Willful SubjectsSara Ahmed

Willful Subjects

duke university press

Durham and London

2014

sara ahmed

© 2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

of America on acid- free paper ∞

Typeset in Chaparral Pro by

Westchester Book Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in- Publication Data

Ahmed, Sara, 1969–

Willful subjects / Sara Ahmed.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5767- 4 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5783- 4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Will. 2. Will— Philosophy.

3. Will— Social aspects. I. Title.

bf611.a294 2014

153.8—dc23 2014007340

Cover art: Fred Tomaselli, Bouquet, 2002.

Mixed media, resin on wood. 28 × 22 in.

© Fred Tomaselli. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery,

New York / Shanghai.

On page 293: Rhiannon Williams, Wall of Arms, 2014.

Contents

Ac know ledg ments vii

Introduction: A Willfulness Archive 1

One: Willing Subjects 23

Two: Th e Good Will 59

Three: Th e General Will 97

Four: Willfulness as a Style of Politics 133

Conclusion: A Call to Arms 173

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. Th anks 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. Th anks 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!

Th is book is dedicated to the many willful women fi ghting to keep feminist hopes alive.

Introduction

A W I L L F U L N E S S A R C H I V E

Th ere is a story called “Th e Willful Child.”

Once 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. Th en 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 fl ourish. Th e 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. Th e arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up,

2 Introduction

acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part. Willfulness involves per sis tence 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 per sis tence 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. Th ey are not proper to subjects insofar as they become property, what can be alienated into a part or thing.2 Th e diff erent 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? Th e rod is an externalization of the mother’s wish, but also of God’s command, which transforms a wish into fi at, a “let it be done,” thus determining what happens to the child. Th e 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? Th e 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). Th is 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.

Th is story, “Th e Willful Child,” is a fi nding. I found it because I was fol-lowing the fi gure of the willful subject: trying to go where she goes, trying to be where she has been. It was another fi gure, related, or perhaps even a relation, a kind of kin, that of the feminist killjoy, who fi rst 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

A Willfulness Archive 3

can fall, like a shadow on the fallen. Th is book is an attempt to give my glimpse of a willful subject a fuller form.

George Eliot’s Th e Mill on the Floss gave me an initial glimpse. I off ered a reading of this novel in Th e Promise of Happiness (2010) as part of a genre of female trouble- making fi ction. In refl ecting 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 identifi cation over time. We might share aff ection for Maggie as feminist readers, as we might share aff ec-tion for the many willful girls that haunt literature. Simone de Beauvoir identifi ed 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 refl ections 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. Th e 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 confi dence in our arguments, we can write them back in) in moving from the fi gure 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 identifi ed 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. Th e seventeenth- century French phi los o pher Blaise Pascal argued: “All men seek happiness. Th is is without exception. What ever diff erent means they employ, they all tend to this end. Th e cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with diff erent views. Th e will never takes the least step but to this object. Th is 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

4 Introduction

happiness. Th e 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 fi lled by “what ever” 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 fi rst gives the will the status of an in de pen dent power (see chapter 1), happi-ness is not simply what motivates will, but is what follows for those who will in the right way: “Th ose 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. Th ose 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). Th e un happy 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 defi nition 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 fi rst instance, as an attribution to a subject of will’s error. Willfulness and unhappiness seem to meet at this point, a stray point. Th is intimacy of willfulness and unhappiness remains to be thought. And to think that intimacy is to queer the will.

A History of the Will

I turned toward the category of “the will” because the fi gure of the willful subject took me there. Th e timing of this sequence matters. Following the fi gure of the willful subject, making her my priority, is another way of

A Willfulness Archive 5

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 phi los o phers, 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 Th ere 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 in de pen dent 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 or ga nize 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). Th e will might be too slippery to be treated as a single idea with diff erent manifestations. Th e 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. Th e 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 off er a his-tory of the will. Hannah Arendt’s Th e Life of the Mind is singular in its explicit aim to off er such a history.9 It is noteworthy that Arendt defi nes 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

6 Introduction

premised on a false separation of ideas as “mental artefacts” from the history of the human subject as “the artifi cer” (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 diffi culties” (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 fi nality: 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 infi nite precaution and diffi culties, let us say that I have tried to avoid it as much as possible” (1977, 74– 75).11 Perhaps it is the diffi culties that Arendt mentions (“I shall analyze will in terms of its histories, and thus of its diffi culties”) that makes Foucault bypass the question of will, even though his genealogical method was indebted to Nietz sche’s Th e Geneal-ogy of Morals ([1887] 2003) which could, and indeed has, been understood as a “genealogy of the will.”12

And it is Nietz sche who off ers 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 Nietz sche 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. Nietz sche off ers more than a critique of the error of will. He suggests that the error of will has a purpose: the “free will” is “the

A Willfulness Archive 7

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 fi nding 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 unifi ed as an entity. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietz sche notes that although “phi-los o phers 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 Nietz sche, 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. Th e 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 fi nd 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 Queer History of Will

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

8 Introduction

of will might appear diff erently, 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 off er 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. Th e latter appears before a subject: “Th e perception of the intellect extends only to the few objects presented to it and is always externally limited.” Th e horizon of the will is not limited by this before: “Th e will, on the other hand, can in a certain sense be called infi nite, since we observe without exception that its scope extends to anything that can possibly be an object of any other will— even the immea sur able 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 fi nite faculty of the intellectual and infi nite faculty of the will that subjects tend to err. As Stephen Menn explains, “Th e 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 fi rmer 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). Th e 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

A Willfulness Archive 9

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 fi rst recognize the path we are asked to fol-low. Arendt addresses Augustine as “the fi rst phi los o pher 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 in de pen dent 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 fi gured 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 refl ect 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 fi gure 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 phi los o pher, whose poem Th e Nature of the Universe we can inherit because of the queer thread of history, as Stephen Greenblatt has shown in his book Th e Swerve (2011). Th e 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 per sis tence can

10 Introduction

be an act of disobedience. Perhaps there is nothing “mere” about per sis-tence. Per sis tence can be a deviation from a trajectory, what stops the hurtling forward of fate, what prevents a fatality.

Th e swerve of history helps us to fi nd 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 phi los o pher of the will. If we address Lucretius in this way, we can bring to the foreground the perversity of will. In Th e Nature of the Universe Lucretius off ers 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. Th e 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. Th e 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 off ers 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. Th e swerve is just enough not to travel straightly; not to stay on course. Oh the potential of this not!

Th e 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 eff ect— 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. Th e 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. Th e “no” is what makes humans on a

A Willfulness Archive 11

deviant line with atoms: “Th ere is within the human heart something that can fi ght 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 fl ow” (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 fi nd only the human in Lucretius would certainly be to miss the point. Th e point is not at the same time to expel the human from the possibility named by the will. Th e 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). Th at 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

12 Introduction

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. Th is 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.” Th e will signifi es 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. Th e 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.

Th e 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. Th e will might even be willful before it becomes the will; before it can fulfi ll 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. Th e swerve does not appear as a moral fl aw or a sign of the sinful rebel-liousness of humans” (2001, 81). Th ere 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 fi gure. Our tendency to associ-ate willfulness with human fl aws 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.

A Willfulness Archive 13

A Willful Method

In following the fi gure of a willful subject, I assemble a willfulness archive. Th is 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. Th ere 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 refl ec-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 fi guratively in the sense of to catch or to hold. Th e 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. Th e willful subject led me to where she came to appear. In following this fi gure, I thus came across materials I had not previously encountered. Th e Grimm fable, “Th e Willful Child,” is one such example. Even as the fi gure 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. Th is 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. Th e arm that keeps coming up began to haunt me. I began to notice other wayward body parts. Th is book is full of them and the promise as well as terror of their agency.

Th e 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

14 Introduction

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 fi gure 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 Th e 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 fi gure 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 signifi cance of George Eliot’s Th e 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 aff ective 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 redefi nition 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-los o pher 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 refl ects my own interest in reimagining the relationship of philosophy to

A Willfulness Archive 15

literature. In reading Eliot as a phi los o pher, 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 refl ection 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. Th e 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 phi los o-phers and aims to create room within philosophy for others who are not phi los o phers. Not being a phi los o pher 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 diff erent angle on what is being reproduced. Not philosophy aims not to reproduce the body of philosophy by a willful citational practice: if phi los o phers are cited (and in this book many phi los o phers are cited) they are not only cited alongside those who are not phi los o phers but are not given any priority over those who are not. Th is is how I come to off er as my fi nal 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 phi los o phers. 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. Th is statement can be heard as aspiration: not philosophy, in

16 Introduction

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. Th inking through the relationship between will and willfulness has allowed me to re orientate my relation to the will as a philosophical idea. Th e arguments off ered 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 diffi cult to disentangle from Nazism, with its triumphant “triumph of the will.”23 Hallward in turn refl ects 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 refl ect on the importance of po liti cal 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 refl ecting 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 refl ect 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. Th e 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.

A Willfulness Archive 17

To bring materials together as a willfulness archive might create an even stronger impression of the willful subject. Th ere 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 eff ects (on disposition). We are following a depositing rather than fi nding what is deposited. Th is 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 fi nd 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 fi eld. Th e reverse mechanism is the same mechanism: the uneven distribution of the will is how a fi gure 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 fi gure 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 fi gure, as someone we recog-nize, in an instant. It is this fi gure 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 fi gure of the willful subject strange by re-fl ecting on the familiarity of her form. And it is thinking of the status of the willful subject as a fi gure that allows us to open up the concept of the archive. Donna Haraway (1997) has shown how fi gures are semiotic and material. If fi gures mean; they matter. If fi gures matter; they mean. A willfulness archive assembled around a fi gure 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 fi gures 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 offi cial 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

18 Introduction

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 “Th e Willful Child” other than as a text? We get further with our descriptions if we include the aff ective realm. How do these words aff ect 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? Th e fi gure of the willful child is saturated with aff ect. Th e word “will-ful” is an inheritance in how it is aff ective, which makes willfulness eff ec-tive or effi cient 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 fi gure caught my attention. I have heard the intonation of this call, how it can fall harshly, as accusation. Th is 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. Th e 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 fi gure, a ghostly fi gure, 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. Th ey 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 defi nition 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?

A Willfulness Archive 19

When willfulness is an attribution, a way of fi nding 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 fl eshy others, to support my own eff ort to make willfulness the sustained ob-ject of theoretical refl ection.

Th e book is or ga nized 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 diff erent 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. Th is 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. Th e fi rst chapter draws on examples of individuals who are “willing together” in actual-izing a possibility; the second refl ects on how the project of eliminat-ing willfulness from will becomes a moral imperative that is binding; the third refl ects 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. Th e question of will becomes a question of pre ce dence, and in the book I explore specifi c fi gures 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 what ever

20 Introduction

gets in the way of an intention, including objects as well as subjects. In chapter 2, “Th e Good Will,” I return to the fi gure of the willful child and consider how she becomes a tool in the history of the education of will. Th e chapter also explores how the will itself becomes a project, as what a subject must work upon, and off ers a critique of the universality of the good will by refl ecting on the gendering of the will as well as willfulness. In chapter 3, “Th e General Will,” I analyze the distinction between will and willfulness as it relates to the distinction between the general and par tic u lar will. I explore how parts that are not willing the preservation of the whole are charged with willfulness, including nonproductive and nonreproductive parts. Th e book then off ers 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 refl ect 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 refl ect on experiences that are diffi cult and do not wish to resolve that diffi culty (to resolve diffi culty would be to lose proximity to what is diffi cult). 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 fi nd 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. Th e Oxford En glish Dictionary (oed) describes the meaning of willful as strong willed “in the positive sense” as both obsolete and rare. Th e 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 refl ection 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

A Willfulness Archive 21

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 fi lled with willful subjects. It might even have become like what it has been fi lled 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 fi rm yes. It is an affi rmation 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: Th e New Mestiza as follows: “Th e 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 Th e 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. Th is line is not a straight but a wayward line, as it must be if we are to fi nd 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 offi cial 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.

Notes

Introduction. A Willfulness Archive

1. Th is translation uses the En glish spelling “wilful.” I have in this book used the American spelling as it allows us to see the “will” in “willful.” I should note also that in the German story the child is not given a gender. In this En glish translation of the German story, the child is “she” but in some other translations the child is “he.” I will address the willful child in this book as “she” because I would argue willfulness tends to be registered as a feminine attribute. However, I hope to show how the gendering of will as well as willfulness is complicated (see chapter 2). Boys and men can be called willful, although that call might sound diff erently and have diff erent eff ects.

2. I explore the relation between property and the will in the fi nal section of chapter 1 with specifi c reference to Hegel and Marx.

3. Classical and early modern texts cited are referred to using book number, chapter number (where relevant) and page number.

4. From Oxford En glish Dictionary Online (2008). All dictionary defi nitions used in this book are from this edition.

5. Probably the only text I have come across that foregrounds “willfulness” in off er-ing a history of the will is Richard E. Flathman’s Willful Liberalism. However his book does not involve a discussion of willfulness as an attribution: it is rather a defense of a style of liberalism, a refashioned liberalism that is in the “free spirit” of Nietz sche, focusing on the creativity and self- making of individuals (1992, 208). Flathman does off er some important readings of voluntarism, including theological voluntarism, and this book provides a useful contrast to Hannah Arendt’s Th e Life of the Mind (1978). His approach to the “semiotic of the will” could also be related to my emphasis on will and willfulness as a grammar (1992, 158), although he uses this method primarily to avoid thinking of the will as a “single entity and force” (159), while my interest is in developing a model of how the will is socially, aff ectively, and unevenly distributed between per-sons and things. My argument also attempts to disentangle willfulness from individu-alism. For a useful edited collection debating Flathman’s willful liberalism, see Honig (2002).

6. In this section and the book that follows, my argument rests on teasing out the relationship between two words/concepts “will” and “willfulness.” I should note that

206 Notes for Introduction

in other languages the words that are roughly equivalent to willfulness are not “will words.” I would suggest that this does not mean the argument can only be made in En-glish, although it can certainly be made more easily and more neatly. Take for example the German word eigensinnig, which is the word used in the Grimm story. Th is word means “own- self” (or a sense of one’s self) rather than self- will. However, it is this sense of “own- ness” that is conveyed by the word “willful” (see chapter 4). Th e German edu-cational literatures on breaking the will of the child (see chapter 2) thus refer to the problem of eigensinnig as that which must be eliminated from the child. In Germany there has been some interesting work on eigensinnig that off ers a reclaiming of that term in a way I am suggesting we can reclaim willfulness. For example, see the book edited by the German social historian Alf Lüdtke, Th e History of Everyday Life, which includes the following on eigensinnig in the glossary of terms: “Key term in Lüdtke’s analysis of workers’ everyday life, denoting willfulness, spontaneous self- will, a kind of self- affi rmation, an act of reappropriating alienated social relations on and off the shop fl oor by self- assertive prankishness, demarcating a space of one’s own. Th ere is a dis-junction between formalized politics and the prankish, stylised, misanthropic distanc-ing from all constraints or incentive present in the everyday politics of Eigen- Sinn. In standard parlance, the word has pejorative overtones, referring to ‘obstreperous, obsti-nate’ behaviour, usually of children. Th e ‘discompounding’ of writing it as Eigen- Sinn stresses its root signifi cation of ‘one’s own sense, own meaning’ ” ([1989] 1995, 314). Th e reclaiming of terms for “problem subjects” will depend on linguistic and cultural histories (that can be treated as resources). Note also in the German case, a word that is a more direct translation for willfulness would be eigenwillig (self- will). Th ere is a fairy tale in En glish by Francis Edward Paget about a spoiled child called Prince Eigenwillig: a boy who inherits the German name for willfulness, in whom we can meet this name in person. And oh: what a sorry tale! In the end Prince Eigenwillig says to his mother, “I won’t do anything you tell me. If you had not spoilt me I shouldn’t be in all this trouble now” (1846, 117). His fate is typical for willful children: punishment by death. He is turned into a ball by the fairy’s wand. My point in referring to this story is to suggest that fairy tales and folklore may provide an interesting site of cultural translation and could be explored as a transcultural willfulness archive.

7. Ryle’s aim is to refuse the concept of “a faculty” of “the will.” He writes: “I hope to refute the doctrine that there exists a Faculty, immaterial Organ, or Ministry, cor-responding to the theory’s description of the ‘Will’ and, accordingly, that there occur pro cesses, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as volitions” ([1949] 2009, 50). As I will point out, however, there is a long history of refl ection on the will that does not treat will as a faculty of the subject.

8. For example, many recent publications on the will address the question of whether the neurosciences can accommodate a concept of free will, or whether they demonstrate the truth of determinism, or become another occasion for supporting com-patibilism. Some typical and telling titles include Th e Volitional Brain (Libet, Freeman, and Sutherland 1999); Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (Gazzaniga 2012); Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? (Murphy and Brown 2009); My Brain Made Me Do It (Sternberg 2010). See Rose (2007) for a discussion of these literatures from a Foucauld-ian perspective. Because my primary interest is not whether or not something called free will exists, but how the will comes into existence as an idea in relation to willfulness, I will

Notes for Introduction 207

not be engaging with these literatures on the free- will- versus- determinism controversy directly. However, I do engage with the histories abbreviated in the shorthand “free will” (the histories, in others words, that mean freedom and will have tended to be thought together), while also recognizing that there have been other ways that will and freedom can be thought (given that some approaches to the will explicitly reject the concept of freedom, while some approaches to freedom attempt to detach freedom from the will).

9. Another example would be Vernon J. Bourke’s (1964) Will in Western Th ought: An Historic- Critical Survey. Although this off ers a “long view” of the will in philosophy, it does not really off er a history of will as an idea, but rather groups together diff erent approaches to the will (the will as rational appetite, will and intellectual preference, and so on). It is a useful reference point but not comparable to Hannah Arendt’s off ering, which raises the question of what it means to think “the will” historically. More recently, Giorgio Agamben has off ered in spoken lectures an “archaeology of will,” proposing that modernity is the transformation from “I can” (the Greek focus on potentiality) to “I will” (understood as a modular verb) engaging with early works in Christianity (such as Augustine and St. Paul) and the relation of will and commandant. He challenges the usual reading that the Greeks could not think the concept of will by relating the emergence of will to the resolution of the problem of potentiality (and impotentiality). While I think this argument is thought provoking, my own approach will suggest that the will has a more complicated career than can be expressed by a simple transition. See also chapter 1, note 16, for further refl ection on the relation of “I will” to “I can.” And fi nally also relevant here would be Regenia Gagnier’s cultural history of individualism focusing on the late nineteenth century. Gagnier off ers an “anatomy of the will” (2010, 1) and is one of the few writers I have come across to consider the biological, social, and individual will (see especially 87– 115).

10. For Arendt a history of the will is a history of the faculty of will. She argues, as do many others, that the faculty of the will was not known in Greek antiquity, though she does include Aristotle in her account insofar as his “notion of proairesis” is a “kind of forerunner of the Will” and “can serve as a paradigmatic example of how certain problems of the soul were raised and answered before the discovery of the Will” (1978, 6). I would include those who have approached the will in terms other than as a faculty of the subject within my understanding of the history of the will (such as Lucretius, Schopenhauer, and Nietz sche in his later work).

11. It is surprising that Foucault does not focus on the will given the centrality of the confessional mode to History of Sexuality, volume 1. An obvious reference point would have been Augustine’s Confessions. J. G. Merquior has also noted how Foucault might have made the will into an explicit aspect of his argument about the rise of the “con-fessional subject” (1985, 139). Foucault does refl ect on Augustine’s City of God in his contribution to “Sexuality and Solitude,” focusing on the image of the erection and the association of sexuality and disobedience in Augustine (Foucault and Sennett 1981). I will be taking up the question of sexuality and the will in relation to this same passage from Augustine in chapter 3.

12. Nietz sche’s “genealogy of man” is described as a “genealogy of the will” by Werner Hamacher. He notes: “Th e central problem, with which the genealogy confronts its historiographers, consists in constructing the passage of the will from its eccentric position, where it is not yet will, into the centre of itself” (1990, 33).

208 Notes for Introduction

13. Nietz sche singles out Schopenhauer at this point as the phi los o pher who “has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to us” ([1886] 1997, 12). Indeed, Schopenhauer develops the argument that the Kantian thing- in- itself should be understood as the will. Th is argument could be understood as so extreme that “the will” becomes far from straightforward. As Gilles Deleuze argues, Schopenhauer “in drawing out the extreme consequences of the old philosophy” is “not content with an essence of the will” but makes “the will the essence of things” (2006, 77– 78). Arguably then Schopenhauer in making the will the one and only thing we can and do know also makes the will into the strangest thing. For further discussion of the strangeness of Schopenhauer’s will, see the section “Stones Matter” in my conclusion to this book.

14. Th e project of following the queer associations between will and error can be connected to J. Jack Halberstam’s (2011) important refl ections on “the queer art of failure.” Th ere is a queer potential in not reaching the right points.

15. Th is is actually the title of her section on Augustine: “Augustine, the First Phi-los o pher of the Will.”

16. Th is wonderful description “teeth of time” is how Robert Hooke in Micrographia (1655) describes bookworms (cited in Greenblatt 2011, 83). Th e material signifi cance of parchment to the history and other histories should not be underestimated. Th at so much depended upon the capacity of parchment to survive the “teeth of time” becomes another way of off ering an account of the intermingling of sheep, goats, and humans in history (as well as worms, since the “teeth of time” do destroy some parchment), as elegantly and sheepishly explored by Sarah Franklin in Dolly Mixtures: Th e Remaking of Genealogy (2007).

17. Th ere has been a turn to Lucretius in the humanities: in addition to Stephen Greenblatt’s account of the history of the book, a history in which the human hand plays a part (a hand that in reaching out fi nds something assumed to have been lost), we also have Michel Serres’s Th e Birth of Physics ([1977] 2000) infl uenced by Gilles Deleuze’s Th e Logic of Sense ([1969] 2001), which off ers a philosophical interpretation of the prior-ity of ancient materialism. Both of these texts make the history of thought “swerve” by acknowledging the matter of the swerve. In the area of scholarship often named as “the new materialism” Lucretius has been given a place as a writer who shows us how matter is the site of agentic potential as we can witness in Jane Bennett’s Th e Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) as well as Vibrant Matter (2009). And in queer theory too, for example, in Jonathan Goldberg’s Th e Seeds of Th ings (2009), we can fi nd Lucretius, written about in this case through the lens of Serres and Bennett, as a way of rereading the matter of sexuality and gender in Re nais sance texts.

18. I will return to the matter of stones (and why stones matter in the history of will) in the conclusion of the book.

19. Augustine makes this comparison in relation to human sin: better to sin freely then not to sin unfreely.

20. For educational treatises, I would include both core texts in educational philoso-phy (in chapter 2, I discuss the work of John Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and James Mill) as well as more pop u lar educational manuals written for parents as well as children. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of these manuals focused on the problem of willful children: examples include Alice Price, A Willful Young Woman ([1887] 2009); Helen Sherman Griffi th’s Her Willful Way: A Story

Notes for Introduction 209

for Girls ([1902] 2009), and Henry Marcus Cottinger’s Rosa, Th e Educating Mother ([1887] 2009). All of these books are now available to contemporary readers as they can be ac-cessed via Google Books and have been reprinted using optical character recognition software. Th ey have been valuable in giving me a sense of how far the fi gure of the willful child (in par tic u lar the willful girl) traveled. I have not been able to decipher the extent to which the texts were distributed and read during this period and have thus not developed my argument through readings of them. It is important to my argu-ment about how willfulness came to matter to engage with materials that reached wide audiences.

21. Observant readers might note that I do not work with George Eliot’s most cel-ebrated novel, Middlemarch, even though it tells the story of another willful heroine, Dorothea Brooke, who ends up (pun probably intended) marrying a character Will. With thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for being such an observant reader! I have worked with the texts that captured my interest; and Daniel Deronda’s willful hero-ine, Gwendolyn Harleth, I found much more compelling as a character, and one who seemed to have more to say to Maggie Tulliver in my imaginary conversation between willful girls.

22. I would agree with John Smith that the relative absence of the will as a theme within feminism can be related to the kind of subject “the will” has been assumed to belong to. At the same time, feminists in refl ecting on the gendering of will have off ered another way of conceiving of willing as a social activity. See chapter 2 for discussions of the gendering of will. I am indebted to John Smith’s detailed historical work on sexual-ity and the will in chapter 3 of this book.

23. Th eodor Adorno was thus able to associate the triumphalism of Nazism directly to the concept of the will: “A will, detached from reason and proclaimed as an end- in- itself, like the will whose triumph the Nazis certifi ed in the offi cial title of the party’s congresses, such a will, like all ideals, that rebel against reason, stands ready for every misdeed” ([1966] 1973, 272). No one who has seen the Nazi propaganda fi lm, Triumph of the Will (1935, directed by Leni Riefenstahl) could fail to note the sharpness of Adorno’s critique. A well- known and astute reading of Riefenstahl’s “fascinating fascism” is of-fered by Susan Sontag (1974).

24. It is noteworthy that some of the strongest critics of the will (as metaphysics of the subject in the case of Nietz sche, or as the reduction of freedom to sovereignty in the case of Arendt) have ended up retaining rather than giving up a concept of will. In Arendt’s case, this can be seen in her commitment to will as a discovery; in Nietz sche’s case, through how he employs the will to understand the motors of history: the will to power.

25. For other stories that used this motif see “Th e Hand from the Grave,” a collection compiled by D. L. Ashliman (1999/2000) http:// www .pitt .edu /~dash /type0779 .html. Accessed January 29, 2014.

26. With thanks to Izzy Isgate whose response to a Facebook post on poisonous pedagogy helped me come up with this sentence.

27. Th e concept of “sweaty concepts” is inspired by the work of Audre Lorde. In the corpus of her work, Lorde creates concepts in or through a description of how it feels to inhabit this body, in this world, to “withstand” that world (see my conclusion for a discussion of “withstanding” in relation to skin and stone). I have been so energized

210 Notes for Introduction

by her example, and in following Audre Lorde, I also want concepts to show the bodily work of their creation: concepts can be made to sweat when we bring them back to the bodies. Indeed, when a concept comes back to the body it might transform how we inhabit bodies. Sweaty concepts might also be understood as concepts that are diffi cult, that demand we work hard to work with them.

28. With thanks to Flavia Dzodan for her question after I gave a lecture on willful-ness in Amsterdam on January 20, 2012, which led to this formulation.

29. My appreciation to AnaLouise Keating who posted this quote in response to a Facebook status update, and whose encouragement to reread Borderlands led me further along a willfulness trail, just as I was beginning to feel the trail had become exhausted.

30. I fi rst worked with this idea of “desire lines” in Queer Phenomenology (2006, 19). My own writing has been a desire line, a wandering away from the offi cial paths laid out by disciplines. Not inhabiting a discipline can be an invitation: it can give us the freedom to roam.

Chapter One. Willing Subjects

1. I should note that another passage from Augustine is more typically compared to Descartes’s method insofar as it is off ered as a refutation of skepticism: “Th ey think that by not acknowledging they are alive they avoid error, when even their very error proves they are alive, since one who is not alive cannot err” (Th e Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 20.27). If the will becomes certain, it is perhaps because doubting will becomes evidence of having a will to doubt. And perhaps becoming certain of will is also about becoming alive to error.

2. Heidegger’s critique of will as metaphysics is in fact a critique of Nietz sche’s concept of “the will to power” and off ers the most explicit reading of the history of metaphysics as a history of will. As Bret W. Davis describes, for Heidegger, “the history of metaphysics not only completes itself in the modern metaphysics of will, from the beginning the project of metaphysics was in this sense a project of will” (2007, 13). Th e use of the will in Nazism provides the historical context for Heidegger’s critique of the will. In Heidegger’s “Conversation on the Country Path about Th inking,” the Scholar says to the Teacher he wants “non- willing,” which means being “willing to renounce willing” ([1959] 1969, 59). Heidegger off ers more than a critique of the metaphysics of will: he tries to get beyond the very bind of will. Although Jacques Derrida did not tend to write explicitly on the will, his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence in Of Grammatology ([1967] 1997) could be read in these terms. Derrida also off ers a way of rereading Nietz sche as not participating in the metaphysics of the will, as Ernst Behler (1991) has suggested. Doing the research for this book has also made me aware that many of the writers working in the mid- to late nineteenth century who contributed to what we might call “a psychology of the will,” some of whom I consider in the following chapter, also off ered strong critiques of the metaphysical will. Henry Maudsley begins Body and Will by arguing against the model of will as “essentially a self- procreating, self- sustaining spiritual entity, which owns no natural cause, obeys no law, and has no sort of infi nity with matter” (1884, 1). He then adds: “What the metaphysician has done is plain enough.” He “has converted into an entity the general term which embraces the