AGENCY AND VOLITION are crucial concerns for feminist theory, and they underlie all of the chapters that follow. Ahmed's notion of willfulness offers a powerful way of conceiving female agency today. In this chapter, I begin by returning to the question of “becoming” raised in the introduction. I link the idea of becoming to Ahmed's willfulness, as well as to the matters of negativity, failure, and anger—this following J. Halberstam and Elizabeth A. Wilson. I then turn to an exploration of a number of literary texts that depict and manifest a range of “willful” female responses to the postfeminist, neoliberal condition. Literary texts allow for ambiguity and contradictoriness and so complement and extend feminist nonfiction and theory. Literary texts also counter the individualism and rationalism that one finds in much nonfiction, involving as they do affectivity. The encounter between reader and text itself involves a becoming that challenges instrumentalizing and individualizing discourses. The willfulness of the texts is potentially contagious.

Becoming, Willing, Failing, Refusing

I have already described “becoming” as involving a challenge to “identity.” In Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Rosi Braidotti also opposes notions of subjectivity as fixed and unified, and argues, following Deleuze, that the subject is “an affective, positive and dynamic structure.” She defines the “becomings” the subject undergoes as involving “empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness,” thereby also critiquing individualism, and by implication neoliberalism (M, 8; cf. M, 3). I have elsewhere highlighted the importance of Braidotti's “nomadic” conception of subjectivity for an understanding of ethics and suggested that it is particularly pertinent to the contemporary era. Braidotti refers, notably, to “the fictional unity of a grammatical ‘I’” (M, 22).

In Becoming Undone, Grosz similarly investigates the questions of individuation and individuality. She suggests: “The individual is a solution or response to the problem posed by intense yet incompatible forces struggling with each other.” This questioning of (individual) “identities” constitutes a challenge to certain feminist theories. Grosz stresses instead becoming, which she links to the question of “difference.” Difference, for Grosz, is not only a matter of distinctions between entities; rather, it is the driving force of things themselves. This thinking ties in with Jasbir K. Puar's ideas of affirmative becomings and of assemblages, and it means rethinking the idea of intersectionality.

Artfulness: The Question of Ion's Knowledge (536d8–541e1)

Ion has rejected the suggestion that he praises Homer simply on the basis of a mindless state without art or knowledge. Therefore, Socrates turns back to the investigation of Ion's artfulness. In the second section of the dialogue, Socrates had focused on the question of the generalizability of Ion's ability to speak well about poetry. Ion's specialization—his inability to speak well about the poets other than Homer—was there taken as evidence that he did not speak well about Homer by art. Yet Socrates never directly investigated Ion's knowledge or artfulness. Here, in the fourth section of the dialogue, Socrates turns to a more direct investigation of what (or whether) Ion knows about the substance of Homer's poetry.

Why is it important to investigate Ion's knowledge? Ion's rejection of the second speech on mindlessness implied that, in his view, his praise of the Homeric poems (as divine) was dependent on some mindful judgment or knowledge of their content. Therefore, we cannot evaluate the solidity of his praise until we determine, in the first place, what it is he claims to judge or know. We encountered the suggestion, in the previous section, that certain poems were recognized to be divine on the basis of a judgment of their nobility or their beauty. But that suggestion is ambiguous: is it a judgment of nobility, or a judgment of beauty, that enables the recognition of divinity? Moreover, despite being endorsed by Ion, the suggestion itself was made by Socrates. Does Ion himself claim to know what is noble?

This section, I will argue, is best understood as a renewed and more direct effort by Socrates to test the hypothesis that a claim to divine wisdom will be dependent on a claim to moral knowledge. Ion has rejected the possibility that he praises Homer simply on the basis of a mindless state. If he can be led to agree that some kind of amoral knowledge is the basis for his praise of Homer's poems as divine, the Socratic hypothesis will presumably be refuted.

A Late Imperial City as a Foreign Country

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” warned L. P. Hartley back in 1953. This was a radical response to the philosophical musing by Marcel Proust sometime around 1923: “The only true voyage … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.” In Hartley's formula, taking a fresh look (with “other eyes”) at a seemingly familiar object or situation means automatically turning them into artifacts of “strange lands.” This operation— which Viktor Shklovsky called “estrangement” (ostranenie) in 1917—is required to differentiate our habits of thought from an object's deeper meaning.Making the object look strange, unfamiliar, or unpredictable is necessary to study it as a phenomenon in its own right, endowed with a rationale of its own. An act of epistemological emancipation is a necessary prerequisite for free thinking about diversity, as well as for any further steps toward political and social liberation.

Overshadowed for much of the twentieth century by the dominant historical narrative centered on the 1917 Revolution as the culmination of Russia's prior development, studies of the late imperial period became a booming field only in the 1990s. Probably because of the need to legitimize this new interest in the period and in topics not limited to the revolutionary movement, the dominant mode of history writing on the Russian early twentieth century has been one of “familiarization.” The most innovative studies were discovering a bourgeois modernity, middle-class sensibilities, and mass culture in Russia very similar to those familiar from European and American history. Recognizable elements of “global modernity” helped to identify methodological approaches to studying Russian realities and incorporating them into ready historical narratives, even if through a certain revisionism.

From “Guest Worker” to “Muslim”

THIS EXCERPT, from the essay collection Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime (Who Is We? Germany and Its Muslims, 2009), by the prizewinning author and Islamic studies scholar Navid Kermani, is illustrative of the widespread exclusion of those deemed to be Muslims from contemporary Germany's collective sense of self. However, Reim Spielhaus's 2006 study suggests that this divide has not always been perceived in the same way. She notes a shift in categorization whereby the label “Muslim” began to be favored over others such as “guest worker” (Gastarbeiter), “migrant,” “foreigner” and “Turk” after 2000, the year when Germany's citizenship laws changed from jus sanguinis to incorporate an element of jus soli, and minority citizens could no longer be singled out on the basis of their passports alone. This transformation was substantially accelerated shortly afterward by the terrorist attacks committed by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. Islamist terrorism has since remained at the forefront of German consciousness as a result of the discovery that Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 perpetrators, had lived and studied in Hamburg, and also because of events such as the 2011 Frankfurt Airport shooting and the foiled plot in Hanover in the recent aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks.

In Struggle You Will Find Your Rights!

Little affected by public discourses elaborated within patrician educated circles, Russian plebeian society employed the social practice of patriarchality when in a potentially explosive cultural and political environment of competing ethnoconfessional groups, and relied on the practice of creative misunderstandings of the middle ground to expand and stabilize the sphere of intergroup cooperation. The fundamental weakness of the hold of public discourses over plebeian society, and the latter's inability to use discourses systematically as a mediator of social relations and transactions resulted in the previously mentioned persistence of carnal knowledge (not constrained solely to the sphere of sexuality, as elaborated by Ann Stoler). Explicit social gestures conveyed much of the relevant information in the language of body politics. There was a darker side to this reliance upon nonverbal modes of communication, as the most intensive meaning could be cloaked in an act of violence, including deadly violence.

Long before action directe became associated with the name of a notorious French urban guerrilla organization in 1979, the principle of direct action became dominant in the sphere of Russian mass politics that was emerging during the first years of the twentieth century. “In struggle you will find your rights!” was the official slogan of the most popular and influential revolutionary party of Socialist Revolutionaries. Despite the efforts of the factions of Russian socialist parties that were better educated and integrated in the sphere of public discourses to rely on propaganda and political education of the masses, both Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats regarded highly symbolical assassinations as the most efficient vehicle for popular mobilization. During the troubled years in the wake of the abortive 1905 Revolution, revolutionary terror overwhelmed the country. In 1906, 3,108 people were killed and wounded as a result of terrorist attacks, which averaged eight or nine casualties a day. Politics and politically motivated violence did not play a decisive role in the functioning of plebeian society, except for the periods of general strikes and armed uprisings. Rather, in their attempts to mobilize the urban lower classes for the revolution, radical political activists themselves had to intuitively rely on the language and social practices understandable to their target audience.

This book tells simple life stories of very ordinary people who found themselves in mundane situations familiar to or at least easily recognizable to everyone. The events took place just over a century ago, during the interrevolutionary period of 1905–17, in the urban landscape still largely present in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania. This illusion of closeness—spatial, chronological, and cultural—presents the main challenge in telling those life stories correctly, as stories of other people rather than our perceived knowledge of those people. Back in 1917, Viktor Shklovsky, a founding father of the Russian Formalist tradition of literary criticism, coined the concept of “defamiliarization” (literally, “estrangement”) to describe the effort to differentiate our habits of thought from an object's deeper meaning by alienating it and making the object look strange, unfamiliar, or unpredictable. The same idea was captured in 1953 in the famous dictum by L. P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” To accurately introduce the protagonists of this study and their exploits—in fact, even to identify them by some generic name as a group—we need to recognize all the foreignness of their world and the strangeness of their perceptions of it.

To illustrate the process of defamiliarization at work on universally recognizable material directly related to this study, let us briefly review the wellknown novella Mumu by the famous Russian realist writer Ivan Turgenev. Written in 1852 and published in 1854, it was included in the school curriculum in Russia for the first time in 1874, and for the past century or so has remained compulsory reading in Russian middle schools. This is the story of the exceptionally tall, strongly built, and hardworking but deaf and nonspeaking serf Gerasim. Taken from his native village, he serves at the city mansion of his landlady. At her whim, Gerasim drowns his only soul mate—the dog Mumu. After demonstrating this excessively resolute obedience, he packs his belongings and leaves for his native village, refusing to serve her any longer.

IN THIS BOOK I investigate how the literary writing of Zafer Şenocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Navid Kermani—all prize-winning contemporary German writers of varying Muslim backgrounds—intimates a sense of the divine beyond identity and ideology at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion.

Şenocak is a poet, translator, essayist, and writer of fiction whose work challenges the dualisms of East and West, male and female, and body and spirit.

Zaimoglu is a novelist, dramatist, newspaper columnist, and painter who varies his writing style and thematic focus frequently in order to explore new areas. For example, he has written in styles influenced by rap music and by the Bible, and on topics including Turkish-German ghetto culture and Martin Luther.

SAID is a native of Iran who settled permanently in Germany after the Iranian Revolution (1978–79) and writes under a pen name to avoid recognition. His poetry, fiction, essays, and radio plays often deal with the themes of exile, love, and spirituality.

Kermani not only writes fiction but also conducts scholarly research into mystical elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His literary writing, greatly influenced by mysticism, treats topics such as love, death, and everyday life.

Through an engagement with the nondualist aspects of Sufism in particular, these writers contribute innovatively to a broader German cultural trend that foregrounds religion and spirituality. The contemporary relevance of this book's focus on Islam grew as my research developed, and its subject matter continues to be the central focus of many debates in Germany, Europe, and beyond. It remains impossible to keep track of all the plots, both foiled and carried out, that have been linked to Islam and Islamism: Western reports on the Taliban gave way to a focus on Nigeria's Boko Haram; both now have been superseded by the threat of the Islamic State (IS). Islamist terrorism remains an ever-present menace, one that has created some uncanny juxtapositions for me personally: A resident of my apartment block was arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and from my desk I could see the police examining his car. The morning after I had participated in the lead panel on Islam in Germany at the annual conference of the German Studies Association of Ireland, I discovered in retrospect that the attack on the Baclan Theater in Paris had been unfolding during our conference dinner.