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Engaged in the willing of wilfulness

What does a book on the will offer to postcolonial studies? Quite a bit it would seem. The location of the will is vital to understanding tropes of wilfulness and agency, in particular; however, the casual inferences too often made by scholars regarding wilful appropriation, wilful acts, wilful desire and wilful ignorance seem to locate this somewhat esoteric and distinctly philosophical treatise as one of use to the broader field. For a wider audience this may not seem as pressing an issue, but in that they would be wrong. Across all social sciences a more nuanced understanding of the will, and in particular the affective will, is an undertaking of no small importance. Indeed it is a great challenge, here shown as such by the creativity of approach required to circumvent the established tropes and canons embedded in the debate over wilful subjects. That said there are some points of contention in the representation of will as undertaken in this book. One that immediately leaps out at the reader in the introduction to the project of providing an ‘archive of will’ (Chapter One) is in the framing of methods and logic undertaken. In these early stages there is a relationship exposed, between the will and notions of both attribution and transgression. Here the work runs a close risk, of seeming to politically reconfigure all transgression as queer. Within a literary studies context this is not, perhaps, problematic in or of itself, but in representing itself as a creative scholarly work of broader focus and relevance— perhaps in particular given the forensic justification of not philosophy as method (p 15)—it seems a little out of synch with the framing of the narrative and the objectives of the book writ large. Let us not shy away from contradictions, however, as perhaps the most powerful point of the narrative, for me, emerged from this tension, in Ahmed’s reframing of ‘willfulness as an attribution’—i.e. a mechanism for finding fault (p 19). It is in this that we are able to empirically access the dynamic of power—subjects empowered by their wilfulness—through the political, politically rebellious subjects. Whilst the archive of will opens up the possibility for reframing political subjects in a more reflexive dynamic, the realization of this promise is left for future reflections—a narrative trajectory acknowledged by the author as loosely woven threads of argument that gradually thicken the account of ‘sociality of will’ in a range of ‘social scenes’ (p 19). Where the willing subject is explored in Chapter One there is a subtle and brave blending of phenomenological and