Heyes’s Responses to Readers

In this response to readers, I start by summarizing and extending Megan Burke’s comments on interrupted time in the context of houselessness and the way vulnerable people are often denied their own temporality altogether. Burke suggests that there is something called “anaesthetized time” that approaches death, and they invite the project to consider more closely the varieties of power that some have over others’ time. I relate these remarks to a political tradition in African American philosophy that Elizabeth Freeman calls thanatomimesis. In her response to the book, Talia Bettcher argues that two of the overly dichotomous framings need to be broken up: postdisciplinary and anaesthetic time, and agency and passivity. I clarify this point and suggest that these comments might point toward more generative work, including in relation to Bettcher’s own project on intimate agency. Finally Alisa Bierria relates the work of Anaesthetics to her own project on incarceration, suggesting that in addition to being denied their own time, prisoners are rendered into temporal property. This is a helpful concept that, I suggest, could be linked more clearly to Bierria’s understanding of revelatory agency and to the time of the contracted present.