Book Review: Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, by Cressida J. Heyes

• Author: Lauren Guilmette
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211062571
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

820 Political Theory 50(5)

does the idea of state personality extend in the case of a sovereign member

state within the European Union, of which it is a member: could the EU itself

be held accountable for actions of its authorized representatives, who them-

selves are states, rather than citizens?

The common practice of holding states responsible—a key feature of

international liberal order—has long been misunderstood through a mislead-

ing analogy drawn from individual responsibility. Impressive in its breadth,

Leviathan on a Leash averts the human-state analogy trap and presents mas-

terfully a novel theory of state responsibility, where, in short, states are

responsible for the actions of their authorized representatives. As long as our

idea of state responsibility rests on a misguided form of collective responsi-

bility, we will not be able to understand properly some of the basic features

that make the international order liberal. After all, what is liberal about a

practice where all citizens collectively are made to suffer through sanctions

because of their leaders’ corruption (think, for example, of the “odious debt”

of $28 billion the Philippines owed foreign creditors after the fall of its dicta-

tor Ferdinand Marcos)? What we need, as Fleming superbly shows, is a con-

ceptual framework that can determine when to apply collective rather than

individual responsibility, and how states can be held collectively responsible.

The irony is that in order for us to leash our leviathan we need to update our

outdated understanding in the twenty-first century by a return to the seven-

teenth century.

Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, by Cressida J. Heyes.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 180 pp.

Reviewed by: Lauren Guilmette, Department of Philosophy, Elon University,

Elon, NC, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211062571

Cressida J. Heyes’s latest monograph offers a wealth of insights for feminist

political theorists and philosophers about the normative edges of “experi-

ence” in the twenty-first century, with concern for liminal experiences that

exceed, exclude, or refuse what typically counts as “experience.” Heyes is

concerned here with “all of the compulsive, numbing, addictive activities that

render working life under neoliberalism more tolerable” (7), sites of tempo-

rary withdrawal that provide a constitutive outside and a respite from the

demand to accumulate distinctive activities into a unique sense of self—that

is, to have experiences (10). The political question here is not only whose