Anaesthetics of Existence

Anaesthetics of Existence

Essays on Experience at the Edge

  • Author: Heyes, Cressida J.
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9781478007814
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781478009320
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2020
  • Month: May
  • Pages: 190
  • Language: English

“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.

  • Cover
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • One. Foucault’s Limits: Experience at the Edge
  • Two. Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media
  • Three. Down and Out: Temporality after Discipline
  • Four. Anaesthetic Time
  • Five. Child, Birth: An Aesthetic
  • Coda
  • Notes
  • References
  • Index
  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F
  • G
  • H
  • J
  • K
  • L
  • M
  • N
  • O
  • P
  • R
  • S
  • T
  • U
  • W
  • Y

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