A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction
In a new book titled Wild Things: Queer Theory After Nature, I develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity and extinction. Wildness in no way signals the untamed frontier, or the...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University Library System, University of Pittsburgh
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/853 |
| _version_ | 1797987758136885248 |
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| author | Jack Halberstam |
| author_facet | Jack Halberstam |
| author_sort | Jack Halberstam |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | In a new book titled Wild Things: Queer Theory After Nature, I develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity and extinction. Wildness in no way signals the untamed frontier, or the absence of modernity, the barbarian, the animalistic or the opposite of civilization. Rather, in a post-colonial and even de-colonizing vein, it has emerged in the last few years as a marker of a desire to return queerness to the disorder of an unsorted field of desires and drives; to the disorienting and disquieting signifying functions it once named and held in place; and to a set of activist and even pedagogical strategies that depend upon chance, randomness, surprise, entropy and that seek to counter the organizing and bureaucratic logics of the state with potential sites of ungovernability and abjection. Wildness signifies in my project in a number of different ways, but here I use the framework of “abjection” to explain some of the appeal of wildness and a few of the ways in which it expresses relations between the unnamable, the excessive, horror and death. Later on, I will turn to a set of performances and art projects that are deliberately auto destructive and that collectively imagine the end of the human. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-11T07:53:13Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-da7eeaf0c0b24c3fb9cfd613a60b691c |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2155-1162 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-11T07:53:13Z |
| publishDate | 2018-12-01 |
| publisher | University Library System, University of Pittsburgh |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy |
| spelling | doaj.art-da7eeaf0c0b24c3fb9cfd613a60b691c2022-12-22T04:36:02ZengUniversity Library System, University of PittsburghJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy2155-11622018-12-0126261410.5195/jffp.2018.853667A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and ExtinctionJack Halberstam0Columbia UniversityIn a new book titled Wild Things: Queer Theory After Nature, I develop a new critical vocabulary to access different, transdisciplinary ways of thinking about race, sexuality, alternative political imaginaries and queer futurity and extinction. Wildness in no way signals the untamed frontier, or the absence of modernity, the barbarian, the animalistic or the opposite of civilization. Rather, in a post-colonial and even de-colonizing vein, it has emerged in the last few years as a marker of a desire to return queerness to the disorder of an unsorted field of desires and drives; to the disorienting and disquieting signifying functions it once named and held in place; and to a set of activist and even pedagogical strategies that depend upon chance, randomness, surprise, entropy and that seek to counter the organizing and bureaucratic logics of the state with potential sites of ungovernability and abjection. Wildness signifies in my project in a number of different ways, but here I use the framework of “abjection” to explain some of the appeal of wildness and a few of the ways in which it expresses relations between the unnamable, the excessive, horror and death. Later on, I will turn to a set of performances and art projects that are deliberately auto destructive and that collectively imagine the end of the human.http://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/853kristeva racesexualityfuturityextinctionabjection |
| spellingShingle | Jack Halberstam A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy kristeva race sexuality futurity extinction abjection |
| title | A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction |
| title_full | A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction |
| title_fullStr | A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction |
| title_short | A Frightful Leap into Darkness: Auto-Destructive Art and Extinction |
| title_sort | frightful leap into darkness auto destructive art and extinction |
| topic | kristeva race sexuality futurity extinction abjection |
| url | http://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/853 |
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