Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects is an interesting deconstruction of the will, in the sense that it shows how dominant understandings of the will disavow themselves, thereby creating the disparaged category of the willful. Ahmed does this by making two key separations of the will from things we usually thing of it as attached to. First, Ahmed detaches will from the subject. The will is “an experience a subject has of itself as bringing something about” (24), but that doesn’t mean that the will is simply something the subject has, in which the subject would necessarily know what their will was. Rather, Ahmed points out how will can be experienced as an internal obstacle, quoting Augustine of “having more than one will,” an internal war of will against will (28). If we attempt to identify ourselves with one of these warring internal wills, we attempt to exert our will on our will. So the experience of willing, that is, the experience of identifying ourselves with a will, “introduces a command structure: to will is to order oneself to will” (28).
This leads Ahmed to discuss how the will is separated from action:
If willing is to command to will, then willing by virtue of the command is not or not yet to carry out what is willed…. Willing is thus what a subject does – or must do – when a command has not been obeyed. (29)
We usually think of will as directed towards action, but Ahmed points out that within the concept there is this moment of suspension, that will occurs precisely when, and because, action is not quite certain. Hence, as Ahmed shows in the rest of the book, the ongoing project of delimiting the right sort of will, creating a unified and productive will whether that is training the will of the child or disciplining those outside the “general will” of the community (that is, the political role of the sovereign and unified general will is predetermined by understandings of the individual will). This opens up some quite radical possibilities for thinking about alternatives to, or reconfigurations of, the politics of the will.