Obstinacy as resistance: Sara Ahmed's political approach

To be able to speak about obstinacy, Sara Ahmed needs to develop a genealogical reading of the will, and it is there that she encounters a poisonous pedagogy that seeks to channel it into good will, that which leads to desiring in a correct way.

In essence, what Sara Ahmed does in Obstinate Subjects (Bellaterra Ediciones) is consider and describe processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation in relation to the ways in which the will is directed. Here, the British author returns to her figure of the killjoy feminist , which is another way of describing obstinacy, as an attitude that disrupts an established idea of happiness.

Between the subject and power, the will is inscribed as a defining characteristic of the subject and indicates its relationship of autonomy or domination. In this framework, the will enters a psychoanalytic dimension, understanding that it is something that does not completely belong to us, since in different contexts it becomes a device for intervening in subjects' behavior in an almost invisible way.

From the self-help techniques mentioned by Ahmed (which transcend the individual to take on broader political dimensions) as technologies that call for the development of willpower and that stimulate guilt by convincing subjects that it is their lack of will that prevents them from achieving their goals, to the variants of social adaptation that involve assimilating one's own will to that of the group, Ahmed understands that there is a propaganda against stubbornness.

In authors such as René Descartes and John Locke , Ahmed finds a dimension of error in the will, an errant, deviant capacity to which the British academic (who was a professor of Cultural Studies and Race at the University of London ) assigns the category of queer. In stubbornness, there is a power of not as a way of recognizing the perverse restlessness of the will and transforming it into a figure. Ahmed observes that stubbornness is a trait carried by a few and wonders how to generalize this stubbornness. It is here that the author moves from a philosophical dimension to a political (or micropolitical) style. Entering into the history of the will, to borrow an expression from Marx, is a way of settling into subordination as a condition of survival.

Ahmed sets out to create an archive of stubbornness, a compilation of behaviors by stubborn individuals that are clearly exceptional. Stubbornness manifests itself through an action or a succession of actions . Ahmed understands that remaining stubborn is what makes the difference because just as there are a series of customs linked to assimilating the general will, entering the chain of stubbornness requires the creation of other forms to be repeated.

While the formation of subjectivity is a central theme of this book translated by Javier Sáez del Álamo , the British writer also seeks to depersonalize stubbornness, just as the will, as a common logic, is depersonalized because its aspect is lost in the amount of predictable behaviors that make social life possible. At this point, one might wonder whether it is precisely stubbornness that establishes a subject as a being capable of disregarding, or at least dissenting from, this general norm and raising a difference.

When Ahmed mentions Antigone , he points out that she is not a person stubborn about burying her brother, but rather that the act of burying him, which involves disobeying the king's prohibition, requires stubborn behavior to be carried out. Stubbornness is the consequence of an action that emancipates itself from the will to obey in order to create a new will (deviant or queer, in Ahmed's terms).

To distance the subject from the general will (which could be understood as inertia or lack of will), the philosophical task that Ahmed proposes as a response to the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling , who considered that there was no subject other than the subject of will, requires experience. Questioning the view of the will as that which motivates an action leads her to think of the will in phenomenological terms. Especially because, if we return to a logic closer to psychoanalysis, there is not one will but several that engage in battle both within the subject and in social life.

Willpower is the attribution upon which desire is tied. Both Hannah Arendt and Edmund Husserl point out that it is there where intentionality is generated as the impulse that seeks to concretize what is desired. For Arendt, willpower presupposes an "I can" that is not guaranteed. In willpower, there is an individual political stake that transforms into obstinacy. It is in this mutation that Ahmed points out that willpower is identified with happiness and obstinacy with the characterization of a killjoy. One element that discourages obstinacy is the danger of being excluded from the possibility of happiness. There is emotional work (which is political) to remove attraction from the figure of the obstinate person.

That power, which Max Weber defined as the capacity of an actor to carry out their will over the resistance of others, requires more primal mechanisms to exist so that the will they wield is understood as a desire forged in each subject. The author, who was director of the Center for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths , uses this approach to consider gender violence from another perspective, especially the issue of consent. Many women can accept and say yes because they know that opposing, expressing their refusal, could mean a level of danger or violence they are not in a position to confront. Denying the mechanisms that lead to the construction of a will that acts against one's own interests means dismissing the construction of subjectivities in political life.

“Listening to cases where saying yes implies strength but isn't experienced as strength” is a task that can be applied not only to address gender-based violence but also when considering social configurations. “The consequences of not wanting what someone wants you to want can be unbearable,” Ahmed points out, explaining that educating the will can be a means of political and emotional pressure.

From this analysis, a method could emerge for thinking about the structure of the new right and popular support. There was once a way to break that will, to align the subject with what "others want them to want." In this configuration, where desire can be the most alien and alienating, it is necessary to intervene in one's own will.

The processes of desubjectification seek to reduce people to their instrumentality. Obstinacy is what allows them to differentiate themselves and recover their subjectivity. But here, the fundamental thing is the acquisition of actions and their repetition as a mechanism that changes the entity of the subject, and thus, what is produced is also the decomposition of an order. Ahmed seems to want to reach the matrix of politics hidden within each person.

The stubborn part of the social body is often the sick part, that unstable organ that doesn't respond to appropriate behavior, that doesn't harmonize but rather stands out for its monstrosity, because it goes beyond its function and goes in another direction. Along these lines , Ahmed reads discourses on immigration as that stubborn social component that refuses to adapt, that remains faithful to the customs and practices of its country of origin. It is there that citizenship, as a technology of the general will, becomes visible.

The political style that emerges from reading Obstinate Subjects is linked to abandoning the will to obey. While it may seem overly basic, what is interesting is this call to return attention to the mechanisms of obedience in a context where the idea of freedom (or its illusion or fantasy) is another form of acceptance of domination. By proclaiming insistence as political grammar, Ahmed calls for a reflection on what has been naturalized.

What Ahmed observes is that this discourse of will also inhabits progressive sectors , especially around critiques of identity politics. Ahmed responds by saying that grouping oneself around particularities is a refusal to be guided by the will that has acquired general recognition. But she is also proposing an obstinacy that could be the negative of power, as Michel Foucault argued when he argued that "there is no power without resistance" and recognized that this phrase was a tautology. Ahmed believes that to escape the general will, obstinacy must be transformed into a gift that can be passed on to others. A kind of contagion linked to the body rather than to a form of consciousness or an organization of rebellion. For the British author, one learns in those actions where "a body that manifests itself turns the city into a body."

She is a researcher and writer specializing in feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism. In her works, she uses the tools of feminist theory to analyze mechanisms of oppression and discrimination in everyday life and institutional contexts. To address these situations, Ahmed has coined the figure of the killjoy feminist, with whom she identifies, who symbolizes someone who tirelessly speaks out against discrimination, harassment, or oppression protected by the status quo. She is the author of books such as Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Routledge, 2004), and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006). In Spanish, Bellaterra has published Vivir una vida feminista (Living a Feminist Life ) (2018), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2019), and What's It Good For? (2020) and Stubborn Subjects (2024). Until 2016, she directed the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths College (University of London), a position she left in protest at the university's poor handling of sexual harassment complaints.