ABSTRACT
Experience is one of the most problematic of philosophical terms. It has been dismissed as a mere veil over the underlying truth of nature, and as the refuge for a kind of brute philosophical materialism. Its unproblematic affirmation has also been criticized on the basis that it assumes a shared set of values anchored in a universal and distinctively human subject. The championing of experience as a useful philosophical category is also often taken to assume the possibility of an authentic relation between self and world. Indeed, it is precisely the impossibility of this co-incidence that a range of post-structural thinkers have sought to place at the centre of philosophical and, indeed, ethico-political thinking. Moreover, as Giorgio Agamben (2007) has observed, various social, cultural and technological developments have eroded the stability, translatability, and authority of experience as a reference point for everyday life. For Agamben then, ‘the question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgement that it is no longer accessible to us’ (2007, 15). Experience, at best, is something that can only be approached asymptotically.
