Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge. Cressida Heyes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020 (ISBN 978-1478008262)

Cressida Heyes's interesting and exceedingly original, Anaesthetics of Existence: essays on experience at the edge addresses an astonishing variety of experiences; some of these are so far on the edge, or over the edge, that they might not be considered to involve "experience" at all.The book discusses experiences on the boundary of experience, and itself pushes the boundary of what should be considered experience.Many philosophers, especially phenomenologists, have reflected upon experience, especially lived experience, but they have not thought much about non-or partly conscious experience.Experience is generally understood to involve conscious awareness, especially time-consciousness in phenomenological analyses.But Heyes addresses the fact that "…some things happen to us, but don't seem to count as experience…" (20).She goes beyond asserting that certain experiences are disregarded, dismissed, and devalued-something long noted by feminists.Rather, Heyes asserts that some events are not considered to constitute experience at all because they are not, or are only partially, conscious.Heyes asks "how the interruptions of consciousness can be thought for a politics of experience" (24).The book looks to "experience" that is anaesthetic in three senses (44-51): first, in terms of the lived experience of time; second, in terms of transforming the subject; and third, in coming up against the limit of oneself, notably in childbirth.All human existence includes anaesthetic experiences.For example, we have all been asleep with activity occurring in the background that we are only marginally aware of, but not totally unaware of, words or sounds that neither waken us nor are incorporated into dreams.But to say that anaesthetic experiences are universal is not to say they don't have particular valences.Regarding sleep, we might want to ask, for example, how a child might be affected by the sounds of domestic abuse even though they apparently "sleep through it."Or we might wonder about effects on the sleep of people who have no choice but to live near noisy train stations or loud 24-hour factories that they seem to "tune out."I would suggest that such anaesthetic experiences might lead to low-level anxiety that is difficult to articulate or perhaps even be aware of, but persistent, nevertheless.More important, Heyes discusses the fact that those who have been assaulted while asleep (72-73), or after having been drugged and assaulted while partly conscious, have difficulty falling asleep, difficulty finding the anonymity

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