The Ethics of Survival, or Notes Toward Jerusalem

<p>“The Ethics of Survival, or Notes Toward Jerusalem” argues that modern institutional “reason”—across psychiatry, law, political economy, philosophy, and history—often functions as illogic: a grammar that performs rationality while enforcing conditions that foreclose relation, survival, and breath. Rather than treating these regimes as discrete, the dissertation traces a shared genealogical structure in which classification becomes governance and epistemological categories harden into ontological demands. I name this structure the diagnostic imperative: the demand that persons render themselves coherent and transparent in order to be recognized as intelligible, worthy, or eligible for care. In this way, epistemological criteria of clarity and legibility harden into ontological demands about what a person must be in order to count. Against this demand, I develop a counter-diagnostic ethics in which silence, hesitation, guardedness, and detachment appear not as deficits but as forms of moral intelligence forged under duress. Operating within a philosophical suspicion of metaphorization, I treat air, breath, resonance, and atmosphere not as figures of speech but as analytic commitments, as names for the material and historical conditions under which relation becomes breathable or coercive. Reading James Baldwin as a methodological teacher, the dissertation elaborates attuned reading as a disciplined practice of contact without capture: a mode of listening that does not compel disclosure. It advances resonance as a relational model of selfhood capable of sustaining ambiguity without collapsing difference into coherence. The dissertation’s central methodological contribution, phronetic poetics, reframes ethical judgment as atmospheric discernment formed within fracture rather than above it, privileging restraint, pacing, and the ethics of remaining over procedural certainty. The final movement turns explicitly to pedagogy and clinical ethics, arguing that the classrooms and consult rooms are atmospheric sites where legibility is trained through participation norms, documentation, and evaluation. I propose a pedagogy of atmosphere that trains perception rather than extracting confession, honors opacity as relation, and reorients time toward truce rather than compliance. This dissertation concludes by naming “willing Jerusalem” as a political and pedagogical horizon: a practice of relation that refuses conquest and securitized coherence, and that remeasures justice by transforming the conditions under which coherence is demanded as the price of care.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Cultural Studies, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2026

Author dc:creator

• Soares Murta, Tiara Noel

Contributors dc:contributor

• Patricia Easton
• Dionne Bensonsmith

• Atmosphere
• Attunement
• Clinical Ethics
• Ethical Ambiguity
• Opacity
• Survival as Method
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Public Health

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1126

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-2148