Contemporary theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, have identified that an essential feature of capitalism is an uninterrupted or permanently wakeful continuity of production, exchange, consumption, communication and control. A form of enforced insomnia which keeps people subservient and compliant. This makes sleep a revolutionary act.
Insomnia ranges from the history of philosophy to contemporary 'sleep science' and cutting edge theory to provide us with a powerful philosophical and aesthetic intervention – that charts not just the problems of sleep but its revolutionary potential as a new politics of sleep. This is urgent reading for anyone trying to sleep in contemporary capitalism.
Acknowledgements
Introduction. “I used to say I had troubles sleeping, then I realized I had more troubles with wakefulness”
Chapter 1. A Symptomatic Exclusion of Sleep in Philosophy
1.1. A Critique of Oneiro-centricism and a New Space for Research
1.2. Isolation and Potentiality: Two Primary Models
1.3. Descartes: Sleep, Madness and Sceptical Argument
1.4. “…Life could not maintain itself for an instant”: Sleep and Dream in Kant
1.5. Hegel: Sleep, Subjectivity and the Absolute
1.6. Freud: “…essentially a problem of physiology.”
Chapter 2. Sleep and Subjectivity
2.1. The "Ontological Meaning of Sleep" (Lévinas)
2.2. The Singularity of the Sleeper in Some (Uncommon) Examples of Contemporary Thought
2.3. Sleep, Wakefulness and Vigilance
Chapter 3. Rex Exsomnis: A Political Theology of Sleep and Vigilance
3.1. “The Great Awakening”
3.2. A Vigilance Complex in Philosophy?
3.3. Non-Sleeping Sovereign (Rex Exsomnis)
3.4 "…sans (t)rêve et sans merci": Sleep and Awakening in Walter Benjamin’s Writings
Chapter 4. Sleep in Capitalist Modernity
4.1. The Question of Sleep in Das Kapital and the Concept of the “Natural Barrier” in the Grundrisse
4.2. Non-Sleeping Society
4.3. The Limit of the Social
4.4. Cultures of Sleep and Industries of Night
Chapter 5. (An)aesthetics of Sleep
5.1. “Sleeping Beauty”: A Political Theology in Fairy Tale
5.2. Sleeping Sonata: Art of Sleep Under Communism
5.3. “Is the Worker Asleep?” From Warhol to Contemporary Art
5.4. Sleep as the Possibility of Artwork
Conclusion. Vigilance of Being Itself? An Ontological Hypothesis
Bibliography
Index
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