elops the argument I first offered in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000). I suggested that the key differentiation is not between us and them, but between them, between those that differences that can be assimilated into the national body and those that cannot. Some become what I called in this book “stranger strangers.” Another way of saying this: some differences become indigestible, what the nation cannot stomach.
Anti-immigration discourse thus exercises the figure of the unwilling migrant, or more specifically the migrant who is “unwilling to integrate.” To be unwilling to integrate is to be “too willing” to retain an allegiance to another body. Citizenship comes to presented what must be forced upon an unwilling and thus willful migrant. A much repeated mantra in the UK is for example that “migrants must learn to speak English. This mantra needs to be heard as such: in fact many of the English language courses are over-subscribed (with long waiting lists). The figure of the unwilling migrant participates in the transformation of citizenship into a requirement, such that the nation is “forced to force” the migrant to become willing.
So many histories at stake in the differentiation between parts! The requirement to become part is a requirement to be willing, to counter the willfulness charge.
A willful part can also be a queer part: a part that is too full of will, a part whose impulses and desires lead it astray. Perhaps willful parts queer the whole body. Decadence has been understood in terms of the pulsation of willful parts. One definition of decadence offered by the French writer Bourget and drawn on by Havelock Ellis is as follows: “If the energy of cells becomes independent, the lesser organism will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole” (cited in Ellis 1932: 52). As Havelock Ellis elaborates a decadent style would be when “everything is sacrificed to the development of individual parts” (1932: 52). A social body becomes queer, becomes decadent, when the parts have “too much will,” compromising everything: the reproduction of the whole.
Do we notice this “too much” because of what we do not notice? Parts appear as full of will when they don’t support the reproduction of a whole. They are too expressive because of what they do not express. No wonder that the self-regard of heterosexuality can be concealed under the sign of the general will, because this particular will has already been given expression in the general will. Giving up a will that does not have a general expression is what allows you to inhabit the familiar, or to recede into the background. When willing “agrees” with what is generally willed, a part becomes part of a background. When willing does not agree, the will of the part is too full: willful. Willfulness might “come up” when an act of willing does not agree with what has receded. A queer phenomenology teaches us what or who recedes in the generalization of will.
And I have no doubt that: willful parts will keep coming up.
Bergson, Henri (2002).  “Frenzy, Mechanism and Mysticism” in John Mullarkey (ed). Bergson’s Key Writings. Continuum: London. 295-344.
Ellis, Havelock (1932). Views and Reviews. London: Desmond Harmsworth.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (2003) . The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pascal, Blaise. (2003)  Pensées. Trans. W.F.Trotter. New York Dover Publications.
Poovey, Mary (1995). Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830- 1864. University of Chicago Press.
Riley, Patrick (1988). The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Robbins, Bruce (1993). The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below. Durham: Duke University Press.