My project on willfulness ended up being a project about parts. I didn’t start with them: they just kept coming up! Willful Subjects is full of them and the promise as well as terror of their agency.
How did this happen? I became interested in how the general will is imagined as a whole body, and the particular will, a body part. 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 secular idea. I draw 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” ( 2003: 132). Pascal argues that the will should tend toward the general, that is, it should acquire 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 ( 2003: 132,).
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 is the willful part. It is no good; it is up to no good.
The willful part is that which threatens the reproduction of an order. As Pascal further 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 only the knowledge and the love of self, what regret, what shame for its past life, for having been useless to the body that inspired its life…! What prayers for its preservation in it! For every member must be worthy to perish for the body, for which alone the whole is” (132). To be a thinking member of a body thus requires you remember you are part of a body. Willfulness thus refers to the part that in willing has forgotten it is just a part. The consequences of such forgetting are shame; the part that is ignorant of its status as part compromises the preservation of the whole.
Implicit in the drama of Pascal’s description is how the will binds memory and utility: the part in willing only the goal of the whole body must remember that body by becoming useful to that body (you can see how my research on will and willfulness led me to a project on “the uses of use”!). Explicit to his model is the intimacy of general will and what we can call general happiness. Pascal notes: “To make the members happy, they must have one will, and submit it to the body” (133). If having one shared will is deemed necessary for the happiness of each member, then failure to submit to this will compromises the happiness of the whole body. Unhappiness and willfulness embody here the same sort of threat to the “whole body.” Or to be more precise: willfulness becomes the cause of the unhappiness caused.
One could learn so much from Pascal’s mischievous foot. We might even say: his feet become rebels when they are not willing to walk or to work. The rebel is the one who compromises the whole, that is, the body of which she is a part. When we think of this “whole body” we might tend to think of “the organic body,” but we also think of how the social is imagined as like a body, as a sum of its parts. The idea of the social body has a long history. As Mary Poovey notes in her book, Making a Social Body, this idea is “historically related” to the classical metaphor of the body politic (1995: 7). She suggests that “the social body” acquired significance as a more inclusive metaphor than that of the body politic, as it gave a part to the labouring poor who had pre