hello all,

welcome back to my blog this semester! This week, my ASTU 100 class has been discussing a chapter out of Judith Butler’s book, Frames of War: When is a Life Grievable? Specifically, a chapter that we read because of it’s relevance to our discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 

The chapter, “Survivability, Vulnerability, and Affect” really put Foer’s novel in a different lens. The discussion that Butler raises about the justification of violence as either mourned or “celebrated” really got me thinking. Now, I’m not going to use my little bit of blog space to summarize her work, (it’s only 30 short, totally non-repetitive and easy to digest pages you can read yourself) but there are some points I’d like to focus on.

To start, Butler makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about what makes our human bodies our own. According to Butler, “the body is a social phenomenon: it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition” (33). She goes on to say that what really makes up our bodies is not just our hands and feet but their relation to other people. Or in the words of one of my classmates this afternoon: I’m not just female because I have all the female parts but because of how others view and treat me as female. Or something along those lines. Basically what I got from this is if we are made up of our interactions with others, maybe we should consider more deeply the kind of responsibility we all have as vulnerable, social beings.

This relates to Foer’s novel especially, in my opinion, because the book is really about the relations victims of trauma have with one another. Of course, the experiences they’ve had impact them greatly, but the main point is how they affect each other afterwards. The thing about this chapter in Butler’s book is that it isn’t just relatable to Foer, it ties in directly with the concept of being a global citizen, and even just how we see ourselves.

The last point I’d like to touch up on is the idea of violence and when is it ever okay. I never really thought of deaths as two categories before this. But it is an interesting point to think of it as “we mourn for some lives, but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (Butler 36). For example, with the attacks on 9/11, the majority of the Western world mourned those lost in the twin towers but responded coldly to those who lost their lives in the Iran and Iraq wars. Maybe it’s a bit naive to think that we can all get along if we think of ourselves as vulnerable in a way that makes us want to take care of each other and not bomb people who bomb us, but I think Butler just wants us to think of all of this in a different frame. Maybe see from a humanistic perspective before acting. Or at least look at these events from a humanistic perspective before deciding who is “us” (100% right) and who is “them” (100% wrong). In a way, I think all of the novels we’ve been reading so far in ASTU 100 is trying to do this too.

Citations 

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Boston, Mass.: Mariner, 2005. Print.

Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, and Affect.” Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print.