Presented at the Western Political Science Association, 2015. Full paper.

The centrality of sovereignty to political theory can make it difficult to isolate and analyze its role within political theory, so in this paper I will take a slightly oblique approach. I will consider one particular experiential aspect of sovereignty, namely, the feelings associated with exercising sovereignty or control, or what it feels like to exercise the will. I draw on the phenomenological or affective approach to the will in Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects to dislodge some of the assumptions political theorists make about the cluster of concepts around sovereignty and the will. This critical investigation of the contingency of the role played by the will in political theory sets the stage for a further demonstration of how thinking about affects can be helpful to political theory, looking at Sianne Ngai’s and Lauren Berlant’s investigation of affects associated with limited agency can suggest a different way of thinking about politics from approaches which center the will and sovereign agency.