Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge by Cressida J. Heyes, and: Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, and: When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence by Megan Burke (review)
- Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge by Cressida J. Heyes, and: Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, and: When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence by Megan Burke
Duke University Press, 2020, 192 pp.
Oxford University Press, 2020, 257 pp.
University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 174 pp.
What connects Heyes’s, Guru and Sarukkai’s, and Burke’s works is their shared investment in the everyday phenomenological experience of the self as the possible site and means of liberatory transformation. Each of the three titles foregrounds different dimensions that constitute the experience of gender, [End Page 258] caste, and race: their discursive and trans-discursive nature, their constitutive sociality, and their temporal determinateness, respectively. These dimensions are the prisms through which they understand experience and posit possibilities of the self ’s transformation.
In her Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (2020), Cressida Heyes focuses on everyday experiences that exceed the control of the subject’s discursive consciousness, such as states of inebriation, sleep, or mothering, to foreground their importance in transforming the subject. Ordinary or marginal as they are, these states are significant because they can become sites of immanent transformations in the mortal life of the subject.
Experiences such as “accidents,” “the violence of rape,” and “birthing,” dramatically interrupt the order of the knowledge-power axis that discursively constructs the subject’s everyday reality. These are some of the examples that may come close to the effect on the self that “epiphany” produces, a phrase used to describe a religious experience of immediate comprehension that fundamentally alters the subject’s relationship with itself (Heyes 45). Heyes calls these “anaesthetic” experiences. Analogous with the Heideggerian concept of “boredom,” the significance of these inactive and hence unproductive states lies in the fact that they “(that) add nothing to the project of temporally extending our self-concept to facilitate an account of agency built on sedimented experience” (Heyes 105). Because these states are fundamentally inactive, these are paradoxically more amenable to the transformation of the self in a direction not charted out by the dominant (neoliberal) temporalities. Junk time, for instance, is a “time of frozen present and a withdrawal from organized future” (Heyes 106), and falling asleep in a culture that normalizes constant wakefulness is the surrender of self-sovereignty. For Heyes, these liminal nonsovereign states are promissory of secular epiphany (Heyes 117). As inactivity is predicated on the surrender of the autonomous will and rational subjectivity that liberal ontologies demand, these states disturb and alter the terms upon which the individuals must exist and function in the world.
The sociopolitical condition of “anaesthetic experiences” is located in the next few chapters in the heterogeneous experiences of withdrawal of consciousness or ego that accompany sexual violence, racist attacks, consumption of junk food, and birthing. The contemporary postdisciplinary nature of the political economy combines the sense of urgency and making fair use of the time that discipline fosters with anxious anticipation of the future. On the one hand, the economy demands an active and productive self. On the other hand, the “future is determined by bio-power that continually tries to “eat away” the attempts at creating alternative worlds” (Heyes 87). In such a situation, the idea of an active subject, freely choosing her project proves to be inadequate. As discussed above, in such an economy what is potentially subversive is a practice of withdrawal. Heyes discovers a correlation for this kind of resistance in the [End Page 259] Spinozist concept of “conatus,” which refers to the act of enduring or persisting in one’s being. The other correlative is found in Saba Mahmood’s (2005) usage of the Arabic term sabr, which connotes a disposition of patient withdrawal from active resistance and opposition (Heyes 93).
The fifth chapter tries to bring together all the threads from the previous...
