CAP – ASTU

From what I heard this week, our ASTU class been on the topic of trauma through an article by Judith Butler, “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. I have not been in class this week because I have caught one of the worst infections I have ever experienced – STREP THROAT (search it up if you don’t know and AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS). If any of you guys know what this is, I will never take my throat for granted again because it is EXTREMELY PAINFUL to swallow even my own saliva (feels like your throat is being pricked with fish bones 24/7). Furthermore, I found out that I was allergic to the penicillin that they gave me for treatment, so I just started on a new medication.

Anyways, aside from my terrible week, I found the article by Butler to be confusing to understand and a little bit repetitive to read. But I thought her argument that the use of the human body as a “bounded kind of entity” (52) to be really interesting. She uses this point to emphasize how precarious the human life is, which also connects to her point of which human lives are deemed as valuable and which ones are not. Despite the fact that all human lives are precarious and fragile, “lives are divided into those representing …” many things such as state interventions or destruction (53). Her examples using the United States as a major player in invading and influencing other countries without provocation stood out to me because that is exactly what I am learning in history. The US has had a very unstable with its neighbour, Central and South America because it has deemed itself as a bringer of democracy to countries it deemed as illiberal and authoritarian. The US has achieved its influence through coup d’etats and by supplying certain groups that it believed would bring democracy to certain countries. For example, the coup in Guatemala of the 1930s was supported by the CIA in order to bring in a new government deemed better by the US. But during the process of all of these “liberations”, thousands of people lost their lives. This goes perfectly with that Butler says, “war is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and to maximize it for others”(54).

In my opinion, as long as any war goes on, there is always going to be alternative sides that do not agree with each other and will use one another as supporting reasons as to why certain actions (such as attacking) should be taken and why they should not. Therefore, I do not really know what solution to offer than perhaps agree with what Butler keeps repeating in her article – the fact that all humans are peculiar. I feel that fact needs to be made extremely clear, because there are a lot of stigmas attached to different groups of people (female, minorities, from the developing world, etc) but ultimately, it links back again to the idea of the precarious human body.

Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. Frames of war: when is life grievable?. Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.