Anaesthetics of existence: Essays on experience at the edge
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Anaesthetics of existence: Essays on experience at the edge Cressida Heyes Duke University Press, Durham, 2020, vii+180pp., ISBN 9781478007814 Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00441-1
Anaesthetics of Existence is a boldly innovative sequel to Cressida Heyes’ earlier foray into the question of bodily agency. Heyes’ Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (2007) delivered a Foucauldian analysis of somatic normalization. Heyes argued that bodies are inescapably ‘constituted through disciplinary power’ (2007, p. 8); however, within this disciplinary frame, some bodily practices may offer a challenge to normalization from within. In particular, the book ended with the suggestion that Michel Foucault’s late work on the aesthetics of existence—an ethical ethos that implies ‘making oneself as art’ (2007, p. 2)—offered valuable insights for rethinking our agentive possibilities as embodied selves that are ‘located within a web of sometimes contradictory norms’ (2007, p. 117). The project of ‘[making] ourselves differently’ (2007, p. 135), Heyes concluded, requires that we recognize the force of normalizing powers but still critically imagine ‘possibilities for a life of greater embodied freedom’ (2007, p. 136). Anaesthetics of Existence picks up almost exactly where Self-Transformations left off, with a discussion of Foucault’s late ethics. And yet, Anaesthetics of Existence is interestingly at odds with—but not unrelated to—the earlier book’s focus on the ethical task of self-transformation. Whereas Self-Transformations examined the tension between normalizing forces and embodied resistance, this new work broaches the question of normalization through the analysis of more ‘diffuse, drifting, unpunctuated and unproductive’ (p. 22) forms of existence and modes of experiencing. Perhaps the best way to understand this point is by turning to the anecdote which opens the book. Heyes tells the story of attending a Foucault conference and of dozily mishearing a speaker repeatedly referring to ‘anaesthetics of existence’ (p. 2). The speaker, Heyes later realized, was simply speaking too fast, thereby leading Heyes to miss that she was, in fact, referring to the muchdiscussed Foucauldian concept of ‘an aesthetics of existence’ (p. 2). However, Heyes interprets this ‘productive mishearing’ (p. 2) as a provocation. ‘The ethical work of the aesthetics of existence, with its implication of making oneself as art’, 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
she writes, ‘in that moment felt grand and really tiring’ (p. 2). In fact, the lived experience of contemporary neoliberal subjects itself can be utterly ‘exhausting, ego-driven, obsessed with irrelevant choices, and abusively self-disciplining, committed to the fantasy of organizing and rationalizing a life of freedom in political contexts in which freedom is systematically denied’ (p. 7). For Heyes, the vicious self-disciplining that is required of neolibera
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