253n34 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 78 “The Ladder of Being” (Aquinas), 221n1 Landsberg, Alison, 178

Latour, Bruno, 217n27, 219n44 laziness, 82–83 Le Bon, Gustave, 56 Lefebvre, Henri, 219n40 legal willfulness, 135, 174–75 the legislator, 98–99 Leiter, Brian, 211n6 “The Lesbian Phallus” (Butler), 235n29 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (King), 142 Leviathan (Hobbes), 135–36 Levinas, Emmanuel, 95 Lewes, George Henry, 61 liberal governance, 224n14 life duty, 104 The Life of the Mind (Arendt), 5–6, 205n5, 228n41 Linebaugh, Peter, 163 Literature, Education and Romanticism (Richardson), 2 Littlejohn, Richard, 237n42 Locke, John: on education, 62, 71, 208n20; on the impressionable child, 69, 71–73, 92–93, 224n15; on will and error, 8–9 Logical Investigations (Husserl), 212n8 Loizidou, Elena, 245n44 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew), 122–23 Lorde, Audre: on the angry person of color, 167; on cancer and prostheses, 184, 199, 245n43, 250n12; on caring for ones’ self, 160; on damage, 189–90; on laboring arms, 203; radical lesbian feminist tradition of, 244n31; on sweaty concepts, 18–19, 209n27 Lovell, Terry, 240n16 Lucretius, 9–12, 15, 114, 155, 188, 208n17 Lüdtke, Alf, 157, 205n6 Luther, Martin, 63 Macpherson, C. B., 255n37 Maggie Tulliver (character), 3, 209n21; cleverness of, 227n35; renunciation of happiness of, 88–91, 227n34

Mahmood, Saba, 243n27 Mairs, Nancy, 250n13 Maitland, Sara, 178 Making a Social Body (Poovey), 100–101, 106, 230n10 Malebranche, Nicolas, 103, 229n2 The Man without Content (Agamben), 214n16 Marcuse, Herbert, 63, 212n9 Marx, Karl: on commodities, 41, 216–17nn25–26; on conditions of bearability, 55–56; on models of organization, 102, 230n6; on voluntary criminals, 122–23, 235n31; on women, 216n25 master- slave fables, 15, 200–204, 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38 “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde), 203 material feminism, 185–95, 250n15 Matthew Crawley (character), 232n17 Maudsley, Henry, 60–61, 210n2 Mayhew, Henry, 122–23 McNeill, William H., 49 McRuer, Robert, 109–10 melancholic migrants, 128–29, 215n23, 237n38 Melle, Ulrich, 33, 212n8 Menn, Stephen, 8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 249n8 Merquior, J. G., 207n11 metaphysical will, 23–24, 210n2 “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” (Schopenhauer), 78 Micrographie (Hooke), 208n16 Middlemarch (Eliot), 209n21 Mill, James, 67–68, 208n20 Mill, John Stuart, 68–69, 75 Miller, Alice, 2, 64, 66, 222nn7–8 Miller, William, 226n28 The Mill on the Floss (Eliot), 3, 14, 88–91, 224n13. See also Maggie Tulliver Minns, Michael Louis, 135 Mirza, Heidi, 243n27 Molly (character), 45–47 Moore, Gregory, 102, 230n7

INDEX

285

moral faculty of will, 2, 20, 32, 60–61, 221n1; in character building, 68–75, 91–96, 225n18; language of “should” in, 79–80; normative basis for judgment in, 81–82; “spoiled” children and, 85, 94–95; striving towards good will in, 59–62, 91–93, 228n42; willfulness as problem of, 3–4, 7 moral law: duty as obedience to, 91–93; practical reason and, 95; respect and, 93–94; willing submission to, 93 Moran, Dermot, 212n8 Mordecai (character), 95 Moten, Fred, 199–200, 216–17n26 mourning, 238n6 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 198–99, 217n33, 244n30 Mrs. Kilman (character), 198–99 Mrs. Poyser (character), 45–47 Multitude (Hardt and Negri), 235n32 Murphy, Michelle, 108–9 Muslim veil debates, 121, 150–52, 236n37, 242–43nn25–28 national will, 126–31, 230n10, 248n60; assimilation and, 128–29, 148–52, 236–37nn36–38; UK riots of 2011 and, 130–31, 237nn41–42. See also general will; political will natural will, 79, 86, 91 The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler), 236n36 The Nature of the Universe (Lucretius), 9–12, 208nn16–17 Nazi will, 142; as dystopia of strong will, 230n9; Heidegger’s critique of, 210n2; straight-armed salute and, 197; “triumph of will” and, 16, 209n23 Nearing, Nellie Marguerite Seeds, 111 Nearing, Scott, 111, 249n6 Negri, Antonio, 235n32 negritude, 141 Neither Fugitive nor Free (Wong), 252n32 neuroscience and the will, 5, 206n7 The Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 225n18 Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Moore), 102

286

INDEX

Nietzsche, Friedrich: on decadence, 235n30; on error of will, 6–7, 207–8nn12–13; free spirit liberalism of, 205n5; genealogy of will of, 25–26, 32, 95, 207n12, 211–12nn5–7; on metaphysical will, 24, 210n2; model of the body of, 26, 102–3, 212n7, 230n7; on particular will, 102–4; on power, 209n24, 230n9; on psychology of the will, 76, 225n20; on strong and weak will, 81, 103, 230n9; on unity of will, 7; on will as emotion of the command, 29; on willing backwards, 39–40, 215n23 “Notes toward a Politics of Location” (Rich), 250n15 not philosophy, 14–16 Novalis, 68–69, 75, 214n16, 224n13 Oakley, Ann, 183–84 Obama, Barack, 245n42 obedience, 29–30, 63–66; cheerfulness of, 72–73; derivation (as term) of, 137; duty and moral law in, 91–93; power relations of, 137–39; Rousseau’s argument against, 73–75; of slaves, 122, 201, 220n47, 234n27, 252n32; unwilling forms of, 140–41. See also disobedience objectification, 41–42, 216–17nn25–26 object oriented ontology (ooo), 211n4 objects of will, 11–12, 19–20, 154, 185–94; attribution of willfulness to, 42–47, 189–94, 217nn27–29; genealogical approach to, 24–26, 211n4; Husserl on acts of willing towards, 35–39, 214n16; not-will of, 11–12, 185–87; phenomenological approach to, 25–26, 211–12nn5–8; as property, 41–42, 216–17nn25–26; sphere of accomplishment of, 39–47, 79–80, 217nn27–29. See also stones Occupy movement, 163–64, 247n50 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 210n2 On Being Included (Ahmed), 241n17; on identity politics, 171, 247n57; on techniques of viewing, 242n25 On Charisma and Institution Building (Weber), 54

On Free Choice of the Will (Augustine), 11–12, 59–62, 185–86 On the Commonwealth (Cicero), 234n27 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 102 optimism of the will, 173–74, 248n1 Orientalism, 40–41, 96 Orphan Texts (Peters), 232n19 “Orthopaedics or the Art of Preventing and Correcting Deformities of the Body” (Andry), 72 Paget, Francis Edward, 205n6 paralysis of will, 77–78 Parks, Rosa, 142–43, 240nn14–16 particular will, 20; of the child’s rebellious arm, 1–2, 13, 18, 53, 98, 100–101, 111, 123; inherited willfulness and, 113–21; obligation to the whole of, 20, 97–104, 229n3; queer willfulness and, 121; as self-will, 99–100, 115, 139–40; sympathetic functions required of, 101–2, 104, 148, 229n5; UK riots of 2011 and, 130–31, 237nn41–42; of vagabonds of capitalism, 122–30, 235nn31–32; willful parts of, 97–98, 104–12, 117, 175–76, 230–31nn10–11, 234n28. See also general will parting gifts, 175–85 Pascal, Blaise, 3–4; on death duty, 104; on general will, 13, 99–100, 117, 229n2; on particular will, 99–100, 105 Pateman, Carole, 233n21 pathology of will, 61–62 Paul the Apostle, 103–4, 160, 246n45 Payot, Jules, 62, 82–83, 96, 234n24 Pearl, Michael and Debi, 222n9 Penelope, Julia, 134 Pensées (Pascal), 13, 99–100 Perry, Heather R., 110–11 persistence, 2, 9–10, 144, 203–4 Peters, Laura, 232n19 Peucker, Henning, 212n8, 214n15 Pfänder, Alexander, 212n8 Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel), 200–204, 252n30

The Phenomenology of the Social World (Schutz), 214n18 phenomenology of will, 24–26, 211–12nn5–8; in Augustine’s Confessions, 26–31; intentionality in, 33–39, 214n16. See also Husserl, Edmund Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 200, 252n31 philosophy of the not, 14–16 Physiology and Pathology of Mind (Maudesley), 60–61 Pickhardt, Carl E., 222n9 Pippi Longstocking (character), 232n19 Plato, 61, 118 poisonous pedagogy, 2, 64–68, 140, 222nn7–9, 222n12 political will/willfulness, 16, 20, 133–72; accepting the charge of willfulness in, 134, 137, 168, 173; acting for change in, 141–43, 239nn10–11; call to arms and, 194–204, 251n21; citizenship and, 126–31; of clenched fists, 194–97; conditions of bearability in, 55–56, 138–39; for disability rights, 185, 250n13; disobedience and, 134–43, 237n3; diversity work and, 143–52, 158–60, 241nn17–18; of feminist killjoys, 2–3, 152–60, 170, 245nn39–41; gay imperialism in, 166–67; general will and, 103; identity politics and, 160, 171, 175, 247n57; persistence of, 2, 9–10, 144, 203–4; as practical craft, 133; of protesting bodies, 161–68, 246–47nn48–50; self-preservation and, 160, 169, 245n43; the social body and, 230n10; sovereignty vs. tyranny in, 135–39, 238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60; techniques for dismissal of, 133–34, 168–69; unwilling obedience and, 140–41; vanguard politics of the rear in, 170–72; wayward queer arms in, 197–204; of Zionism, 96, 228n43, 248n60. See also national will Poovey, Mary, 100–101, 106, 199, 230n10 possessive individualism, 255n37 The Postcard (Derrida), 218n34

INDEX

287

Potter, Sally, 172 power relations (freedom and force), 16, 54–56; bearability in, 55–56, 138–39; in education of the will, 63–67, 91–92, 103, 130–31, 221n4, 223n10, 226n27, 227n39; in feminist accounts of gender, 54–56, 220nn46–48; in forcing of general will, 97, 103, 105, 129; in the master-slave dialectic, 15, 200–204, 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38; sociological model of, 54, 219n44; in sovereignty vs. tyranny, 135–39, 238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60; in voluntary servitude, 138–39; will to power and, 230n9. See also political will/willfulness practical reason, 95 Price, Alice, 208n20 The Principles of Psychology (James), 215n21 problem of will, 3–4, 7 projection, 36–39, 214n18 projects of will, 61–62. See also education of the will The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed), 3; on capacity for action, 235n32; on conditional happiness, 219n42; on consciousness of gender, 217n33; on feminist killjoys, 244n30; on happiness dystopias, 230n9; on melancholic migrants, 237n38; on non-attunement, 218n38 property, 41–42, 199–201 prosthetic body parts, 109–10, 177–85, 249n8 Protagoras (Plato), 61 Protestantism: paternal authority in, 63, 221nn4–5; sinfulness of the child in, 62–63 protesting bodies, 47, 56, 161–68, 246–47nn48–50 psychoanalytic theory, 80. See also Freud, Sigmund psychology of the will, 210–11nn2–3 Puar, Jasbir, 167 Puwar, Nirmal, 147

288

INDEX

queer (as term): derivation of, 10; political potency of, 158, 250n13 Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed), 210n30; on action shaping bodies, 108; on attunement, 218n37; on effort, 52; on tables, 25, 215n24; on the temporal, 25; on tending toward, 79 queer will and willfulness, 7–12, 21, 134, 208n14, 237n2; apartness of, 117–18; Augustine and, 8–9, 11–12; call to arms of, 197–204, 251n21; crips and, 184–85, 250n13; diversity work and, 149–50, 241n21; error and, 7–9; in family making, 232n19; gay imperialism and, 166–68; inheritance and reproduction in, 121; Lucretius’s swerve as, 9–12, 15, 17, 192, 208n17; not philosophy of, 15–16; protesting bodies and, 161–68; stone butch figure of, 189; as unbecoming member, 126, 193, 203; as willful ecology, 192–94, 251nn19–20 A Question of Silence (dir. Gorris), 155–57 race/racism, 170, 235n32, 247n50; the angry person of color and, 167; in anti-immigration rhetoric, 127–29, 236–37nn35–38; in diversity work, 143–52, 158–60; of gay imperialism, 166–67; history of resistance to, 199–201; involuntary stigma in, 161–62; techniques of racialization in, 159–60, 242n25, 245n40, 245n42; as willful word, 168 radical lesbian feminist tradition, 244n31, 251n21 Rancière, Jacques, 230n10 reaching, 200–204 “Re-Arming the Disabled Veteran” (Perry), 110 The Rebel (Camus), 239n10 recalling the will, 31 Reclaim the Night marches, 163 Rediker, Marcus, 163 Refiguring the Ordinary (Weiss), 215n21 Reinier, Jacqueline, 72 reluctance, 140–41

Reminiscences (Gage), 252n28 renunciation of will, 88–91, 227n34 reproductive will, 112–21, 193 Ribot, Théodule, 61–62, 68, 230n7; on strong will, 81–82; on weak will, 76–79, 176, 225n20, 225nn22–23; on will as testimony, 226n27 Rice, John, 66–67 Rich, Adrienne, 250n15 Richardson, Alan, 2, 73 Ricoeur, Paul, 33, 39 Riefenstahl, Leni, 16, 209n23 Riley, Patrick, 98, 99, 229n2 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wyatt), 239n10 risk proximities, 79–81, 226n28 Robbins, Bruce, 111–12, 232n18 Robertson, Geoffrey, 136 the rod, 197; as artificial organ, 231n15; educational role of, 1–2, 65–67, 111; family line as, 114; Locke’s “the steady hand” and, 71–74; national mourning of, 130–31; at political demonstrations, 165, 167–68; sovereign power and, 136–37, 172, 238n5, 248n60. See also arms and hands Rolland, Roman, 173 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 239n9 Romola (Eliot), 83, 114–16, 233nn20–22 Rosenblatt, Helena, 99 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68, 208n20, 219n42; on common will, 98; on education, 73–75, 97, 98, 103; on general will, 97–99, 103, 228n1; on particular will, 98 Roux, Wilhelm, 102 Rutschky, Katharina, 64, 66, 222n7, 222n9 Ryle, Gilbert, 5, 6, 206n7 Saarinen, Risto, 219n42 Said, Edward, 40–41, 96 Sandahl, Carrie, 184–85 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 203, 215n20 Schechter, Harold, 178 Scheler, Max, 236n36 Schelling, F. W. J., 23

Schopenhauer, Arthur: on identification, 238n6; on motivation of will, 36, 43, 52, 75, 121, 188–89, 214n17, 250n16; on particular will, 101–2; on reproductive will, 118–19; on same-sex love, 78, 226n26; on will as the essence of things, 188, 208n13 Schutz, Alfred, 214n18 Schwarz, Judith, 134 Schwarz, Kathryn, 227n37 The Science of Education (Herbart), 91–96, 227n39 The Search after Truth (Malebranche), 103 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 10, 16; on “queer” (as term), 158, 250n13; on voluntary and involuntary stigma, 161–62 The Seeds of Things (Goldberg), 208n17 self-help, 62, 75–84, 221n3; strengthening of will in, 78–84, 226n27; weaknesses of will and, 76–79; will as an internal resource in, 75–76, 225n19 selfishness and narcissism, 105, 231n11 self-perception, 217n32 self-willing, 52–53; anger and, 115; general and particular will in, 99–100, 115, 139–40, 239n9; Rousseau’s argument for, 73–75; will alignment in, 81–82 Serlin, David, 109 Serres, Michel, 208n17 sexism, 170 Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Dollimore), 9 sexuality, 207n11; Augustine on desire and, 9, 28–29, 119–20, 208n15, 213nn11–12, 234nn27–28; consciousness of, 150–51, 241–42nn21–25; counter-will and impotence in, 77, 226n24, 234n28; language of will in, 78, 226n25. See also queer will and willfulness “Sexuality and Solitude” (Foucault), 207n11 “Sexual Nationalism” conference, 158–60, 245n41 sexual violence. See violence against women

INDEX

289

Sharpe, Hasana, 250n16 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 197 Showalter, Elaine, 234n26 Shuttleworth, Sally, 89 Silas Marner (Eliot): broken pot of, 43–45, 47–48, 50; catalepsy of, 124–25; child of, 47–48; kinship of strangers in, 124–26, 192; laborer’s body of, 107 Sisterhood Is Powerful, 195 Slansky, Jeffrey, 225n19 slaves/slavery: in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, 15, 200–204, 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38; laboring will of, 201–3, 239n10, 252n33, 254–55nn35–38; muscular arms of, 199, 252nn28–29; willful submission of, 122, 138–39, 201, 220n47, 234n27, 252n32 Slavishak, Edward, 109 Smiles, Samuel, 75–76 Smith, Adam, 101 Smith, Andrew, 123 Smith, Jeremy John, 213n14 Smith, John, 16, 78, 209n22, 226n26 Smith, Tommie, 197, 251n24 Sobchack, Vivian, 179 the social body, 100–101, 106, 176–77, 199, 229n4; attunement and harmony of, 49–54, 95, 230n10; citizenship and national will in, 126–31, 230n10; the family as, 113–14, 125–26, 232n19; usefulness and, 232n17. See also general will The Social Contract (Rousseau), 97–99 social will, 47–56, 79, 218n35; affect and, 68, 223n11; attunement and muscular bonding in, 49–54, 95, 168, 218nn37–38, 247n55; emotional work of, 52–53; momentum of the crowd and, 56–57, 144; non-attunement and bumpiness in, 50–53, 218n38, 219n43; power relations in, 54–56, 219n44, 220nn46–48; shared projects in, 47–48; vanguard politics of the rear and, 170–72 sociology of the will, 47, 218n35 Socrates, 61, 221n2 Soderstrom, Lukas, 102

290

INDEX

Some Thoughts concerning Education (Locke), 62, 71 Sophocles, 137, 238n6 sovereign will, 135–39, 238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60 The Speculative Turn (ed. Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman), 211n4 Spillers, Hortense, 201 Spinoza, Baruch, 60, 187–88, 250n16 spontaneity, 29–31, 52–53, 95, 228n40 Stein, Edith, 38, 214n16 Stengel, Andrew M., 135 Stengers, Isabelle, 192–93, 251n19 Stephen Gordon (character), 117–18 Stern, Daniel, 218n39 stickiness, 211n5 stigma, 161–62 Stirner, Max, 139, 239n9 stomachs, 105, 231n13 Stone, Lawrence, 2 stones, 11–12, 185–94, 250n15; in lesbian queer history, 189–90; not- will of, 185–87; queer willessness of, 187; stony kinship of, 188, 192, 196, 199–200; willing motivation of, 187–94, 250nn16–17 “Stories of Stone” (Cohen), 186 straightening devices, 7–8 Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Ahmed), 128 strengthening of will, 78–84, 103, 226n27, 230n9; general will and, 228n1; methodology for, 82–84, 91; Nietzsche’s model of, 81, 103, 230n9; risk proximities and, 79–81, 226n28; will required for, 83, 88 Strength of Will (Boyd Barrett), 62, 83–84 “The Struggle between Parts of the Organism” (Roux), 102 Stryker, Susan, 199, 252n27 subject of will. See the willful subject; the willing subject Sullivan, Nikki, 199, 252n27 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 64–66, 222n8 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 63–64 sweaty concepts, 18–19, 209n27

the swerve, 9–12, 15, 17, 192–94, 208n17 The Swerve (Greenblatt), 9–10 tables, 211n3; diversity work and, 158–60; feminist killjoys at, 152–53, 155–56; Husserl’s use of, 214n24; near sphere of, 41; as a pivot, 13, 25 “Talks to Teachers” (James), 83–84 Tatchell, Peter, 165–66 temporality of will, 25; coherence and continuity in, 29–31; future intention of, 31–39, 214n16; hesitation between tense in, 34–35, 49; recall of past in, 31, 39–47, 215n23; spontaneity of good will in, 91–92, 95, 228n40; synchronicity in, 52–53, 228n40; the virtue of volition and, 87 Terry, Jennifer, 78 testimony, 226n27 Text Book of Physiology (Foster), 230n7 Theoharis, Jeanne, 142–43, 240nn14–15 The Thieving Hand (dir. Blackton), 177–78 Thoreau, Henry David, 240n13 Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (Freadman), 26–27 Timaeus (Plato), 118 Time and Free Will (Bergson), 225n21 Titchkosky, Tanya, 147, 241n19 Tomkins, Silvan S., 221n4 Tom Tulliver (character), 90 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 47, 113, 219n41, 223n11 To Train Up a Child (Pearl and Pearl), 222n9 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 211n6 Triumph of the Will (dir. Riefenstahl), 16, 209n23 Trowbridge, Katherine M., 224n17 Truth, Sojourner, 199, 252n28 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 6–7 Tyler, Imogen, 130, 231n11 Tyrannicide (Robertson), 136 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 78 the unconscious, 175, 248n3 unhappiness, 4, 100 United Kingdom: anti-immigration rhetoric in, 127–29, 236nn35–37; anti-Islamic

activism in, 165–66; English language use in, 129; prosecution of Charles I in, 135–36; riots of 2011 in, 130–31, 237nn41–42; unwilling servants in, 111–12, 232nn17–18; veil debates in, 121, 150–52, 236n37, 242–43nn25–28 universalism, 160, 171, 245–46nn44–45 uppity (as term), 245n42 utilitarian will, 84 vagabonds, 122–30, 235nn31–32 “Valuing and Value” (Husserl), 33 Valverde, Mariana, 61 vandalism, 237n3 vanguard politics of the rear, 170–72 Vibrant Matter (Bennett), 10, 208n17 Vincent, Norah, 109–10 violence against women: Reclaim the Night marches against, 163; of sex trafficking, 54–55, 220nn46–47 Virno, Paolo, 244n38 virtue, 119–20; as habit, 73, 225n18; of volition, 60, 87 voluntary criminals, 122–23 voluntary servitude, 138–39 Walker, Alice, 134 wandering willfully, 83, 96, 116–17, 233–34nn23–24; of vagabonds of capitalism, 122–30, 235nn31–32; of wandering womb, 118–19, 234n26 weakness of will, 61, 76–79, 103, 221n2; effort and strengthening for, 78–84, 91, 226n27; insufficient impulse in, 76–77, 225n20, 225n23; judgment of willfulness in, 80–81; pathologization of, 62, 221n3; as vacations from will, 80 Weber, Elisabeth, 221n5 Weber, Max, 54, 214n18 Wegner, Daniel M., 211n3 Weiss, Gail, 70, 215n21 Wekker, Gloria, 159 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 117–18, 198 Wesley, John, 66 What Is Called Thinking (Heidegger), 249n10 “What Is Critique?” (Foucault), 6

INDEX

291

Whytt, Robert, 101 will: derivation of word, 32, 213nn13–14; history of, 4–7, 205n5, 206–8nn8–13; queer potential of, 7–12, 21; vs. willfulness, 205n6 will alignment, 81–82 Willett, Cynthia, 254n36 “The Willful Child” (Grimm brothers), 1–2, 13–15, 17–18, 63–64; dehumanized version of, 190–92; English translation of, 205n1; German eigensinnig in, 157, 202, 203, 205n6; inherited willfulness in, 113; judgment of willfullness in, 81; as master-slave fable, 200–204; obedience required in, 138; parental authority in, 63, 221n5; rebellious arm of, 1–2, 13, 18, 53, 98, 100–101, 111, 120–21, 123, 178, 203–4; the rod in, 136–37. See also children; education of the will willful ecology, 192–94, 251nn19–20 Willful Liberalism (Flathman), 205n5 willfulness, 1–4; accepting the charge of, 134, 137, 168, 173; affirmation of diagnosis of, 133, 237n1; definitions of, 4, 18–21, 205n4, 205n6; as error of will, 4, 6–7, 229n3; history of, 161; as legal term, 135, 174–75; negative connotations of, 20–21; as parting gift, 175–85; as problem of will, 3–4, 7; queer potential of, 12, 237n2; transformation into pedagogy of, 170–71; words associated with, 150–51, 153–55, 242nn23–24. See also archive of willfulness the willful subject, 12, 17–18, 21; affective realm of, 18, 82–83, 152, 229n5; autonomy of, 211n5; feminist killjoys as, 2–3, 152–60, 170; as semiotic figure, 17–18, 205n5; spaces of relief for, 169–70; the swerve and, 17, 192–94; willingness to be willful of, 134. See also political will/ willfulness A Willful Young Woman (Price), 208n20 Williams, Raymond, 195–96 Williams, Robert R., 202 the willing subject, 23–57; anxiety of, 37–38, 215n19; calling upon will by,

292

INDEX

26–31, 211–12nn5–9; conditional will of, 53–54, 127–29, 219nn42–43, 236–37nn36–38; experience of will of, 24; futurity of will of, 31–39, 214n16; getting “behind” an action by, 25–26, 35–39, 168, 171–72, 185, 214n18, 215n21; giving up by, 38; internal struggles with external will of, 27–31, 213nn10–12; momentum of, 56–57, 144; nonspontaneous continuity of will of, 29–31, 52–53; objectification of, 41–42, 216–17nn25–26; power relations of, 54–56, 129, 219n44, 220nn46–48; recalling will as affirmation of, 31; social sphere of, 47–56, 79, 218n35; sphere of accomplishment (with objects) of, 39–47, 79–80, 217nn27–29; willful objects in the way of, 42–47 Will in Western Thought (Bourke), 207n8 willpower, 7 will relatedness, 113–21 will to power, 230n9 will words (and phrases), 32, 64, 173–74, 213n13, 222n6, 226n27 will work, 40–41, 88–91, 96; on getting along, 157; on institutional diversity, 146–47 “willy nilly,” 54, 220n45 Wingfield, Adia Harvey, 245n42 womanism, 134 women’s will. See gendering of will/ willfulness Wong, Edlie L., 252n31 The Woodlanders (Hardy), 107 The World as Will as Representation (Schopenhauer), 78 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 141 Wright, Richard, 196–97 Wyatt, Rupert, 239n10 Young, Iris Marion, 214n16 Zackodnik, Teresa, 252n28 Zandy, Janet, 106–7, 109 Žižek, Slavoj, 160, 246n45, 247n50 Zornado, Joseph L., 64