“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.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. Foucault's Limits: Experience at the Edge  27
2. Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media  52
3. Down and Out: Temporality after Discipline  75
4. Anaesthetic Time  97
5. Child, Birth: An Aesthetic  125
Coda  141
Notes  147
References  159
Index   177

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