Wendy Hamblet

What is it that permits us to see others as 'evil'? This book argues that it's our epistemological framework, which also resituates our own moral compass and reframes our moral world such that we can justify performing violent deeds, which we would readily demonize in others, as the heroics of eradicating evil. When conflict is understood positively as the confrontation of differences, an unavoidable and indeed desirable consequence of the rich tapestry of earthly life, then a discussion can open as to how to navigate the countless confrontations of difference in the most skillful way. Through this lens, violence comes into view as the least skillful means of responding to, and working with, difference, since violence tends to 'rebound' and leaves both victims and perpetrators worse off—shameful and vengeful. Philosopher Wendy C. Hamblet argues that the radically polarized and oversimplified worldview that sorts the phenomena of the world into 'good guys' and 'evil others' is a framework as old as human community itself, and one that undermines people's own moral infrastructure, permitting them to take up the very acts that they would readily demonize as 'evil' in others. One's own violent responses to the human condition come to be reframed from unskillful and undesirable actions to valiant heroic reactions. In short, those who see 'evil' in others are far more likely to do 'evil,' resorting to the least skillful means for navigating difference—violence. In theory, violence is demonized as 'evil' in popular and criminological discourse and calls forth 'rebounding' like responses in the form of acts of vengeance in individuals and punitive responses in state institutions. However, punishment is itself defined as an 'evil' inflicted by a legitimate authority upon a wrongdoer in compensation for a wrong done. This leads to the conundrum that the state, as much as the vigilante, must necessarily undermine its own legitimacy by taking up the very acts that it deems as evil in its enemies and punishes in its deviant citizens. By reframing conflict positively, Hamblet introduces a new way of thinking about difference that allows the reader to appreciate (rather than tolerate) difference as a desirable feature of a multicultural, multi-religioned, multi-gendered world. This resituates the discussion of conflict such that conflict response styles can be viewed as more and less skillful means of navigating impasses in a world of differences.

This paper considers the use of myth in the Platonic dialogues. It seeks to demonstrate that Plato takesup the task of rewriting the old myths, not in order to clarify the real truth about ancient tales, but to make thosetales serve higher—ethical—ends. Thus Plato makes a valiant effort to replace the old "truths" in order to displaceand overcome ethically dangerous assumptions in the old tales. But I shall demonstrate that, despite the changesin mythical content, the old tropes endure in the new form and the dangerous elements of myth persist. Theelements of myth that I consider to be most dangerous are the motifs of "fallenness" and the irredeemably tragic dimension of earthly existence . These mythologems endure despite the new imagery that seeks to overcome them and they continue to breed a "nostalgia" of loss and tragic origins. This is the archaic infection that I see as the spawning ground of ritualistic patterns of human behaviour that are essentially violent. The infection is sublimated but carried alongin new contextual forms in Platonic myth, concealed but dynamically present. The persistence of these dangerous elements, in my reading, signal the failure of the Platonic project of purification—a failure most clearly evidenced in the tragic character of Eros and in the impotence of the philosopher in the city—indeed in Socrates' being ever atopos with regard to the city and missing even from the lofty perches reserved for the philosopher and the lover . There is no place forSocrates—for the truly just and good man—in the real cities down under the heavens. No place for him in theupper world of lofty contemplations. Without him, wealth and power and honour will ever rule the human scene and justice will be the ideal of simple fools.1That is the essential tragedy of the human condition as it re-emerges in the Platonic corpus

Mortal being is not being pure and simple, not posit-ive being alone, as the lived experience suggests it to be. Living being is always a living of mortal flesh, a living taunted by death as “the nothingness that wearies it.” This taunting doggedly pursues the living being and turns it inward in what Levinas terms “inter-esse.” In living its mortality, essence is always inter-esse — inside of itself — 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 its opening as an ethical being where self is abandoned, ruptured, sacrificed for the sake of the suffering other. This paper also addresses the larger question of what, if anything, is missing in Levinas’ account of living being. In his fidelity to a monadic view of isolated existence with its meaning-appropriations, is Levinas bound to maintain the “innocence” of all living beings, even in their most vile acts against others? Can Levinas account for the ability of the existent to leap outside his 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 the holocaust that motivate his work, or to the endless parade of holocausts that mark the history of the human species even to the present day? Finally, this paper entertains whether Levinas’ weddedness to this view of living being as isolated self-enclosure compels him to overlook the degree to which our 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.

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

In The Sacred Monstrous author Wendy Hamblet traces the historical and social fact of violence through the work of Girard, Bloch, Lorenz and Burket. She takes up the charge advanced by social theorists, anthropologists and others that violence is steeped in our being; it pervades our generations and is imbedded in the ethos of our modern institutions. Hamblet's discussion of human history re-frames our understanding of how violence works in history and society. The Sacred Monstrous is a salient work of continentally informed philosophy that contributes significantly to any discussion of violence and conflict in the social sciences

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

This paper reconstructs the deficiencies of formal democracies to explain the internal injustices of the modern state, the self‐righteous swaggering foreign policy of Western powers, and the dangerously over‐simplified, polar logic characterizing the war rhetoric of the modern era. In a brief tour through the non‐liberal tradition of democratic thought, drawing connections between the tragic mythological origins of Western understandings of self and world, the paper attempts to demonstrate that a failure to find alternate, healthier means of value‐creation has caused Westerners, in their constructive identity work, to adhere themselves to their systems with a ritualized, ‘religious’ fervour. Legitimacy in the world becomes, in the final analysis, a simple matter of might. The possession of firearms and bread render self‐sanctifying myths legitimating aggressions on the argument of ‘good’ powers fighting the battle against ‘evil’ contaminants.