Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge

by Cressida J. Heyes

“Experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. At the same time, “the personal is political,” and one's own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. In Anaesthetics of Existence Cressida J. Heyes reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one's life a work of art, Heyes's “anaesthetics of existence” describes antiprojects that are tacitly excluded from life—but should be brought back in. Drawing on critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and she analyzes phenomena that press against those edges. Essays on sexual violence against unconscious victims, the temporality of drug use, and childbirth as a limit-experience build a politics of experience while showcasing Heyes's much-needed new philosophical method.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays

192 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2020

Reviews

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anaesthetics of Existence is that rare philosophical work that projects a new set of approaches into the future: Heyes applies feminist phenomenology, especially its commitment to interrogating embodied temporality, to states in which agency/autonomy is defunct or at least severely limited, as during sleep, intoxication, and childbirth. Her chapter on drugged rape, especially the ethical valences of such rape, will be required reading for anyone studying sexual violence. The twin chapters on postdisciplinary time and its refusals (by, say, drinking lots of wine after a long workday or spending entire nights playing video games) are part of a greater cultural movement towards checking out, towards refusing productivity (or "quiet quitting," as the media circuit has taken to calling this phenomenon), towards asserting something not quite like agency in a depleting culture of endless self-fashioning and self-mastery. Heyes's chapter on ecstatic childbirth was, in my opinion, the weakest among the bunch simply because it was too short and felt incomplete. Her descriptions of pain (as a priori futile as all descriptions of pain are) were amazingly skillful, but I wanted more sustained engagement with the meaning of such subject-splitting pain, not in the biblical "women must suffer in childbirth" kind of way, but in a feminist phenomenological sense. Are women women because of that (until very recently) non-optional pain?

Overall, Heyes is interested in what kinds of agency are possible when linear temporality is suspended, in whether passivity can authorize politically effective ways of subjectivity. I don't think she quite answered that overarching question (just as Saba Mahmood hasn't, in my opinion), but there's a lot that remains to be done. A wonderful work: clear, fresh, and erudite. Can't wait for her book on sleep!

[Dylan]

simply breathaking