Browsing Scholarly Works by Author "Zack, Naomi"

Zack, Naomi Frankowski, Alfred Frankowski, Alfred 2012-10-26T04:07:59Z 2012-10-26T04:07:59Z 2012 http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12463 The Cassandra Complex is a work in the traditions of critical philosophy and psychoanalysis. In The Cassandra Complex, I examine the intersection of violence, racism, and mourning. I hold that analysis of this intersection gives birth to a critical view on the politics of memory and the politics of racism as it operates in its most discreet forms. What makes violence discreet is that it escapes identity or is continually misidentified. I call that structure of violence that escapes being identified as such "White violence" and argue that this structure of violence undermines our normative ways of addressing racist violence in the present. This creates a continual social pattern of misidentification, mistaken memory, and mistaken practices of thinking about the violence of racism, both past and present. The present form of this misidentification could be called post-raciality, but it is specific to how we understand and remember our own history of anti-Black violence. I argue that post-racial memory produces memory only to facilitate forgetting and thus is only seen as a social pathology in the public sphere. The term "Cassandra Complex" provides an identity for the type of social pathology that appears at the critical edge of political discursivity. From the analysis of this social pathology, I argue that aesthetic sorrow, allegorical memory, and a sublime sense of mourning disrupt the normative functioning of the social pathology. Indeed, I argue that aesthetic sorrow makes the present strange by making the politically unbearable aesthetically unrepresentable. This sense of loss constitutes its own history, appearing first as an aesthetics of anesthesia, then as a memory that is also an amnesia. Thus, I hold that a robust notion of allegory that can be translated into the public sphere as a way of exposing the degenerative effects of post-racial memory. Moreover, I hold that allegory allows for a social analysis of those political conditions that make public that which has gone silent. I argue that an understanding of the political significance of that continual movement of silence is the task of understanding the present form of violence in the post-racial. en_US University of Oregon All Rights Reserved. Anti-Black racism Immanuel Kant Memorials Post-racial Walter Benjamin W.E.B. Du Bois The Cassandra Complex: On Violence, Racism, and Mourning Electronic Thesis or Dissertation

Zack, Naomi Fourlas, George 2014-10-17T16:13:17Z 2014-10-17T16:13:17Z 2014-10-17 http://hdl.handle.net/1794/18506 Divisiveness routinely turns violent, thus making research into alternative means of dealing with conflict an urgent necessity. This dissertation focuses on the politics of divisiveness and the techniques of conflict transformation. In this, I offer a robust and operable theory of reconciliation. I argue that reconciliation is the first principle of justice. In this sense, the ideal of justice is enacted through the improvement and coordination of social-political relations, which requires the development of trust and institutions that facilitate the ever emergent demos. This is not to suggest that alternative approaches to justice, such as distributive models, are useless or wrong. Rather, justice requires a consensus which cannot be realized when persons see their neighbors as enemies. In conflicts, activities that benefit the enemy Other, such as the redistribution of wealth, will be taken as an injustice by other embattled social groups. As I demonstrate through various cases, interpersonal and institutional responses, like redistribution, often escalate discord and rarely create a shared sense of justice. Thus, conflict becomes a cyclical and multilevel problem. I explore how we can better respond to the cycle of conflict at individual, social, and systemic levels, in order to realize a legitimate notion of justice. I use an interdisciplinary approach to defend my arguments, drawing on iv philosophy and conflict resolution (CR). CR is an emerging field that emphasizes practical responses to conflict, often with advocacy for reconciliation. However, more theoretical work needs to be done to explain the ideal of reconciliation that directs CR practices. Within philosophy, little work has been done on the topic of reconciliation. A vast literature exists on the topic of justice, but this literature offers few practical descriptions of how persons come to agree upon the terms of justice. Thus, theories of justice are often labeled as 'ideal' simply because they are disconnected from the fragmented and conflict-ridden reality most people experience. This dissertation, as a project in non-ideal political theory that is empirically informed by cases and concerns in CR, fills these gaps in both philosophy and CR. en_US University of Oregon All Rights Reserved. Conflict Transformation Critical Theory Ethics Justice Political Theory Reconciliation Justice As Reconciliation: Political Theory in a World of Difference Electronic Thesis or Dissertation Ph.D. doctoral Department of Philosophy University of Oregon

Zack, Naomi Mendoza, Jose Mendoza, Jose 2012-12-07T23:13:24Z 2012-12-07T23:13:24Z 2012 http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12538 Recently, Christopher Heath Wellman has proposed an innovative argument that appears to resolve, at least with respect to immigration, the tension between democratic autonomy (i.e. a people's right to self-determination) and human rights (i.e. respect for individual freedom and universal equality). Wellman argues, from a traditionally liberal point of view, that a legitimate state (i.e. a state that respects human rights) is entitled to self-determination and that part of the definition of being self-determined is having the presumptive right to unilaterally control immigration. In other words, Wellman claims that a state's unilateral right to control immigration can be made compatible with liberal commitments to individual freedom and universal equality. I aim to raise a novel objection against Wellman's argument, which I hope will also challenge philosophers to think differently about the immigration issue as a whole. My position is that even if Wellman's conclusion is correct, that a state's right to self-determination can be made compatible with human rights, the presumptive right that this generates for a legitimate state to unilaterally control immigration is, at best, limited only to admission and exclusion policies (i.e. to questions about who can be let in and who can be kept out). Wellman's conclusion, however, does not hold for strategies of immigration enforcement and expulsion (i.e. to the questions about how these policies may be enforced or what sort of deportation procedures a state is justified in using). And, in fact, I argue that under Wellman's account, a legitimate state would be restricted in deploying certain strategies of immigration enforcement and expulsion. My conclusion is that with respect to immigration enforcement and expulsion strategies, the presumptive right is on the side of the immigrant and not the state. This means that if a legitimate state wishes to control immigration, it is the state who holds the burden of proof to show that not only its immigration policies but also its enforcement and expulsion strategies do not violate prior commitments to individual liberty and universal equality. This, I contend, provides a moral and political baseline justification for immigrant rights, which I refer to as a minimalist defense of immigrant rights. en_US University of Oregon All Rights Reserved. Border Enforcement Deportation Immigrant Rights Immigration Moral Philosophy Political Philosophy On Immigration Enforcement and Expulsion Strategies: A Moral and Political Defense of Immigrant Rights Electronic Thesis or Dissertation