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sara ahmed
Willful Subjects
2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
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Notes 205
References 257
Index 277
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 in-
spired me to pick up many of the trails. I am grateful for feminist friend-
ships 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 Gen-
der 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
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 plea-
sure 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 disobedi-
ent, 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 capac-
ity of a subject to survive, let alone flourish. The punishment for willful-
ness is a passive willing of death, an allowing of death. Note that willful-
ness 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 stub-
born 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 willful-
ness; 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 vio-
lence 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 correc-
tion, 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 fol-
lowing 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 charac-
ter 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 affec-
tion 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 per-
sonal 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 charac-
ter: 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 tend-
ing toward something, we tend toward happiness, then happiness pro-
vides 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), happi-
ness 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. Unhappi-
ness 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.
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 willful-
ness 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 dif-
ferent 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 con-
nects humans to all other things, from atoms to amoebas and stones.
The will could even be described as one of philosophy’s most promiscu-
ous terms.
It is thus not surprising that there are few attempts to offer a his-
tory 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 his-
tory 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 his-
tory of the idea of freedom) would be “rather easy” because it would be
A Willfulness Archive 5
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 un-
promising places, in what we tend to feel is without history: in senti-
ments, love, conscious, instincts” (1977, 139). For Foucault the will might
have been too unpromising to have been made an explicit object of in-
quiry. 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 prob-
lem 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 Geneal-
ogy 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 Nietz-
sche [1887] 2001, 204). Perhaps we catch nothing but the sight of our-
selves 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 ac-
count 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 “phi-
losophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it were the best-
known 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 diagnos-
tics. 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 sub-
ject becomes “in its power.” And when social problems are narrated as
problems of will, they become a consequence of the failure of individu-
als 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 re-
munerated 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 be-
come the problem: individuals become the cause of problems deemed
their own.
A Willfulness Archive 7
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 fore-
ground 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). Accord-
ing 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 ar-
gument: 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 contrari-
ness 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 happi-
ness. We can again hear the echo of Augustine: to leave the path of happi-
ness 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 fol-
low. 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 Dol-
limore’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 9
be an act of disobedience. Perhaps there is nothing “mere” about persis-
tence. 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 Lucre-
tius but derives from the Latin clīnāre, to incline) in order to mount a
philosophical defense of Epicurean atomism. The will makes human be-
ings 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 physi-
cal 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 con-
tinuity 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 descrip-
tion 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 acci-
dent: those who do not follow the straight line, who to borrow Lucre-
tius’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 conver-
sion 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
A Willfulness Archive 11
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 poten-
tial 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 deter-
mine 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 other-
wise. The swerve does not appear as a moral flaw or a sign of the sinful rebel-
liousness of humans” (2001, 81). There is a clear hesitation in Bennett’s use
of the word “willfulness,” a hesitation that takes the form of simultane-
ously 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 associ-
ate 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 expres-
sion 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 reflec-
tions 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 fa-
miliar, I was still surprised by the “how” of her appearance. Research in-
volves 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 distinc-
tion. 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 in-
cludes 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 lan-
guage 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 signifi-
cant 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 will-
fulness become assignments that pertain not only to persons but also
to things. As Moira Gatens notes, George Eliot can be thought of as a phi-
losopher 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 liter-
ature. 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 de-
scribed as not philosophy. What do I mean by this? To be doing not philoso-
phy is a way of framing one’s relation to philosophy albeit in apparently
negative terms. Not philosophy is practiced by those who are not philoso-
phers 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 rearticu-
lated in terms of the not: whether understood as possibility or capacity,
as the possibility of not being compelled by an external force (I have dis-
cussed 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 rea-
soning 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 trans-
form being. This statement can be heard as aspiration: not philosophy, in
A Willfulness Archive 15
reinhabiting the body of philosophy, queers that body. Willfulness: phi-
losophy 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 con-
cept 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. Phenom-
enology 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 strength-
ening 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 oth-
ers. 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 recog-
nize, 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 re-
flecting 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 other-
wise 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 cer-
tainly, 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 think-
ing 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 touch-
ing? The figure of the willful child is saturated with affect. The word “will-
ful” is an inheritance in how it is affective, which makes willfulness effec-
tive 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 impres-
sion. 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 con-
clude 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 willful-
ness 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 impres-
sions 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 ob-
ject 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 impres-
sions 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 actual-
izing a possibility; the second reflects on how the project of eliminat-
ing willfulness from will becomes a moral imperative that is binding; the
third reflects on how some wills are generalized in a social or institu-
tional 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 experi-
ence 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 con-
version 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 nega-
tive 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 bring-
ing 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. Femi-
nist, 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 philosophi-
cal 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 pri-
mordial Being, and all predicates apply to it alone—groundlessness, eter-
nity, 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 includ-
ing 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 ques-
tion 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 be-
longs 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 ap-
prehend 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 ex-
periencing 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 brack-
eting 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 ask-
ing 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 reflect-
ing on the temporal as well as spatial aspects of “the behind.” As Hus-
serl 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 re-
veal 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 apprehend-
ing, 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 under-
stood 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 with-
out 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 exist-
ing attitude in terms of habits of the will: “Attitude, generally speak-
ing, 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, phenomenol-
ogy offers a set of critical and reflexive methods for investigating not
only consciousness, but the relationship between the voluntary and in-
voluntary aspects of experience.8 I draw on Husserl, among other phe-
nomenologists, to consider willing as a way we experience inhabiting a
world with others.
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 inheri-
tance can be drawn from Augustine to Husserl, who concludes his Carte-
sian 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 tempo-
rary: 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 free-
dom (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 27
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 as-
sociated for Augustine with desire and lust, which have become trans-
formed 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 Chapter One
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 com-
mand to itself, not to some other will. The reason, then, why the com-
mand 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)
Willing Subjects 29
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 exter-
nality, as if the will is coming from the outside. This sense of will’s exter-
nality 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 imag-
ines 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 our-
selves 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 inter-
nal 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 one-
self 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 check-
ing 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 recall-
ing). 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 Chapter One
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 expe-
rience 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 ear-
lier, 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 agree-
ment not only with what is being willed, but with the past that has been
willed, and that is being reproduced in will.
Willing Subjects 31
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 En-
glish 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 Au-
gustine and culminates most obviously in Kantian ethics, which invests
in the will as a moral faculty that must be distinguished from the patho-
logical 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 rela-
tion 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 some-
thing 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 imme-
diacy of action by becoming wishful. Indeed, it is the relation between
willing and action that seems specific to will (although recalling Augus-
tine 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 Chapter One
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 intention-
ality. 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. Hus-
serl might help us to develop a more precise argument about the inten-
tionality 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 be-
long 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 phenom-
enologists 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 (Wil-
lensmeinung), 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 33
has a concreteness (it has something “in mind”), and in its very concrete-
ness, 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 judg-
ment 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, with-
out 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 phenom-
enological 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 un-
folds is constituted as having happened according to my will, as hap-
pening 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 exci-
tations 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)
34 Chapter One
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 some-
thing 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 in-
fluencing might be a satisfying feeling even when it is separated, or per-
haps 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 im-
pressions. For Husserl willing is corporeal: a willing is a bodily turn. In-
deed 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 practi-
cal 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 35
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 inten-
tionality. 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 con-
trast this idea of willing as directed toward objects with Hannah Arendt’s
description: “In order to will, the mind must withdraw from the immedi-
acy 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 trans-
forms 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 experi-
ence 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 experi-
ences as projection. Heidegger’s account of projection would be an obvi-
ous 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 possibil-
ity 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 Chapter One
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 appear-
ance 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 get-
ting behind something. If willing is an energetic relationship to a future
possibility, not all possibilities become an object of will, not all possibili-
ties 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 en-
counter 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 expe-
rience willing is involved in how we experience power (understood here
as capacity or competence). This is not to say willing is necessarily con-
fident. 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 will-
ing 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 37
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 con-
scious 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 ex-
perience 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 con-
sciousness” 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 Chapter One
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 will-
ing 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 cessa-
tion; or perhaps the cessation of willing is an arrival (the already willed).
Willing might involve protention, which Husserl describe as the “intui-
tive 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 in-
volve 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 expe-
rience is acquired. Willing might be an experience of being “on the way”
to actualization.
Willing Subjects 39
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 ap-
proaches 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 frus-
trated, 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 accom-
plish 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 as-
suming “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 Chapter One
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 writ-
ing, not only the table, but also the paper and the inkwell, or the com-
puter 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 involve-
ment. 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 prop-
erty 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 commod-
ity 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 41
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 conse-
quence 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. Will-
ful 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 judg-
ment 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 ready-
to-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 sur-
roundings (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 Chapter One
Handiness refers not only to being skillful with hands but to what is con-
venient 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 ham-
merer’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 obstruc-
tion, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really no-
tice 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 wan-
derer, 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 pro-
duced 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 43
which he held as his most precious utensil, among the very few conve-
niences 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 appre-
ciation 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 expres-
sion 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 Chapter One
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 quali-
ties of a relation: if they resist our will; they are no longer quite so agree-
able, 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 will-
fulness is one I will return to, perhaps as a way of picking up the shat-
tered pieces of a broken jug.
Willing Subjects 45
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 willful-
ness 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 be-
comes, 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 Chapter One
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 hap-
piness 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 Subjects 47
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 sym-
pathy. 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 con-
vention 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 “con-
currence 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 cur-
rere, “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 pool-
ing.” 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 Chapter One
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 understand-
ing 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 open-
ness 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 attun-
ement 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 ac-
complish 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 at-
tuned 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 will-
ing, 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 49
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 relation-
ship. 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 separa-
tion 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 rela-
tion. And this “becoming relation” suggests “harmony,” a sense of peace,
joining, reconciliation, and oneness. It is noteworthy that the word “har-
mony” 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 con-
cur 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 Chapter One
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 at-
tunement becomes an aim, those who are not in tune or who are out of
tune become the obstacles; they become the “non” attuned whose clum-
siness 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 eth-
ics 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 some-
one 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 dif-
ficulty. It is not necessarily that willing together becomes an injunction,
though it can become so. An injunction can be implicit even in the seem-
ingly 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 51
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 con-
sciously) 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 her-
self 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 his-
tory of being in time; the time of precedence, when some are required
to make adjustments to be in time with others. I have suggested follow-
ing 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 agree-
ment.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 Chapter One
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 wel-
comes 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 resi-
dence: 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 wel-
comes the guest only on condition the guest behaves or “is” a certain
way, a restriction of hospitality that is not, Derrida suggests, very hospi-
table. 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, com-
bining “will” with guest. Welcome originally implied a guest “whose com-
ing 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 con-
ditional 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 53
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, em-
phasis 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 regis-
ter. 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 traffick-
ing 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 Chapter One
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 hear-
ing 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 ad-
ditional 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 conse-
quences of not willing what someone wills you to will. A condition of bear-
ability 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 uncom-
fortable 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. Dis-
comfort 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 volun-
tary redundancy) which basically amounts to a choice between leaving
Willing Subjects 55
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.
56 Chapter One
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 experi-
ence 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 will-
ing 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.
Willing Subjects 57
Chapter Two
B
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 happi-
ness. And faced with the dramatic imminence of his death, she wonders,
retrospectively, whether willing his death made her sluggish in pursu-
ing 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, per-
haps 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 Gwendo-
lyn’s moral question seems gentle: “That momentary murderous will can-
not, 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 some-
thing called the will exists. We might describe this certainty as moral cer-
tainty: 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. Augus-
tine 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 for-
malism 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 intro-
duction 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 ques-
tion 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 exam-
ple, the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley in his Physiology and Pathol-
ogy 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 Chapter Two
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 “sub-
ject 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 “sen-
tient 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 some-
thing that needs to be worked upon. Scholars have already identified how
during the Victorian period “weakness of the will” became an explana-
tion of human pathologies of various kinds (see Valverde 1998; R. Smith
1992; J. Smith 1989).2 For example, Mariana Valverde’s history of alcohol-
ism 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 unhealth-
ier, 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
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 Richard-
son 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 Chapter Two
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 author-
ity 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; willful-
ness 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
64 Chapter Two
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 be-
ginning 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 cre-
ate 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 accor-
dance 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 for-
get 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 de-
velop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and
deed that they must submit to the will of their parents. Obedience re-
quires 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)
66 Chapter Two
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 in-
evitable, but it is part of a history we cannot afford to forget. It is a his-
tory 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 philoso-
phy 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 elim-
inate 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 “lawless-
ness” given subject form.
Philosophers have written at length about the mortal and moral dan-
ger 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 tyran-
nical 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 tyr-
anny. 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
68 Chapter Two
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 di-
rected 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 en-
vironmental 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.
70 Chapter Two
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 re-
pining. 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 dis-
obedience” (63). Disobedience is narrated as the “wrong bent” of will. In-
deed, 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 bend-
able 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
72 Chapter Two
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 compli-
ant, 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 counterin-
tuitive 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. Rous-
seau 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 vocab-
ulary of the educator ([1762] 1993, 62). If for Locke the child’s will must
become compliant through awe, for Rousseau the child must be encour-
aged 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 encour-
aging 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
74 Chapter Two
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 break-
ing 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 with-
out 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 agree-
ment. 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.
76 Chapter Two
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 will-
ing 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 assump-
tion? As a pre- as well as non-Freudian psychology of will,23 Ribot’s ac-
count 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 “counter-
will.” 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
78 Chapter Two
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, empha-
sis added). A strong will is thus not required when “natural tendencies”
and the “I will” go “in the same direction,” or when what is “immedi-
ately 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 chap-
ter. 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 inclina-
tions 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
80 Chapter Two
yet. And what is being aimed for is then imagined as health and happi-
ness, 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” compro-
mise 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 pur-
pose. 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 im-
pulses, 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 predomi-
nant impulse” ([1901] 1968, 28–29). James Rowland Angell in turn argues
82 Chapter Two
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 wander-
ers. 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 wan-
derer 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 self-
trained. 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 “gymnas-
tics 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”
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 train-
ing 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 Chapter Two
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, charac-
ter 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 an-
other feature of an unremarkable social and moral landscape. The attri-
bution 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 charac-
ters 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 ex-
cess 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 dia-
gram 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 ac-
cordance 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 presen-
tation 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.
86 Chapter Two
In Daniel Deronda the fragility of the female will is given a case his-
tory.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 mo-
ment 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 agree-
ing 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 hesi-
tation, 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 fe-
male resistance expressed here in the negativity of an inactive but mur-
derous 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: Gwendo-
lyn does not follow any such line of flight. The novel does not waver in
88 Chapter Two
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 re-
cede 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: “Mag-
gie 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
90 Chapter Two
and Maggie are portrayed as too willing not to be willful, as willfully will-
ing: 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
92 Chapter Two
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 justi-
fied) 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 possibil-
ity 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 en-
countered 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 show-
ing 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 emo-
tions that are pathological. Respect is moral as respect for the moral law.
Kant specifies:
94 Chapter Two
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 aristo-
crats 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 so-
cial 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 self-
agreement 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 pre-
cedence is concealed and exercised under the guise of a moral law. The
spontaneity of the good will is not a secure foundation for ethical judg-
ment; 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 ma-
ture 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 lov-
ing 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
96 Chapter Two
Chapter Three
W
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 notori-
ous. 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 re-
vealed. 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 “who-
ever” 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 social-
ity 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 pri-
vate 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 ob-
jects as they are” which means they must be “guarded from the seduc-
tion 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 gen-
eral 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 Chapter Three
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 “sub-
ordinated”; 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 secu-
lar 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 inevita-
bly 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 ac-
quire 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 fur-
ther 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 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 creation of the voluntary criminal, the willing and thus willful wan-
derer, 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 trans-
forming 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
WILLFULNESS
AS A STYLE OF POLITICS
I
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 will-
fulness 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 pre-
scribing a set of behaviors, such as those that have been historically diag-
nosed 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 “dis-
missal” derives from dis (apart, away) and mittere (to send, let go). To dis-
miss 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 diagno-
sis 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 follow-
ing 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. . . . Respon-
sible. 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 femi-
nism 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: willful-
ness as audacity, willfulness as standing against, willfulness as creativity.2
As we know from assembling a willfulness archive, willfulness is usu-
ally 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 fol-
lowing 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 ac-
knowledge that willfulness is a fragile thread that can be stretched only
if it is not broken.
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)
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 momen-
tum 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 de-
cision 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
A CALL TO ARMS
I
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 previ-
ous 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 with-
out 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 optimis-
tic? One of the key “will phrases” exercised in cultural studies, usually
attributed to Antonio Gramsci, who himself was drawing on a formu-
lation 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 mislead-
ing translation: as implying optimism in will. Any such optimism might
be a “cruel optimism” as formulated by Lauren Berlant (2011), an attach-
ment 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 “opti-
mism 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
Parting Gifts
As I pointed out in the previous chapter, willfulness has a specific his-
tory 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 pur-
pose” and in full knowledge of the law. I think we can understand imme-
diately 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 Conclusion
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 voli-
tion: that the unconscious structures our sense of identity through a se-
ries of vital (even when they are lethal they are vital) identifications that
affect one’s situation in reality. Feminists must know better than to con-
fuse, to merrily mix up willful choice—political volition—with uncon-
scious 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 politi-
cal 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 politi-
cal 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 willful-
ness 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 mat-
ters. 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 indi-
vidual 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
176 Conclusion
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 throw-
ing 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 ac-
tion 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 an-
other 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 re-
sistance 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 res-
toration 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 un-
willing 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 cen-
tral 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
178 Conclusion
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, some-
thing 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 diffi-
culty of her relationship to her new prosthetic hand. She joins her family
on holiday, and the prosthetic hand becomes an object of shared atten-
tion, 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 be-
fore 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 so-
cial problem that pushes it obtrusively into the foreground of one’s con-
sciousness” (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: “Involun-
tarily 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
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 be-
come harmful desires. What do we learn from the very sinister mode of
the Hand’s appearance? In one instance, Clare likens what her relation-
ship 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 stron-
ger 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 Conclusion
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 deli-
cate 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 con-
trary, 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 ac-
cident, 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
182 Conclusion
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 permis-
sion 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 ca-
pacities 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
184 Conclusion
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 cov-
ering 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 commit-
ments 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
186 Conclusion
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 as-
sumed 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 Spi-
noza, 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, Spi-
noza gives us a story of a thinking stone. “Now this stone since it is con-
scious 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 con-
sciousness 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
188 Conclusion
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 ham-
mer 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 en-
tanglement of stone and skin matters: skin too, skin like stone, is capable
of receiving impressions. Damage can be understood as a form of recep-
tion. 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 clos-
est” (1984, 160). It would be hard to overestimate the power of Lorde’s
description. Social forms of oppression, racism, the hatred that creates
190 Conclusion
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 will-
ing. 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 dwell-
ers 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 unwill-
ing 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 willful-
ness 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
192 Conclusion
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 Intru-
sion: 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 medi-
ating part: the part to which all other parts must relate. A willful ecology
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 partici-
pate, 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 strug-
gle. The raised arm and the clenched fist are protest signs. Lincoln Cush-
ing (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 Conclusion
genres including in the French and Soviet Revolutions, by the Black Pan-
ther 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 previ-
ous 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 Sis-
terhood 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 help-
ing 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
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 imagina-
tion, 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 Conclusion
of black and white workers, the violence of profit extracted from labor. If
these hands are raised together, they are reaching for rather than assum-
ing 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 mo-
ments 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 Olym-
pics 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 ac-
tion 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 be-
hind 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 compul-
sory: 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 sub-
jects of the call: the call to arms as the call of arms. A call can mean a la-
ment, 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
198 Conclusion
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 may-
hem, a state of disorder or riotous confusion. As Susan Stryker and Nikki
Sullivan have pointed out, the word “mayhem” derives from English com-
mon 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 his-
tory 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
200 Conclusion
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 prop-
erty; 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 origi-
nal). 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 ex-
ploited 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 be-
came 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 becom-
ing: a “severing of the body from its motive will” (67). A severing is a sen-
tencing, 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, en-
tirely 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 sub-
mitting 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
202 Conclusion
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 free-
dom.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 Hege-
lian 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 dis-
solved 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 won-
der willful arms offer their own form of wisdom. No wonder arms have
a kinship with stones: building the walls, bringing them down. Bring-
ing 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 stand-
ing. 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
204 Conclusion
Notes
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 An-
tigone 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
Following willful subjects has allowed me to develop the thesis: that the uneven distri-
bution 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 phenomenol-
ogy 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
Hegel is clearly exposing what happens when a faction sets itself up as the uni-
versal and claims to represent the general will, where the general will supersedes
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 uni-
versality, which is only empty insofar as it extends from some particulars and not oth-
ers 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 spe-
cialty 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 or-
ganizations (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, al-
though 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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Index
278 INDEX
rioting children, 130–31, 237nn41–42; The Cancer Journals (Lorde), 184
as servants and handmaids, 111–12, Capital (Marx), 122
231n15; spatial adjustments for, 147–48, capitalism, 105–12; bodily labor of,
241n19; stigmatization of, 161–62; 106–10, 122, 231n15, 234n24, 235n32;
stomachs and belt tightening of, 105, division of labor in, 230n10; fat cats’
231n13; unbecoming traces of, 126, 193, belt-tightening in, 105, 231n13; loss
203; as vagabonds of capitalism, 122–30, and disability in, 109–11; willful
235nn31–32; willful parting gifts of, migrants of, 122–30, 235nn31–32
176–85, 248n4; as willful wanderers, Caputo, John D., 246n45
116–17, 233–34nn23–24. See also arms “Caring for War Cripples” (Biesalski),
and hands; the social body 110–11
Body and Will (Maudsley), 60–61, 210n2 Carlos, John, 197, 251n24
Body Parts (dir. Red), 178 Carnal Thoughts (Sobchack), 179
Boétie, Étienne de La, 138–39 Carrie (dir. de Palma), 178
Bonaparte, Felicia, 85 Carter, Angela, 237n2
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Cartisian Mediataions (Husserl), 27
(Anzaldúa), 21 The Case of Wagner (Nietzsche), 235n30
Boss, Medard, 49 Castañeda, Claudia, 69
Bourdieu, Pierre, 93–94 Césaire, Aimé, 141
Bourget, Paul, 121, 235n30 Chanter, Tina, 239n7
Bourke, Vernon J., 207n8 character building, 68–75, 91–96; plastic-
Boyd Barrett, Edward John, 62, 83–84 ity of children and, 69–73; Rousseau on
Braidotti, Rosi, 174–75 self-will and, 73–75; self-help in, 75–84,
breaking the will, 63–68, 221n4 225n19, 226n27; the steady hand in,
Brimstone, Lyndie, 3 71–73, 92–93, 224n15, 224n17
broken pots, 43–48, 50, 154 the charge of willfulness, 134, 137, 168,
Brouwer, Dan, 161 173
Brownmiller, Susan, 55 Charles I, King of England, 135–36
Buber, Martin, 142 children: character building in, 69–73;
Butler, Judith: on Antigone, 238n6; on as feral rioters, 130–31, 237nn41–42;
Arendt’s discussion of duty, 92, 228n41; inherited willfulness of, 113–21, 130;
on formal universalism, 245n44; on as subject-to-come, 123–24; as willful
Nietzsche, 31; on the phallus, 235n29; orphans, 232n19. See also education of
on protesting bodies, 162–63; on Rosa the will
Parks, 240n16 Christian thought, 212n9
Cicero, 234n27
call to arms, 194–204, 251n21; the citizenship, 126–29; as community of
clenched fist of, 194–97, 251n24; laboring strangers, 126–27; conditional will
will of, 201–4, 252n33, 254–55nn35–38; and assimilation in, 127–29, 148–52,
mayhem and, 199, 252n27; wayward 236–37nn36–38; diversity and, 148–49
queer arms of, 197–200 City of God (Augustine), 119–20, 207n11,
Calvin, John, 63, 212n9 212n9, 213n11
Calvinism. See Protestantism civil disobedience, 141–43, 240n13,
Cameron, David, 129 244n38
Campbell, Sue, 244n32 Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Tho-
Camus, Albert, 239n10 reau), 240n13
INDEX 279
civil rights movement, 142–43, depersonalized willfulness. See objects
240nn14–16 of will
Clare (character), 178–84, 249n10 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 218n34; on condi-
class, 232n18, 235n32 tional hospitality, 53; on humans and
clenched fists, 194–97, 251n24 animals, 249n10; on metaphysics of
the clinamen, 10 presence, 210n2
clumsiness, 45, 50–51 Descartes, René, 8, 210n1
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 186 desire lines, 21, 210n30
collective will, 56. See also social will determinist models, 5, 60–61, 206n7,
command. See obedience 221n1
concurrence of wills, 48, 218n36 Dewey, John, 225n19
conditional will, 53–54, 127–29, Dihle, Albrecht, 212n9
219nn42–43, 236–37nn36–38 disability, 109–11, 175–85, 241n19; politi-
Confessions (Augustine), 26–30, 207n11, cal activism on, 185, 250n13; prosthetic
212n9 body parts for, 109–10, 177–85, 249n8;
Connolly, William, 228n42 spatial accommodations for, 147–48,
continuity of will, 29–31 241n19
“Conversation on the Country Path about Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 72
Thinking” (Heidegger), 210n2 Diseases of the Will (Ribot), 61–62, 68,
Cooke, John, 135–36 230n7; on affective state of willing, 76;
corporeal will, 60, 221n1. See also bodies on strong will, 81–82; on two classes of
and body parts will pathology, 226n25; on weaknesses
Cottinger, Henry Marcus, 208n20 of will, 76–79, 176, 225nn20, 225nn22–
Crimp, Douglas, 238n6 23; on will as testimony, 226n27
Critique of Judgment (Kant), 228n41 dismissal, 133–34, 168–69
The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed), disobedience, 134–43, 237n3; accepting
129, 241n20 the charge of willfulness in, 134, 137,
Cushing, Lincoln, 194–95 168, 173; in acting for change, 141–43,
Cusk, Rachel, 153 239nn10–11; as reluctance, 140–41;
sovereignty vs. tyranny in, 135–39,
Daly, Mary, 153, 244n31 238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60;
Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 84–91, 209n21; wayward queer arms and, 197–204. See
Daniel as ethical subject of, 95–96; also political will/willfulness
Gwendolyn’s guilt in, 59–60, 85–88, diversity work, 143–52, 158–60, 241n21;
140–41, 176–77, 180–81, 209n21; insistent labor of, 149–50, 241n20;
Gwendolyn’s renunciation of desire in, institutional will and habit in, 145–48,
88–91; Zionism in, 96, 228n43, 248n60 241nn17–18; integration and, 148–52;
Darwin, Charles, 102, 230n6 spatial adjustments and, 147–48,
Davidson, Donald, 61 241n19; two meanings of, 144; walls
Davis, Angela, 254n36 encountered in, 144–46
Davis, Bret W., 210n2 Dollimore, Jonathan, 9, 116–17
Davis, Michael, 14 Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy
Dekel, Mikhal, 228n43 (Franklin), 208n16
Deleuze, Gilles, 120, 188, 208n13, 208n17 Dorothea Brooke (character), 209n21
demonstrating bodies, 47, 56, 161–68 Douglas, Mary, 198
Dentith, Simon, 73 Douglass, Frederick, 252n32, 254n36
280 INDEX
Downton Abbey, 232n17 Émile (Rousseau), 73–75, 86, 97–98, 103,
Dr. Strangelove (dir. Kubrick), 177 219n42
Duggan, Mark, 237n41 Empedocles, 193
Dumont, M. Léon, 70, 147 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 235n32
Durkheim, Émile, 247n55 The Enchantment of Modern Life (Ben-
duty, 91–93 nett), 208n17
A Dying Colonialism (Gilly), 196 Engels, Friedrich, 55–56
English Defence League (edl), 165–66
ecological considerations, 192–94, Epicurean atomism, 10
251nn19–20 Erasmus, 212n9
Edelman, Lee, 125 error of will, 4, 6–9, 98, 229n3; Nietz-
The Educating Mother (Cottinger), 208n20 sche’s critique of, 6–7, 25–26; spatial
education of the will, 14, 20, 208n20; and temporal aspects of, 8–9
affective alignment with good will An Essay on the Education and Instruction
in, 59–62, 68, 91–93, 223n11, 228n42; of Children (Sulzer), 64–66
as character-building project, 68–75, ethics, 32, 91, 95–96
91–96; German literature on, 205n6; everyday will, 19–20. See also the willing
methodology for, 82–84; obedience subject
and violence in, 62–67, 91–92, 103, The Everything Parent’s Guide to the
130–31, 221n4, 223n10, 226n27, 227n39; Strong-Willed Child (Pickhardt), 222n9
plasticity of children and, 69–73; evil and ill will, 11–12, 95, 228n42
poisonous pedagogy in, 2, 64–68, 140, Experience and Judgment (Husserl), 31
222nn7–9, 222n12; Rousseau’s utopian experience of will, 24
model of, 73–75; self-help in, 75–84,
225n19, 226n27; sinfulness of the child family and kinship, 113–21, 192, 232n19;
and, 62–63; the steady hand in, 71–73, belonging in, 125–26; marriage
92–93, 224n15, 224n17 and female subjection in, 115–16,
The Education of the Will (Payot), 62, 82–83, 233nn20–22; mourning in, 238n6;
234n24 queer willfulness and, 117–18, 121,
Edwards, Jason, 245n39 232n19
Edwards, Jonathan, 72, 246n48 Fanon, Frantz, 214n16, 239n11; on
Eichmann, Adolf, 92, 228n41 colonial labor, 112, 203, 255nn37–38; on
eigensinnig, 157, 202, 203, 205n6, 244n36, political will, 141, 196
244n38 Farber, Leslie, 84, 225n23
Eliot, George, 3, 14–15, 85–91, 209n21; fatigue, 38, 215n20
on feminine renunciation, 88–91, fatness, 226n29
227n34; on free will and determinism, Feagin, Joe, 245n42
60, 221n1; gendering of willfulness by, Felix Holt (Eliot), 117
87–88, 90–91, 227n37; on manual labor, Felman, Shoshana, 248n3
106; on reproductive duty, 114–16; Female Masculinity (Halberstam), 198–99
on solitude and belonging, 124–26; feminism, 249n9; attributions of willful-
sorrowing wanderers of, 117; on willful ness in, 90–91, 121, 134, 155; clenched
broken objects, 43–47. See also Daniel fist of protest in, 195; new material-
Deronda ism of, 185–95, 250n15; radical lesbian
Ellis, Havelock, 121, 198 tradition of, 244n31, 251n21; will and
El-Tayeb, Fatima, 159 willfulness in, 175, 227n37
INDEX 281
the feminist killjoy, 2–3, 152–60, 170; full will, 29–31
acts of self-preservation of, 160, 169; futurity of willing, 31–39
collected examples of, 152–53; political
acts of, 157–60, 245nn39–41; the snap of, Gage, Frances Dana, 252n28
155–57; willful words used for, 153–55, Gagnier, Regenia, 207n9, 218n35
157, 160, 244n33, 244n36, 244n38 Gaia, 192–94
feminist snap, 155–57 Gandhi, Mahatma, 142
feminist theory, 21; on bodies and tech- Garrity, Jane, 198–99
nology, 217n29; on identity politics, Gatens, Moira, 14
160, 171, 175, 247n57; on making gay imperialism, 166–68
objects matter, 211n5; on power rela- gender: feminist accounts of, 16, 54–56,
tions and gender, 16, 54–56, 220n48, 220n48, 233n21; in labor of transgen-
233n21; reclaiming of the haggard in, dered individuals, 149; muscular arms
153, 244n31; willfulness of, 134 and, 198–99
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 104, 115–16, gendering of will/willfulness, 20, 205n1,
230n8 209n22, 231n12; in Eliot’s characters,
fists, 194–97, 251n24 87–91, 227n37; female renunciation
Flathman, Richard E., 205n5 and, 88–91, 227n34; in hysteria, 118–19,
“Footmen” (Hazlitt), 112 234n26; language of will in, 217n33;
force. See power relations marriage and female subjection in,
formal universalism, 160, 171, 114–17, 233nn20–22; of reluctance to
245–46nn44–45 yield, 153; of veiled Muslim women,
For Your Own Good (A. Miller), 2, 66 121, 150–52, 236n37, 242–43nn25–28
Foster, Michael, 230n7 genealogical approach to objects, 25–26,
Foucault, Michel: on genealogy of the 211n4
subject, 6, 207n11; on orthopedics, 72; The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 6
on power relations, 137–38, 219n44, general will, 20, 47, 97–131; attribution of
239n8; on self-discipline, 215n22 agency to, 228n1; the body as model of,
Franklin, Sarah, 102, 208n16 101–4; capitalist message of, 105–12;
Freadman, Richard, 26–30 citizenship and nation in, 126–31,
“Freedom of the Will” (Mill), 68–69 236–37nn35–38; forcing of freedom
free will/freedom: accountability implied by, 97, 103, 105, 129; happiness and,
in, 6–7; as cause of sin, 27–31; debates 100, 103; mediating parts of, 98–99;
on determinism vs., 5, 60–61, 206n7, obligation of the part to the whole in,
221n1; forcing by general will of, 97, 20, 97–104; political form of, 103; re-
103, 105; happiness and, 118; power production and inheritance in, 112–21,
relations of, 16, 54–56; Rousseau’s 143, 193; transformation from religious
model of, 73–75 to secular realm of, 99–104, 229n2;
“Frenzy, Mechanism and Mysticism” willful parts of, 97–98, 104–12, 117,
(Bergson), 107–8 175–76, 230–31nn10–11, 234n28
Freud, Sigmund: on counter-will and The General Will before Rousseau (Riley),
impotence, 77, 226n24, 234n28; on 229n2
hysteria, 234n26; language of will of, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Psy-
225–26nn23–24; Little Hans story of, chology (Eliot), 14
120 German Fascism, 66
Frye, Marilyn, 56–57, 134 Gilbert, Margaret, 47–48
282 INDEX
Gilly, Adolfo, 196 hands. See arms and hands
Gilroy, Paul, 253n34 hap joy, 249n7
Ginger and Rosa (dir. Potter), 172 happiness, 3–4; vs. apartness, 117–18; as
giving up, 38 duty, 114, 233n20; general will and, 100,
Gohir, Shaista, 243n28 103; racism and, 167–68; will and, 8–9
Goldberg, Jonathan, 208n17 happiness dystopias, 230n9
good will, 57, 60–62, 84–96, 248n60; Haraway, Donna, 17, 44, 211n5
attribution of, 93–94; duty and obedi- Hardt, Michael, 235n32
ence in, 91–93; vs. ill will, 94–95; social Hardy, Thomas, 107
harmony and, 95–96; spontaneity of, Haritaworn, Jin, 159, 166–67, 244n36
91–92, 95. See also education of the will Harman, Graham, 211n4
Gordon, Lewis, 253n34 Harrison, Ross, 135–36
Gordon, Peter E., 5 Harrison, Simon, 23, 212n9
Gorris, Marleen, 155 Hart, James, 212n8
Gramsci, Antonio, 173–74, 248n2 Hartman, Saidiya V., 201, 252n32
Grandcourt (character), 86–87, 176–77 Harvey, Davidk, 248n1
Greenblatt, Stephen, 9–10, 208n17 Hayles, N. Katherine, 255n37
Gregory, 63–64 Hazlitt, William, 112
Griffith, Helen Sherman, 208n20 Hegel, G. W. F., 23; on bodily unity,
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 1–2, 13–15, 101; Butler’s critique of, 245n44; on
17–18. See also “The Willful Child” contract will, 233n21; on habit, 146;
Grosfoguel, Ramón, 171 master-slave dialectic of, 15, 200–204,
Guattari, Félix, 120 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38;
Gwendolyn Harleth (character): guilt of, on property, 41, 200; on wayward
59–60, 85–88, 140–41, 176–77, 180–81, inheritance, 113
209n21; renunciation of desire by, Heidegger, Martin, 49; on the hand,
88–91; weak-willed nature of, 85–86 249n10; on metaphysical will, 24,
Gynecology (Daly), 153 210n2; on projection, 36–38, 214n18;
on the willful hammer, 42–43, 217n28,
habit, 147, 224n14; vs. assimilation, 151; 217n31, 247n54; on willing backwards,
character-building and, 70–71; Husserl 39–40, 215n23
on, 26; institutional will as, 146–48, Hekma, Gert, 159
241nn17–18; virtue as, 73, 225n18; Henry, Paget, 253n34
willfulness as, 169–70 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 91–92, 227n39
habituation, 148 Her Willful Way: A Story for Girls
Hage, Ghassan, 128–29 (Griffith), 208n20
the haggard, 153, 244n31 Heterodoxy Club, 133–34
Halberstam, J. Jack, 163, 198–99, 208n14 heterosexuality, 150, 241n21
Hall, G. Stanley, 225n19 Hill, Thomas E., 91
Hall, Radclyffe, 117–18, 198 The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke),
Hall, Stuart, 248n1 205n6
Hallward, Peter, 16, 228n1, 239n11 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 207n11
Hamacher, Werner, 207n12 Hobbes, Thomas, 135–36, 238n4
“The Hand from the Grave” (Ashliman), Hochschild, Arlie, 52, 108
209n26 Home Truths (Maitland), 178–85, 249n7,
The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), 231n16 249n10
INDEX 283
homonationalism, 167 inclination, 91
homosexuality: radical lesbian feminist individualism, 150–51, 242n24, 242n26
tradition of, 244n31, 251n21; Schopen- Ingold, Tim, 250n17
hauer’s explanation of, 78, 226n26. See inherited will, 113–21, 143
also queer will and willfulness institutional will, 146–48, 241nn17–18
Honig, Bonnie, 238n6 The Interpersonal World of the Infant
Hooke, Robert, 208n16 (Stern), 218n39
hooks, bell, 201 Investigations into the Enigma of Male-to-
hopefulness, 173–74, 248n1 Male Love (Ulrichs), 78
Hopkins, Samuel, 72–73 Inwood, Brad, 5
Horton, James Oliver, 252n32 “I prefer not to,” 164, 246–47nn48–49
Horton, Lois E., 252n32
Howe, Samuel Gridley, 106 Jacobs, Harriet, 201, 252n33
“How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” James, William, 38–39, 215n21; on the
(Davidson), 61 feeling of effort, 79, 84; on habit,
Hume, David, 101, 211n6 70–71, 147–48, 224n14; on impotence,
hunger strikes, 161 234n28; new psychology of, 225n19; on
Husserl, Edmund, 25–26, 212n8; on acts will exercises, 83–84
of willing towards an object, 35–39, Jane Eyre (Brontë), 176–77
214n16; on affirmative recalling of will, Johnston-Arthur, Araba Evelyn, 244n36
31; on Augustine’s self-investigation, 27; judgment of willfulness, 15, 19, 20; as
on consciousness, 150, 241n21; on habits killjoy of the future, 47; normative
of the will, 26, 241n18; on intentionality basis for, 81–82
of will, 33–34, 214nn15–16; on the near
sphere, 41, 83; on protention, 39 Kafer, Alison, 250n13
the hydra myth, 163, 246n47 Kant, Immanuel, 208n20; on aesthetic
hysteria, 118–19, 234n26 judgment, 228n41; categorical impera-
tive of, 92, 228n43; ethics of, 32, 91; on
“I cannot,” 214n16 moral education, 91–95, 228nn41–42;
“The Idea of Freedom” (Arendt), 213n12 on moral will, 221n1; on respect, 93–94;
Ideas (Husserl), 25, 212n8; on acts of on spoiled children, 67, 94–95, 223n10;
willing, 34–35, 215n21; on the natural Sulzer and, 222n8; on virtue of voli-
attitude of resolution, 33–34, 214n15; tion, 60, 87; on working classes, 232n18
on the table, 214n24 Karfíková, Lenka, 212n9
identity politics, 160, 171, 175, 247n57 Kaufman, Walter, 235n30
“I have seen black hands” (Wright), Kempis, Thomas à, 88–89, 227n33
196–97 Kierkegaard, Søren, 30
The Illusion of Conscious Will (Wegner), killjoys, 2–3, 47, 170. See also the feminist
211n3 killjoy
imagined community, 127 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 142
An Imitation of Christ (Kempis), 88–89, King, Stephen, 178
227n33 Kojève, Alexandre, 253n34
immigration, 127–29. See also anti- Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 78
immigration rhetoric
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), “The Ladder of Being” (Aquinas), 221n1
201 Landsberg, Alison, 178
284 INDEX
Latour, Bruno, 217n27, 219n44 Mahmood, Saba, 243n27
laziness, 82–83 Mairs, Nancy, 250n13
Le Bon, Gustave, 56 Maitland, Sara, 178
Lefebvre, Henri, 219n40 Making a Social Body (Poovey), 100–101,
legal willfulness, 135, 174–75 106, 230n10
the legislator, 98–99 Malebranche, Nicolas, 103, 229n2
Leiter, Brian, 211n6 The Man without Content (Agamben),
“The Lesbian Phallus” (Butler), 235n29 214n16
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (King), Marcuse, Herbert, 63, 212n9
142 Marx, Karl: on commodities, 41,
Leviathan (Hobbes), 135–36 216–17nn25–26; on conditions of
Levinas, Emmanuel, 95 bearability, 55–56; on models of or-
Lewes, George Henry, 61 ganization, 102, 230n6; on voluntary
liberal governance, 224n14 criminals, 122–23, 235n31; on women,
life duty, 104 216n25
The Life of the Mind (Arendt), 5–6, 205n5, master- slave fables, 15, 200–204,
228n41 252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38
Linebaugh, Peter, 163 “The master’s tools will never dismantle
Literature, Education and Romanticism the master’s house” (Lorde), 203
(Richardson), 2 material feminism, 185–95, 250n15
Littlejohn, Richard, 237n42 Matthew Crawley (character), 232n17
Locke, John: on education, 62, 71, Maudsley, Henry, 60–61, 210n2
208n20; on the impressionable child, Mayhew, Henry, 122–23
69, 71–73, 92–93, 224n15; on will and McNeill, William H., 49
error, 8–9 McRuer, Robert, 109–10
Logical Investigations (Husserl), 212n8 melancholic migrants, 128–29, 215n23,
Loizidou, Elena, 245n44 237n38
London Labour and the London Poor Melle, Ulrich, 33, 212n8
(Mayhew), 122–23 Menn, Stephen, 8
Lorde, Audre: on the angry person of Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 249n8
color, 167; on cancer and prostheses, Merquior, J. G., 207n11
184, 199, 245n43, 250n12; on caring for metaphysical will, 23–24, 210n2
ones’ self, 160; on damage, 189–90; “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love”
on laboring arms, 203; radical lesbian (Schopenhauer), 78
feminist tradition of, 244n31; on Micrographie (Hooke), 208n16
sweaty concepts, 18–19, 209n27 Middlemarch (Eliot), 209n21
Lovell, Terry, 240n16 Mill, James, 67–68, 208n20
Lucretius, 9–12, 15, 114, 155, 188, Mill, John Stuart, 68–69, 75
208n17 Miller, Alice, 2, 64, 66, 222nn7–8
Lüdtke, Alf, 157, 205n6 Miller, William, 226n28
Luther, Martin, 63 The Mill on the Floss (Eliot), 3, 14, 88–91,
224n13. See also Maggie Tulliver
Macpherson, C. B., 255n37 Minns, Michael Louis, 135
Maggie Tulliver (character), 3, 209n21; Mirza, Heidi, 243n27
cleverness of, 227n35; renunciation of Molly (character), 45–47
happiness of, 88–91, 227n34 Moore, Gregory, 102, 230n7
INDEX 285
moral faculty of will, 2, 20, 32, 60–61, Nietzsche, Friedrich: on decadence,
221n1; in character building, 68–75, 235n30; on error of will, 6–7,
91–96, 225n18; language of “should” in, 207–8nn12–13; free spirit liberalism of,
79–80; normative basis for judgment 205n5; genealogy of will of, 25–26, 32,
in, 81–82; “spoiled” children and, 85, 95, 207n12, 211–12nn5–7; on metaphys-
94–95; striving towards good will in, ical will, 24, 210n2; model of the body
59–62, 91–93, 228n42; willfulness as of, 26, 102–3, 212n7, 230n7; on partic-
problem of, 3–4, 7 ular will, 102–4; on power, 209n24,
moral law: duty as obedience to, 91–93; 230n9; on psychology of the will, 76,
practical reason and, 95; respect and, 225n20; on strong and weak will, 81,
93–94; willing submission to, 93 103, 230n9; on unity of will, 7; on will
Moran, Dermot, 212n8 as emotion of the command, 29; on
Mordecai (character), 95 willing backwards, 39–40, 215n23
Moten, Fred, 199–200, 216–17n26 “Notes toward a Politics of Location”
mourning, 238n6 (Rich), 250n15
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 198–99, 217n33, not philosophy, 14–16
244n30 Novalis, 68–69, 75, 214n16, 224n13
Mrs. Kilman (character), 198–99
Mrs. Poyser (character), 45–47 Oakley, Ann, 183–84
Multitude (Hardt and Negri), 235n32 Obama, Barack, 245n42
Murphy, Michelle, 108–9 obedience, 29–30, 63–66; cheerfulness
Muslim veil debates, 121, 150–52, 236n37, of, 72–73; derivation (as term) of, 137;
242–43nn25–28 duty and moral law in, 91–93; power
relations of, 137–39; Rousseau’s argu-
national will, 126–31, 230n10, 248n60; ment against, 73–75; of slaves, 122,
assimilation and, 128–29, 148–52, 201, 220n47, 234n27, 252n32; unwilling
236–37nn36–38; UK riots of 2011 and, forms of, 140–41. See also disobedience
130–31, 237nn41–42. See also general objectification, 41–42, 216–17nn25–26
will; political will object oriented ontology (ooo), 211n4
natural will, 79, 86, 91 objects of will, 11–12, 19–20, 154, 185–94;
The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler), 236n36 attribution of willfulness to, 42–47,
The Nature of the Universe (Lucretius), 189–94, 217nn27–29; genealogical
9–12, 208nn16–17 approach to, 24–26, 211n4; Husserl on
Nazi will, 142; as dystopia of strong will, acts of willing towards, 35–39, 214n16;
230n9; Heidegger’s critique of, 210n2; not-will of, 11–12, 185–87; phenomeno-
straight-armed salute and, 197; “tri- logical approach to, 25–26, 211–12nn5–8;
umph of will” and, 16, 209n23 as property, 41–42, 216–17nn25–26;
Nearing, Nellie Marguerite Seeds, 111 sphere of accomplishment of, 39–47,
Nearing, Scott, 111, 249n6 79–80, 217nn27–29. See also stones
Negri, Antonio, 235n32 Occupy movement, 163–64, 247n50
negritude, 141 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 210n2
Neither Fugitive nor Free (Wong), 252n32 On Being Included (Ahmed), 241n17; on
neuroscience and the will, 5, 206n7 identity politics, 171, 247n57; on tech-
The Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 225n18 niques of viewing, 242n25
Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Moore), On Charisma and Institution Building
102 (Weber), 54
286 INDEX
On Free Choice of the Will (Augustine), The Phenomenology of the Social World
11–12, 59–62, 185–86 (Schutz), 214n18
On the Commonwealth (Cicero), phenomenology of will, 24–26,
234n27 211–12nn5–8; in Augustine’s Confessions,
On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 102 26–31; intentionality in, 33–39, 214n16.
optimism of the will, 173–74, 248n1 See also Husserl, Edmund
Orientalism, 40–41, 96 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 200, 252n31
Orphan Texts (Peters), 232n19 philosophy of the not, 14–16
“Orthopaedics or the Art of Preventing Physiology and Pathology of Mind
and Correcting Deformities of the (Maudesley), 60–61
Body” (Andry), 72 Pickhardt, Carl E., 222n9
Pippi Longstocking (character), 232n19
Paget, Francis Edward, 205n6 Plato, 61, 118
paralysis of will, 77–78 poisonous pedagogy, 2, 64–68, 140,
Parks, Rosa, 142–43, 240nn14–16 222nn7–9, 222n12
particular will, 20; of the child’s rebellious political will/willfulness, 16, 20, 133–72;
arm, 1–2, 13, 18, 53, 98, 100–101, 111, accepting the charge of willfulness in,
123; inherited willfulness and, 113–21; 134, 137, 168, 173; acting for change
obligation to the whole of, 20, 97–104, in, 141–43, 239nn10–11; call to arms
229n3; queer willfulness and, 121; as and, 194–204, 251n21; citizenship and,
self-will, 99–100, 115, 139–40; sympa- 126–31; of clenched fists, 194–97; con-
thetic functions required of, 101–2, ditions of bearability in, 55–56, 138–39;
104, 148, 229n5; UK riots of 2011 and, for disability rights, 185, 250n13;
130–31, 237nn41–42; of vagabonds of disobedience and, 134–43, 237n3;
capitalism, 122–30, 235nn31–32; willful diversity work and, 143–52, 158–60,
parts of, 97–98, 104–12, 117, 175–76, 241nn17–18; of feminist killjoys, 2–3,
230–31nn10–11, 234n28. See also 152–60, 170, 245nn39–41; gay impe-
general will rialism in, 166–67; general will and,
parting gifts, 175–85 103; identity politics and, 160, 171,
Pascal, Blaise, 3–4; on death duty, 104; 175, 247n57; persistence of, 2,
on general will, 13, 99–100, 117, 229n2; 9–10, 144, 203–4; as practical craft,
on particular will, 99–100, 105 133; of protesting bodies, 161–68,
Pateman, Carole, 233n21 246–47nn48–50; self-preservation
pathology of will, 61–62 and, 160, 169, 245n43; the social body
Paul the Apostle, 103–4, 160, 246n45 and, 230n10; sovereignty vs. tyranny
Payot, Jules, 62, 82–83, 96, 234n24 in, 135–39, 238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34,
Pearl, Michael and Debi, 222n9 248n60; techniques for dismissal of,
Penelope, Julia, 134 133–34, 168–69; unwilling obedience
Pensées (Pascal), 13, 99–100 and, 140–41; vanguard politics of the
Perry, Heather R., 110–11 rear in, 170–72; wayward queer arms
persistence, 2, 9–10, 144, 203–4 in, 197–204; of Zionism, 96, 228n43,
Peters, Laura, 232n19 248n60. See also national will
Peucker, Henning, 212n8, 214n15 Poovey, Mary, 100–101, 106, 199,
Pfänder, Alexander, 212n8 230n10
Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel), 200–204, possessive individualism, 255n37
252n30 The Postcard (Derrida), 218n34
INDEX 287
Potter, Sally, 172 queer (as term): derivation of, 10; politi-
power relations (freedom and force), 16, cal potency of, 158, 250n13
54–56; bearability in, 55–56, 138–39; Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed), 210n30;
in education of the will, 63–67, 91–92, on action shaping bodies, 108; on
103, 130–31, 221n4, 223n10, 226n27, attunement, 218n37; on effort, 52; on
227n39; in feminist accounts of gender, tables, 25, 215n24; on the temporal, 25;
54–56, 220nn46–48; in forcing of on tending toward, 79
general will, 97, 103, 105, 129; in the queer will and willfulness, 7–12, 21, 134,
master-slave dialectic, 15, 200–204, 208n14, 237n2; apartness of, 117–18;
252nn30–31, 253n34, 254n36, 255n38; Augustine and, 8–9, 11–12; call to arms
sociological model of, 54, 219n44; of, 197–204, 251n21; crips and, 184–85,
in sovereignty vs. tyranny, 135–39, 250n13; diversity work and, 149–50,
238n4, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60; 241n21; error and, 7–9; in family mak-
in voluntary servitude, 138–39; will ing, 232n19; gay imperialism and,
to power and, 230n9. See also political 166–68; inheritance and reproduction
will/willfulness in, 121; Lucretius’s swerve as, 9–12,
practical reason, 95 15, 17, 192, 208n17; not philosophy of,
Price, Alice, 208n20 15–16; protesting bodies and, 161–68;
The Principles of Psychology (James), stone butch figure of, 189; as unbecom-
215n21 ing member, 126, 193, 203; as willful
problem of will, 3–4, 7 ecology, 192–94, 251nn19–20
projection, 36–39, 214n18 A Question of Silence (dir. Gorris), 155–57
projects of will, 61–62. See also education
of the will race/racism, 170, 235n32, 247n50; the
The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed), 3; angry person of color and, 167; in
on capacity for action, 235n32; on anti-immigration rhetoric, 127–29,
conditional happiness, 219n42; on 236–37nn35–38; in diversity work,
consciousness of gender, 217n33; on 143–52, 158–60; of gay imperialism,
feminist killjoys, 244n30; on happi- 166–67; history of resistance to,
ness dystopias, 230n9; on melancholic 199–201; involuntary stigma in,
migrants, 237n38; on non-attunement, 161–62; techniques of racialization in,
218n38 159–60, 242n25, 245n40, 245n42; as
property, 41–42, 199–201 willful word, 168
prosthetic body parts, 109–10, 177–85, radical lesbian feminist tradition, 244n31,
249n8 251n21
Protagoras (Plato), 61 Rancière, Jacques, 230n10
Protestantism: paternal authority in, reaching, 200–204
63, 221nn4–5; sinfulness of the child “Re-Arming the Disabled Veteran” (Perry),
in, 62–63 110
protesting bodies, 47, 56, 161–68, The Rebel (Camus), 239n10
246–47nn48–50 recalling the will, 31
psychoanalytic theory, 80. See also Freud, Reclaim the Night marches, 163
Sigmund Rediker, Marcus, 163
psychology of the will, 210–11nn2–3 Refiguring the Ordinary (Weiss), 215n21
Puar, Jasbir, 167 Reinier, Jacqueline, 72
Puwar, Nirmal, 147 reluctance, 140–41
288 INDEX
Reminiscences (Gage), 252n28 Schopenhauer, Arthur: on identification,
renunciation of will, 88–91, 227n34 238n6; on motivation of will, 36, 43,
reproductive will, 112–21, 193 52, 75, 121, 188–89, 214n17, 250n16; on
Ribot, Théodule, 61–62, 68, 230n7; on particular will, 101–2; on reproduc-
strong will, 81–82; on weak will, 76–79, tive will, 118–19; on same-sex love,
176, 225n20, 225nn22–23; on will as 78, 226n26; on will as the essence of
testimony, 226n27 things, 188, 208n13
Rice, John, 66–67 Schutz, Alfred, 214n18
Rich, Adrienne, 250n15 Schwarz, Judith, 134
Richardson, Alan, 2, 73 Schwarz, Kathryn, 227n37
Ricoeur, Paul, 33, 39 The Science of Education (Herbart), 91–96,
Riefenstahl, Leni, 16, 209n23 227n39
Riley, Patrick, 98, 99, 229n2 The Search after Truth (Malebranche), 103
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wyatt), Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 10, 16; on
239n10 “queer” (as term), 158, 250n13; on vol-
risk proximities, 79–81, 226n28 untary and involuntary stigma, 161–62
Robbins, Bruce, 111–12, 232n18 The Seeds of Things (Goldberg), 208n17
Robertson, Geoffrey, 136 self-help, 62, 75–84, 221n3; strengthening
the rod, 197; as artificial organ, 231n15; of will in, 78–84, 226n27; weaknesses
educational role of, 1–2, 65–67, 111; of will and, 76–79; will as an internal
family line as, 114; Locke’s “the steady resource in, 75–76, 225n19
hand” and, 71–74; national mourning selfishness and narcissism, 105, 231n11
of, 130–31; at political demonstrations, self-perception, 217n32
165, 167–68; sovereign power and, self-willing, 52–53; anger and, 115; gen-
136–37, 172, 238n5, 248n60. See also eral and particular will in, 99–100, 115,
arms and hands 139–40, 239n9; Rousseau’s argument
Rolland, Roman, 173 for, 73–75; will alignment in, 81–82
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 239n9 Serlin, David, 109
Romola (Eliot), 83, 114–16, 233nn20–22 Serres, Michel, 208n17
Rosenblatt, Helena, 99 sexism, 170
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68, 208n20, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde,
219n42; on common will, 98; on educa- Freud to Foucault (Dollimore), 9
tion, 73–75, 97, 98, 103; on general will, sexuality, 207n11; Augustine on desire
97–99, 103, 228n1; on particular will, and, 9, 28–29, 119–20, 208n15,
98 213nn11–12, 234nn27–28; conscious-
Roux, Wilhelm, 102 ness of, 150–51, 241–42nn21–25;
Rutschky, Katharina, 64, 66, 222n7, 222n9 counter-will and impotence in, 77,
Ryle, Gilbert, 5, 6, 206n7 226n24, 234n28; language of will in,
78, 226n25. See also queer will and
Saarinen, Risto, 219n42 willfulness
Said, Edward, 40–41, 96 “Sexuality and Solitude” (Foucault),
Sandahl, Carrie, 184–85 207n11
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 203, 215n20 “Sexual Nationalism” conference, 158–60,
Schechter, Harold, 178 245n41
Scheler, Max, 236n36 sexual violence. See violence against
Schelling, F. W. J., 23 women
INDEX 289
Sharpe, Hasana, 250n16 Some Thoughts concerning Education
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 197 (Locke), 62, 71
Showalter, Elaine, 234n26 Sophocles, 137, 238n6
Shuttleworth, Sally, 89 sovereign will, 135–39, 238n4,
Silas Marner (Eliot): broken pot of, 43–45, 238–39nn6–8, 244n34, 248n60
47–48, 50; catalepsy of, 124–25; child The Speculative Turn (ed. Bryant, Srnicek,
of, 47–48; kinship of strangers in, and Harman), 211n4
124–26, 192; laborer’s body of, 107 Spillers, Hortense, 201
Sisterhood Is Powerful, 195 Spinoza, Baruch, 60, 187–88, 250n16
Slansky, Jeffrey, 225n19 spontaneity, 29–31, 52–53, 95, 228n40
slaves/slavery: in Hegel’s master-slave Stein, Edith, 38, 214n16
dialectic, 15, 200–204, 252nn30–31, Stengel, Andrew M., 135
253n34, 254n36, 255n38; laboring will of, Stengers, Isabelle, 192–93, 251n19
201–3, 239n10, 252n33, 254–55nn35–38; Stephen Gordon (character), 117–18
muscular arms of, 199, 252nn28–29; Stern, Daniel, 218n39
willful submission of, 122, 138–39, 201, stickiness, 211n5
220n47, 234n27, 252n32 stigma, 161–62
Slavishak, Edward, 109 Stirner, Max, 139, 239n9
Smiles, Samuel, 75–76 stomachs, 105, 231n13
Smith, Adam, 101 Stone, Lawrence, 2
Smith, Andrew, 123 stones, 11–12, 185–94, 250n15; in lesbian
Smith, Jeremy John, 213n14 queer history, 189–90; not- will of,
Smith, John, 16, 78, 209n22, 226n26 185–87; queer willessness of, 187;
Smith, Tommie, 197, 251n24 stony kinship of, 188, 192, 196,
Sobchack, Vivian, 179 199–200; willing motivation of, 187–94,
the social body, 100–101, 106, 176–77, 250nn16–17
199, 229n4; attunement and harmony “Stories of Stone” (Cohen), 186
of, 49–54, 95, 230n10; citizenship and straightening devices, 7–8
national will in, 126–31, 230n10; the Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in
family as, 113–14, 125–26, 232n19; Post-Coloniality (Ahmed), 128
usefulness and, 232n17. See also general strengthening of will, 78–84, 103, 226n27,
will 230n9; general will and, 228n1; meth-
The Social Contract (Rousseau), 97–99 odology for, 82–84, 91; Nietzsche’s
social will, 47–56, 79, 218n35; affect and, model of, 81, 103, 230n9; risk proximi-
68, 223n11; attunement and muscular ties and, 79–81, 226n28; will required
bonding in, 49–54, 95, 168, 218nn37–38, for, 83, 88
247n55; emotional work of, 52–53; Strength of Will (Boyd Barrett), 62, 83–84
momentum of the crowd and, 56–57, “The Struggle between Parts of the Or-
144; non-attunement and bumpiness ganism” (Roux), 102
in, 50–53, 218n38, 219n43; power rela- Stryker, Susan, 199, 252n27
tions in, 54–56, 219n44, 220nn46–48; subject of will. See the willful subject; the
shared projects in, 47–48; vanguard willing subject
politics of the rear and, 170–72 Sullivan, Nikki, 199, 252n27
sociology of the will, 47, 218n35 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 64–66, 222n8
Socrates, 61, 221n2 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 63–64
Soderstrom, Lukas, 102 sweaty concepts, 18–19, 209n27
290 INDEX
the swerve, 9–12, 15, 17, 192–94, 208n17 activism in, 165–66; English language
The Swerve (Greenblatt), 9–10 use in, 129; prosecution of Charles I
in, 135–36; riots of 2011 in, 130–31,
tables, 211n3; diversity work and, 158–60; 237nn41–42; unwilling servants in,
feminist killjoys at, 152–53, 155–56; 111–12, 232nn17–18; veil debates in, 121,
Husserl’s use of, 214n24; near sphere 150–52, 236n37, 242–43nn25–28
of, 41; as a pivot, 13, 25 universalism, 160, 171, 245–46nn44–45
“Talks to Teachers” (James), 83–84 uppity (as term), 245n42
Tatchell, Peter, 165–66 utilitarian will, 84
temporality of will, 25; coherence and
continuity in, 29–31; future intention vagabonds, 122–30, 235nn31–32
of, 31–39, 214n16; hesitation between “Valuing and Value” (Husserl), 33
tense in, 34–35, 49; recall of past in, 31, Valverde, Mariana, 61
39–47, 215n23; spontaneity of good will vandalism, 237n3
in, 91–92, 95, 228n40; synchronicity in, vanguard politics of the rear, 170–72
52–53, 228n40; the virtue of volition Vibrant Matter (Bennett), 10, 208n17
and, 87 Vincent, Norah, 109–10
Terry, Jennifer, 78 violence against women: Reclaim the
testimony, 226n27 Night marches against, 163; of sex traf-
Text Book of Physiology (Foster), 230n7 ficking, 54–55, 220nn46–47
Theoharis, Jeanne, 142–43, 240nn14–15 Virno, Paolo, 244n38
The Thieving Hand (dir. Blackton), 177–78 virtue, 119–20; as habit, 73, 225n18; of
Thoreau, Henry David, 240n13 volition, 60, 87
Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will voluntary criminals, 122–23
(Freadman), 26–27 voluntary servitude, 138–39
Timaeus (Plato), 118
Time and Free Will (Bergson), 225n21 Walker, Alice, 134
Titchkosky, Tanya, 147, 241n19 wandering willfully, 83, 96, 116–17,
Tomkins, Silvan S., 221n4 233–34nn23–24; of vagabonds of
Tom Tulliver (character), 90 capitalism, 122–30, 235nn31–32; of
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 47, 113, 219n41, 223n11 wandering womb, 118–19, 234n26
To Train Up a Child (Pearl and Pearl), 222n9 weakness of will, 61, 76–79, 103, 221n2;
A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 211n6 effort and strengthening for, 78–84,
Triumph of the Will (dir. Riefenstahl), 16, 91, 226n27; insufficient impulse in,
209n23 76–77, 225n20, 225n23; judgment of
Trowbridge, Katherine M., 224n17 willfulness in, 80–81; pathologization
Truth, Sojourner, 199, 252n28 of, 62, 221n3; as vacations from will, 80
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 6–7 Weber, Elisabeth, 221n5
Tyler, Imogen, 130, 231n11 Weber, Max, 54, 214n18
Tyrannicide (Robertson), 136 Wegner, Daniel M., 211n3
Weiss, Gail, 70, 215n21
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 78 Wekker, Gloria, 159
the unconscious, 175, 248n3 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 117–18, 198
unhappiness, 4, 100 Wesley, John, 66
United Kingdom: anti-immigration rheto- What Is Called Thinking (Heidegger), 249n10
ric in, 127–29, 236nn35–37; anti-Islamic “What Is Critique?” (Foucault), 6
INDEX 291
Whytt, Robert, 101 26–31, 211–12nn5–9; conditional
will: derivation of word, 32, 213nn13–14; will of, 53–54, 127–29, 219nn42–43,
history of, 4–7, 205n5, 206–8nn8–13; 236–37nn36–38; experience of will of,
queer potential of, 7–12, 21; vs. willful- 24; futurity of will of, 31–39, 214n16;
ness, 205n6 getting “behind” an action by, 25–26,
will alignment, 81–82 35–39, 168, 171–72, 185, 214n18, 215n21;
Willett, Cynthia, 254n36 giving up by, 38; internal struggles
“The Willful Child” (Grimm brothers), with external will of, 27–31, 213nn10–12;
1–2, 13–15, 17–18, 63–64; dehumanized momentum of, 56–57, 144; nonsponta-
version of, 190–92; English translation neous continuity of will of, 29–31, 52–53;
of, 205n1; German eigensinnig in, 157, objectification of, 41–42, 216–17nn25–26;
202, 203, 205n6; inherited willfulness power relations of, 54–56, 129, 219n44,
in, 113; judgment of willfullness in, 81; 220nn46–48; recalling will as affirma-
as master-slave fable, 200–204; obedi- tion of, 31; social sphere of, 47–56, 79,
ence required in, 138; parental author- 218n35; sphere of accomplishment (with
ity in, 63, 221n5; rebellious arm of, 1–2, objects) of, 39–47, 79–80, 217nn27–29;
13, 18, 53, 98, 100–101, 111, 120–21, 123, willful objects in the way of, 42–47
178, 203–4; the rod in, 136–37. See also Will in Western Thought (Bourke),
children; education of the will 207n8
willful ecology, 192–94, 251nn19–20 willpower, 7
Willful Liberalism (Flathman), 205n5 will relatedness, 113–21
willfulness, 1–4; accepting the charge will to power, 230n9
of, 134, 137, 168, 173; affirmation of will words (and phrases), 32, 64, 173–74,
diagnosis of, 133, 237n1; definitions of, 213n13, 222n6, 226n27
4, 18–21, 205n4, 205n6; as error of will, will work, 40–41, 88–91, 96; on getting
4, 6–7, 229n3; history of, 161; as legal along, 157; on institutional diversity,
term, 135, 174–75; negative connota- 146–47
tions of, 20–21; as parting gift, 175–85; “willy nilly,” 54, 220n45
as problem of will, 3–4, 7; queer poten- Wingfield, Adia Harvey, 245n42
tial of, 12, 237n2; transformation into womanism, 134
pedagogy of, 170–71; words associated women’s will. See gendering of will/
with, 150–51, 153–55, 242nn23–24. See willfulness
also archive of willfulness Wong, Edlie L., 252n31
the willful subject, 12, 17–18, 21; affective The Woodlanders (Hardy), 107
realm of, 18, 82–83, 152, 229n5; auton- The World as Will as Representation
omy of, 211n5; feminist killjoys as, 2–3, (Schopenhauer), 78
152–60, 170; as semiotic figure, 17–18, The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 141
205n5; spaces of relief for, 169–70; the Wright, Richard, 196–97
swerve and, 17, 192–94; willingness to Wyatt, Rupert, 239n10
be willful of, 134. See also political will/
willfulness Young, Iris Marion, 214n16
A Willful Young Woman (Price), 208n20
Williams, Raymond, 195–96 Zackodnik, Teresa, 252n28
Williams, Robert R., 202 Zandy, Janet, 106–7, 109
the willing subject, 23–57; anxiety of, Žižek, Slavoj, 160, 246n45, 247n50
37–38, 215n19; calling upon will by, Zornado, Joseph L., 64
292 INDEX