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Zusatztext Westin’s much-needed exploration of the addiction experience is a thoughtful, honest, and penetrating analysis that warrants attentive reading even by those untouched by addiction or outside the therapeutic arena. Informationen zum Autor Anna Westin is Visiting Lecturer at London School of Theology and Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Klappentext Existential phenomenology can be a particularly helpful philosophical method for understanding human experience. Starting from the perspective of the subject, it can clarify and problematize subtle everyday relations, enabling greater insight into difficult situations. Used by contemporary philosophers as a way of understanding the embodied experience of illness, this method has been helpful for understanding physical illness in the medical humanities, offering a fruitful way of reading the subjectivity of mental states. An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction examines how the experience of addiction engages both mental and physical phenomena within the existence of a particular human life, using the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren Kierkegaard. The book maps out an existential phenomenology of subject-in-relation. Both Lévinas and Kierkegaard use decidedly psychological and theological language to situate their philosophy, discussing the subject through concepts of love, otherness, responsibility and hope, while played out in a situation of anxiety, suffering, desire and revelation.Combining existential phenomenological discourse with contemporary addiction discourse, Westin argues that the concept of subject as 'addict', as found in the Twelve Steps Program and disease models of addiction, ought to be replaced with the free and relational identity of subject as 'addicted'.In order to address addiction in terms of existential phenomenology, this book uses Levinas and Kierkegaard to understand this meaningful, problematic and dangerous human experience. Zusammenfassung Existential phenomenology can be a particularly helpful philosophical method for understanding human experience. Starting from the perspective of the subject, it can clarify and problematize subtle everyday relations, enabling greater insight into difficult situations. Used by contemporary philosophers as a way of understanding the embodied experience of illness, this method has been helpful for understanding physical illness in the medical humanities, offering a fruitful way of reading the subjectivity of mental states. An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction examines how the experience of addiction engages both mental and physical phenomena within the existence of a particular human life, using the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren Kierkegaard. The book maps out an existential phenomenology of subject-in-relation. Both Lévinas and Kierkegaard use decidedly psychological and theological language to situate their philosophy, discussing the subject through concepts of love, otherness, responsibility and hope, while played out in a situation of anxiety, suffering, desire and revelation.Combining existential phenomenological discourse with contemporary addiction discourse, Westin argues that the concept of subject as ‘addict’, as found in the Twelve Steps Program and disease models of addiction, ought to be replaced with the free and relational identity of subject as ‘addicted’. Inhaltsverzeichnis INTRODUCTIONI. EXISTING DISCOURSES ON ADDICTIONII. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LÉVINAS: RELIGION, RELATON AND DESIREIII. LÉVINAS: THE HOPEFUL RELATION PRECEDING FREEDOMIV. THE EXISTENTIALISM OF KIERKEGAARD: HOPEFUL EXPERIENCE AND ENTANGLED FREEDOMV. KIERKEGAARD: RELATING TO THE OTHER AS LOVEVI. LÉVINAS AND KIERKEGAARD: LOVE, HOPE AND RELATIONAL SUBJECTIVITYVII. A HOPEFUL DIALOGUE OF ADDICTION: LÉVINAS, KIERKEGAARD AND THE TWELVE STEPSCONCLUSIONBIBLIOGRAPHYINDEX...
