Wendy Hamblet

Quantum field theory is generally accepted by the modern scientific community as the most accurate paradigm for understanding the mystery of reality. This theory revolutionizes what we know as ’matter’ and how material things are connected. But is also confirms an ancient philosophical and ethical truth: the unfathomable mystery of being. Quantum field theory demonstrates that beings be in such a manner that their composite reality evades human cognition. Quantum field theory forces a rethinking of what we mean by ’world’, ’beings’, ’existence’, and ’God’, and our assumptions about order, God, responsibility and systems of ethics

This dissertation attempts to explain the violent history of the West as a function, of the ways in which the project of identity formation is carried out in individuals and in human communities. The work suggests that the "home" site of identity formation, whatever its size and context, may assert itself in the world and over against other alien identity structures according to a "logic of domination" that was communicated in, and is bequeathed by, ancient rituals of violence that were practiced pervasively throughout the early history of Western cultures. ;Rituals of mutilation, expulsion and sacrifice were performed over centuries and perhaps even millennia in early human communities in order to draw upon ritual's perceived power to bring solidity and coherence to disordered communities. These rituals communicated a logic of domination that asserted the identity of the community on the basis of the murder or metaphorical murder of alien persons. This dissertation proposes that these rituals have bequeathed to subsequent generations, through a legacy that inheres in their matter and through the structuring of their conceptual systems, a bifurcated worldview that sees some beings as pure and some as corrupt and infectious. They may have bred in subsequent cultural formations their, logic of aggressive expulsion and their pathologies of defense that assert self-sameness on the basis of countercultural rejection. This dissertation submits that the violent history of the West and the continued explosions of ethnic conflict today may be re-enactments of these early violent performative histories

Mortal being is not being pure and simple, not posit-ive being alone, as the lived experiencesuggests it to be. Living being is always a living of mortal flesh, a living taunted by death as “thenothingness that wearies it.” This taunting doggedly pursues the living being and turns it inward inwhat Levinas terms “inter-esse.” In living its mortality, essence is always inter-esse — inside ofitself — in the for-itself of self-interest.This paper attempts to track the opening of essence from its “innocent” lived mortality, through the“thinking” awakening that brings it to an awareness of the violences entailed in its living, to itsopening as an ethical being where self is abandoned, ruptured, sacrificed for the sake of thesuffering other. This paper also addresses the larger question of what, if anything, is missing inLevinas’ account of living being. In his fidelity to a monadic view of isolated existence with itsmeaning-appropriations, is Levinas bound to maintain the “innocence” of all living beings, even intheir most vile acts against others? Can Levinas account for the ability of the existent to leap outsidehis enclosed world to effect the destructive works that we witness every day in the human world?Can Levinas, committed to the “innocence” of living being, do justice to the injustices of theholocaust that motivate his work, or to the endless parade of holocausts that mark the history of thehuman species even to the present day? Finally, this paper entertains whether Levinas’ weddednessto this view of living being as isolated self-enclosure compels him to overlook the degree to whichour meanings are preordained by the socio-politico-economic realities of our cultural contexts,whether the phenomenologist, as much as the existent, must remain blind to the powers of histories and institutions and systems to dictate the meanings that we find as the borders that give us the stable lifeworld