Daemon in the Sanctuary: The Enigma of Homespace Violence

"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. 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.