rker’s body in order to be given to the body of the aristocrat. Robbins cites William Hazlitt’s essay, “Footman” from 1830, written from the point of view of the gentleman with the aim of satirizing that viewpoint: “what would be the good of having a will of our own, if we had not others about us who are deprived of a will of their own, and wear a badge to say ‘I serve’” (17). The aristocratic class rule through the will: an exercising of will that take the form of the deprivation of others of a will of their own, treating others as servers, in the case of handmaids, as hands, in the case of footmen, as feet. An unwilling servant would be “impertinent,” a word that now implies “rudely bold” but derives from the Latin for “unconnected” or “unrelated.” An unwilling servant would but a part that is not related to a whole, as the one who is unwilling to subordinate her or his will to the will of the whole.
It is an impertinent history, this history of willfulness. A willful part might be the part that has stopped working. No wonder: willfulness is striking.
So many histories are at stake in this differentiation between willing and unwilling or willful parts!
We could think also of citizenship in these precise terms: citizenship as becoming part. Of course in multicultural liberal secularism, a diversity of individual parts is permitted. A diversity of individual parts might even be encouraged but on condition that each part is willing to participate in national culture, where participation requires an agreement with a common end or purpose (see here for a reflection on conditional will). We learn the requirements of participation from those whose particulars fail to meet them. Think of how “the veil” has acquired a willfulness charge. The veil becomes a willful part, a part that refuses to take part in national culture; a stubborn attachment to an inassimilable difference.
The creation of a distinction between willing and willful parts is thus a crucial mechanism for reproducing the national body. My account here develops 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 ind