In last week’s class, we read a chapter of Judith Butler’s Frames of War. I wanted to discuss how I felt while reading and a quote I chose for my LP group to connect in our meeting last week. In the beginning, I found myself confused about what she was trying to get at, but by the end, I thought I had a somewhat clear understanding of what she was trying to articulate in her writing. As Kendall mentioned in class, it was the type of writing where one must read more than just a page to understand. With this, I found it a little tricky to take gist notes on each page one at a time. I ended up reading the whole chapter and then going back and analyzing each page. Doing this gave me a more well-rounded understanding of each concept Butler discussed.
I found the quote, “Those we kill are not quite human and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own.” I thought this was an engaging and impactful quote. It is something that I have thought about, but I have never seen someone put it on paper like that before. It emphasizes the empathy we feel for those who are like us, whether that be a nationality or religion. I think Butler wants to highlight the impact shared lived experiences have on people as individuals and how it influences our communities and who we come to feel “responsibility” for. We see this in our everyday lives, and I think it is true that we tend to feel for those we consider similar to ourselves.
Glad to see you working through this stuff, Nina. I think one of the really impactful parts of that quote is that she is making us reckon with the fact that if we are not outraged by a loss of life, we must not have recognized it as a life at all. I think sometimes we let ourself off the hook without realizing the full impact of that idea.