Ideologies of Experience

Treating 'experience' as an ideology, Bowker analyzes why experience is so popular and influential, how it relates to trauma and trauma theory, and what it tells us about our political and cultural condition.

Matthew H. Bowker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY. His work applies psychoanalytic and literary-critical approaches to topics in political philosophy.

1. Introduction 2. Experience, Failure, and Thinking 3. The Incorporation and Transmission of Traumatic Experience 4. Misunderstood and Repeated Experience in Le Malentendu 5. Experience and Control in Higher Education 6. Aloneness and its Opposites 7. Hikikomori: Deprived, Isolated, and Disfigured Selves 8. 'Natural' Experience and the State of Nature