Hello, everyone,

I feel like the time was elapse fast that is again for me to take on our class blogger.（You might never seen my previous blogs because I wasn’t in this class last term). In the past week, we had gone through the work “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” by Judith Butler, which sounds like a philosophical script when I tried to digest words from it. However, some of our classmates went back to our first week of reading on Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and comes out with some new perspective on the terrorist attack.

I believe every bloggers in our class have done a great job in each of your blog, but I didn’t have time to read through them one by one. First blog that draw my interest is Kennedy who comments on Butler’s question which ask for what does it means to be human? He then answer the question with a cosmopolitan view which I strongly agree that humanity is despite the border of nation-state, who don’t come from the same background doesn’t mean we can deny the fact he also a human. Through Butler’s lens, Kennedy also identified some actions the American government took that reveal the hypocrisy under the mask of freedom from their constitution. By also discuss on Butler, in Isaiah’s journal he takes a deeper look on the concept of “dehumanize” which basically claimed when you feeling threaten by someone, you will not perceive he as a human being . He  exemplified with the event of Holocaust, which is when Nazi Germany seems the genocide of Jewish as an statistic. This example, let me recall my history teacher while I was in high school once quotes a (in)famous sentence by Joseph Stalin, “The death of one men is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic ”. When I rethinking this “dehumanizing” phrase, is kind of true when it applies to many historical artificial atrocities which reveals the brutal and cold-blooded (political/military) figures just like Stalin himself.

Two another people I had looked at are focusing on the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”. One query arouse since I finished the novel is why the story doesn’t seems much relevance with 9/11 attack, and some of us do debate on their blogs. Erin argues that the experience of Oskar does not engage with public mourning after the attack happened. He is upset on his American identity because he discover more footages and facts from foreign websites them the domestic television channel. It suggests that many American media had modify the images that will eventually go to public views in order to promote the value of American exceptionalism and formed the wave of Islamophobia. Coming next, In Inneke’s blog, instead of dig down to the historical trauma of 9/11, she compares the movie played in 2012 with the actual novel. I felt similarly when I was watching that touching movie although it abandoned much of the grandparents part.However it does shown me the visual contexts that I couldn’t form by only reading the words which improve my understanding when I browsed the book later on.

In the end, I want to say that I had receive many unique insights about both the novel and Butler’s opaque essay after read all of the intellectual talks you made. During this blog posts, I saw lots of opinions that are resonate to me and hopefully I will see more amazing thinkings that will compelling me to read and comment in future.