Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire by J. Jack Halberstam

Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire Reviews

• 
  R.J. Gilmour

  Halberstam's book Wild Things looks at the relationship between our ideas of desire and wildness. It is a sophisticated text filled with a range of examples ranging from Maurice Sendak's, Where the Wild Things Are to the film, Life of Pi. Halberstam's writing is always intersectional, showing the relationship between colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia and how categories of the other and wildness are created by those who write these texts. The book is important for anyone interested in categories of desire.
  
  "This book takes the wild instead as an epistemology, a terrain of alternative formulations that resist the orderly impulses of modernity and as a merging of anticolonial, anticapitalist, and radical queer interests." x
  
  "The wild, I learned too late, is not a place you can go, a site you can visit; it cannot be willed into being, left behind, lost or found. The wild limns our experience of time and place, past and present, and beckons us to a future we will never know." xii
  
  "Wild Things makes the case for considering modern sexuality as a discursive force that runs in several directions at once-toward the consolidation of self within the modern period, away from the rituals and prohibitions of religious belief, and toward indeterminate modes of embodiment. In terms of what Michel Foucault called "the history of sexuality," queer bodies reenter the symbolic order through a "reverse discourse" whereby they fashion both classification and rejection into selfhood."6
  
  "Wildness is all at once what we were, what we have become, and what we will be or, even, what we will cease to be in the event of postural climate collapse...Wildness has no goal, no point of liberation that beckons off in the distance, no shape that must be assumed, no outcome that must be desire. Wildness, instead, disorders desire and desire disorder." 7
  
  "The unruly lives of the lost, the lonely, and the lunatic call their hellos from what Foucault calls "the other side of all the things that are." The wild, like nature, we could say with Foucault, can longer be good." 15
  
  "While late nineteenth century science, psychology, and literature found ways to classify new forms of human behaviour and interaction, some bodies, many bodies, fell outside of those classifications and remained in the wild, so to speak, beyond the human zoo, inexplicable, discomforting, shocking, exploitable, displayable. This language of wildness, zoos, expertise, scientific observation, and the definitional capture of forms of embodiment, however, describes a larger orbit of exclusion and fetishistic fixing than that of the genteel and aristocratic world of Stephen Gordon and Oscar Wilde." 24-25
  
  "As Fanon articulated, Blackness, on account of its very specific relation to property, has been situated as a realm of "value," to use Lindon Barrett's terminology, that limns enlightenment principles with their negative reflection. Not simply the slave to a master nor darkness to light, Blackness, within a white imaginary, must be pressed into the service of negation itself." 26
  
  "It also demonstrated how necessary an institutive connection between Blackness and wildness might be fore the legitimation of state violence." 27
  
  "Bewilderment, the process of becoming wild by shedding knowledge (as opposed to becoming civilized by acquiring), offers both escape and madness, desire and disorder." 31
  
  "It is within the epistomologies established by colonial encounters, by colonial brutality, and by a colonial will to know that the wild is established as a space of otherness, of primitive anteriority, and as Indigenous knowledge ripe for the taking. In its encounter with imaginary wild people, the colonial project confronts very different understandings of body, life, magic, science, value, and resources and attempts to eliminate them wielding the tools of ethnography (writing indignity into the past), law (legislating possessive investments in land and resources), and guns (eradicating what could not be fixed)." 38
  
  "And so, Taussig's book itself cannot escape the binary it challenges, and too often Taussig himself, like so many other writers who attempt to immerse themselves in the idiom of an imaginary otherness (Conrad, just to give the most obvious example), actually reproduces the colonial terms of encounter within which a wild other embodies the unknown, the magical, and the antidote to the ills of Euro-American cultural values." 39
  
  "When Marlow descended into the heart of darkness, he found the savagery he went to confront in the form of Kurtz, the colonial administrator who has not simply "gone native" or wild but who has, in his managerial madness, transacted the precise terms of what Taussig calls "the colonial mirror of production"..."The terror and the tortures they devised mirrored the horror of the savagery they both feared and fictionalized." 42
  
  "Queer wildness, accordingly, inherits this ambivalence that inheres to the mirror of colonial production-it always runs the risk of reproducing the terms that it seeks to displace." 46
  
  "Like Taussig, Byrd describes a mirroring relation between settler colonial discourses and the epistemologies they come to destroy. And, so, Byrd uses the notion of "cacophonies of colonialism" (xxvii to describe the contradictory materials levied by colonial masters against other civilizations in the form of the Native peoples they are about to conquer. Colonialism, for Byrd, is a violent clash of cultures, systems, and peoples that "creates shockwaves that ripple outward from the collision in time, space and popular culture" (xxvii)...While the colonial narrative wants to smooth out the dissonance of cacophonous encounters by vertically projecting violence, noise, and savagery onto the other and claiming a rational certitude for itself, Byrd makes cacophony into a horizontal landscape of cultural collision. And so, what the colonizer cannot understand, what he is bewildered by, becomes the source of chaos and noise and represents a chaotic world of ungovernable peoples-exactly the mis-en-scene of The Rite." 69
  
  "Rosenberg reminds us that the difference between animals we love and animals we eat is not about companionship, but about capital." 122
  
  "And that, furthermore, the same systems of classification invented by Carl Linnaeus to know and master the so-called natural world produced, at the same time, a shadow system of classification for the unnatural, the racially diverse, the unproductive, and the criminal." 123
  
  "Sendak saw childhood not as an experience of "sweetness and light," but as a dark experience of anger and rage as well as cruelty." 133
  
  "If Frankenstein's monster represented an early nineteenth-century fear of hybridity and untrammelled scientific experimentation, not to mention concern about multitudes and the power of feminine creativity, by the end of the nineteenth century it was the vampire that came to stand for, all at once, popular unrest, threats to national identity posed by immigrant populations, forms of perverse sexuality, and new forms of capitalism that sucked the life out of everything...The popularity of the metaphor of the zombie, not to mention zombie films and TV shows, evidences deep anxiety in contemporary Euro-American culture over things that refuse to dies, on the one hand, and things that occupy the realm between life and death, on the other other. As medicine seeks to extend life beyond the body's actual capacity-think pacemakers for example-and as debates over abortion remain intractable over the status of the unborn child in relation to the category of life, the boundary between life and death becomes porous in new ways. In addition, the daily news of disappearing species, of new viruses and threats to complex ecosystems, puts the larger category of life into question and raises the possibility that earth is already in a zombified condition of living death." 148
  
  "And the pet, I will propose, is only the latest creature we have rendered as a prosthetic extension of our mortal bodies. As an accessory, a fetish, an improper object of love and intimacy...the pet is a zombified figure of the blurred boundaries between life and death in contemporary culture." 150
  
  "Contemporary obsessions with zombie forms, like nineteenth century obsessions with vampires, recognizes in this monstrous form the end of era, and if the era in question at the close of the nineteenth century was a form of capitalism, as the twenty-first century mints its own monstrous symbolism, the end it imagines is not of an era, but of the human itself." 173
• 
  Margaryta

  REVIEW FORTHCOMING IN Ancillary Review of Books
• 
  matty creen

  Great
  
  Like al of Halberstam’s works since and includingThe Queer Art of Failure, this was engrossing to read and dissect. Most likely it will take a rereading for me to fully grasp the ideas presented here.
• 
  Dwight Davis

  Halberstam conceptualizes queerness as wildness, as the refusal of clean categories, as the drive to unbuild our world and float in the wildness of an unknowable future still being built. Really loved this with the exception of the weird anti-pet shit.
• 
  Ana-Cristina Santos

  Brilliant and engaging, as always.