Cressida J. Heyes, "Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge" (Duke UP, 2020)
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What is the central question Cressida Heyes explores about subjectivity and experience?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. I'm co host of the channel, along with Carrie Figdoor, Robert Talise, and Alexis McLeod. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Cressida J. Hayes, HM Tory Chair in the Political Science Department of the University of Alberta. Her book, Anesthetics of Existence Essays on Experience at the Edge, is just out from Duke University Press. How should we think about the relationship between subjectivity and experience?
In Anesthetics of Existence, Hayes approaches this question through interrogating the apparent limits of experience found in an 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. Hayes 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. Cressida Hayes, welcome to New Books. Thanks, Sarah. It's a pleasure to be here. Um so will you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your background as a philosopher um and also how you got into this project?
Sure. Um
I have a uh very interdisciplinary background, so I did my first degree in Oxford, which is uh where I grew up as well actually. And so I did philosophy, politics and economics. Um and then I moved to North America very early because I got scholarships to go to grad school. Where I ended up doing a PhD in philosophy at McGill University, which is a uh an analytic department. So I I mentioned this educational history partly because one of the things that's a bit quirky about my life as a philosopher is that I started off being trained in the analytic tradition and I wrote uh my first book, which was actually my dissertation, was in feminist philosophy, but it was on Wittgenstein. And the style and the
pr approach of that book were very much uh analytic. And then after doing that work I sort of became interested in Foucault partly with my other hat as a political theorist on. And when I started working on my second book, I I knew that I wanted to say something about Foucault's work. And then I sort of realized that he was a philosopher working in traditions that I knew very little about. And so I started trying to retrain myself as a continental philosopher. And that's really hard.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question Cressida Heyes explores about subjectivity and experience?
0:00–9:14
2
How does Heyes trace her interdisciplinary journey from analytic philosophy to feminist phenomenology?
9:14–17:54
3
What are the “limits of experience” Heyes investigates through sleep, anesthesia, and childbirth?
17:54–25:35
4
How does the book combine genealogy and phenomenology to analyze unconscious sexual violence?
25:35–34:43
5
What is “post‑disciplinary time” and why does it matter for feminist theories of agency?
34:43–42:55
6
How does Heyes describe “anesthetic time” in the context of working motherhood and cheap wine culture?
42:55–50:29
7
Why does Heyes argue that childbirth can be an anesthetic experience and a limit case for philosophy?
50:29–58:32
8
What future projects does Heyes envision after Anaesthetics of Existence, especially regarding a feminist philosophy of sleep?
58:32–1:01:43
Speakers
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