Sound Bite
"Daemon in the Sanctuary" explores the uncanny contradiction between the phenomenological experience of home as a site of nurture and security and the empirical reality that people are far more likely to be hurt and even killed in their own homes by their intimates, rather than at the hands of strangers.Moving from the syrupy tributes of the god of love in Plato's "Symposium" to the subject of domestic violence appears to be a giant leap, but he author shows that embroidered romantic ideas about love prepare the initiate poorly for the reality of intimate connection. Poets and philosophers who lead us to believe that love is heaven sent can leave us craving an extreme experience.We crave an earth-shaking, life-altering intrusion on our tranquility as evidence that love is real. Thus the naive initiate can easily mistake the flutter of the pulse, the quickening of the heart rate, the flush, the confused emotions, and the painful longing as signs of the god's gift. But these are also the signs of fear!
About the Book
Edmund Husserl, oft-named the 'Father of Phenomenology,' affirms the prior nature of phenomenological experience, explaining that even the 'objective' scientist is first of all a 'subject' who derives from subjective experience the data that form the building blocks of the edifice of 'objective knowledge' Husserl's argument shook the foundations of philosophy, making nonsense of the clever analytical manipulations that previously constituted philosophical method and spawning a whole new lineage of philosophical inquiry for the understanding of truth as the 'lived experience' of human subjects.In 'Daemon in the Sanctuary', Wendy C. Hamblet, herself a philosopher in the phenomenological lineage, wonders about the truth value of phenomenological experience, through the lens of the problem of intimate violence. If Husserl is right and phenomenological method provides the ground of all empirical truth, then what is to be made of the fundamental contradiction between the lived experience of home as a site of nurture and security and of intimates as guardians and caretakers, and the empirical fact, evident in every human society, that people are far more likely to be harmed, and even killed, in their homes or in the homes of their intimates and at the hands of those charged with their care.Hamblet carefully choreographs a dance between the two opposing 'truths' to expose how the lived sense of home, colored by ideals, can tint people's expectations about intimate connection and cloud their ability to recognize the signs of intimate abuse. This book illuminates the dangers and pitfalls of unhealthy intimacy and offers a regimen for loosening the grip of a sickened love's pathological hold.
Table content
Chapter One. Dinner with the Daemon 5 Chapter Two. The God Falls from the Heavens 19 Chapter Three. The Ambiguous Roots of Homespace Love 24Chapter Four. The Ambiguous Logic of the Homespace 31 Chapter Five. The Nature of Homespace Violence 43 Chapter Six. The Nurture of Homespace Violence 57 The Ritual of the Hunt 65 The Ritual of the Scapegoat Murder 71 The Ritual of Rebounding Violence 76Chapter Seven. Phenomenal Truth versus Systemic Reality 86 Chapter Eight. Systems within Violent Systems 110Conflict Theory in a Nutshell 115 Conflicted Social Realities 116 Industrial Societies 116 Simple Communal Societies 121 The Models Bleed Together 123Chapter Nine. The Shame of Homely Violence 129 Chapter Ten. What's Eros Got to Do with It? 138 Chapter Eleven. What's Shame Got to Do with It? 149 Chapter Twelve. Philosophical Treatments for the Sickly Daemon 157 Chapter Thirteen. The Psychotherapist's Daemon 169 Chapter Fourteen. Healing the Sickly Daemon 172 Chapter Fifteen. Resituating the Daemonic Medium 191 Selected Bibliography 201
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