Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge

"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 anti-projects 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 analyzes phenomena that press against them. 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.

Cressida J. Heyes is H. M. Tory Chair and Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Alberta and author of Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies and Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice.