How should we think about the relationship between subjectivity and experience? In Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), Cressida J. Heyes approaches this question through interrogating the apparent limits of experience found in unconsciousness—including sleep; forms of “checking out”—including general anesthesia and a glass of wine; and childbirth. Using genealogy and critical phenomenology grounded in feminist theory, Heyes approaches the project of conceptualizing agency through an interrogation of things that affect us, that happen to us, that we fall into, and undergo, but that are at the limits of experience and what can be said about it.

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