More crap on the Buggers and Alterity

Something that I thought was very interesting about Ender's Game and our subsequent discussion and blog posts was our focus on the idea of destroying the other. When its ok to do so etc. That Thursday we had a discussion in my Cairo class where we discussed Seeing Like a State, which argues that notions of high modernism and all that sort of stuff. Essentially the obsession over totalizing narratives was big focus of high modernist thought. On both the left and right people got sucked into these questions of universality. If something didn’t fit inside their neatly constructed paradigms, then it was something Other and usually was ignored or destroyed.

I think when discussing Ender's Game its good to think of it through the gaze of modernist thought. Ender's Game is an interesting commentary on “seeing like a state” because that’s the gaze that nearly all the “important” people seem to take. The Bugger’s do not fit within their intellectual framework. So instead of putting more effort into understanding them, they seek to destroy them.