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    The Fall of Sleep
    The Fall of Sleep
    The Fall of Sleep
    Ebook51 pages36 minutes

    The Fall of Sleep

    By Jean-Luc Nancy

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    Philosophers have largely ignored sleep, treating it as a useless negativity, mere repose for the body or at best a source for the production of unconscious signs out of the night of the soul.

    In an extraordinary theoretical investigation written with lyric intensity, The Fall of Sleep puts an end to this neglect by providing a deft yet rigorous philosophy of sleep. What does it mean to "fall" asleep? Might there exist something like a "reason" of sleep, a reason at work in its own form or modality, a modality of being in oneself, of return to oneself, without the waking "self" that distinguishes "I" from "you" and from the world? What reason might exist in that absence of ego, appearance, and intention, in an abandon thanks to which one is emptied out into a non-place shared by everyone?

    Sleep attests to something like an equality of all that exists in the rhythm of the world. With sleep, victory is constantly renewed over the fear of night, an a confidence that we will wake with the return of day, in a return to self, to us--though to a self, an us, that is each day different, unforeseen, without any warning given in advance.
    To seek anew the meaning stirring in the supposed loss of meaning, of consciousness, and of control that occurs in sleep is not to reclaim some meaning already familiar in philosophy, religion, progressivism, or any other -ism. It is instead to open anew a source that is not the source of a meaning but that makes up the nature proper to meaning, its truth: opening, gushing forth, infinity.

    This beautiful, profound meditation on sleep is a unique work in the history of phenomenology--a lyrical phenomenology of what can have no phenomenology, since sleep shows itself to the waking observer, the subject of phenomenology, only as disappearance and concealment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFordham University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2009
    ISBN9780823231195
    The Fall of Sleep
    Author

    Jean-Luc Nancy

    Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’s foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

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      Book preview

      The Fall of Sleep - Jean-Luc Nancy

      1

      To Fall Asleep

      I’m falling asleep.¹ I‘m falling into sleep and I‘m falling there by the power of sleep. Just as I fall asleep from exhaustion. Just as I drop from boredom.² As I fall on hard times. As I fall, in general. Sleep sums up all these falls, it gathers them together. Sleep is proclaimed and symbolized by the sign of the fall, the more or less swift descent or sagging, faintness.

      To these we can add: how I‘m fainting from pleasure, or from pain. This fall, in its turn, in one or another of its versions, mingles with the others. When I fall into sleep, when I sink, everything has become indistinct, pleasure and pain, pleasure itself and its own pain, pain itself and its own pleasure. One passing into the other produces exhaustion, lassitude, boredom, lethargy, untying, unmooring. The boat gently leaves its moorings, and drifts.

      The pain of pleasure comes when pleasure can no longer bear itself. It’s when it gives itself up and stops allowing itself solely to enjoy [jouir]. Exhausted lovers fall asleep. The pleasure of pain is when pain insists, not without perversity, that it should be sustained, and savored even, while it grows increasingly inflamed. It’s when it revels, if only in its own lament. It doesn‘t just let itself struggle and protest against the pain; by itself it agrees to fall asleep in a way—in the sense that we say put the pain to sleep—even if it means enduring a dreadful reawakening.

      In any case, faintness and falling consist in not allowing a state to persist with the tension natural to it (a state of tension, then, that is not a state). With its tension and its intention slackening, giving up: activity into fatigue, interest into boredom, hope or confidence into distress, pleasure into displeasure, rejection of pain into morose delectation of it. Keenness becomes dull, momentum is lost, an alertness falls asleep.

      * * *

      An alertness falls asleep: that is how from all quarters we are led or led back toward the motif of sleep as soon as any kind of faintness is expressed, as soon as any renunciation appears, an abandon, a decrease or a retreat of intentionality under any of its forms.

      An alertness falls asleep, for, by definition, it is only alertness that can fall asleep. Wakefulness alone can give way to sleep, and wakefulness preserved stems from sleep refused, sleepiness refused. The sentinel must struggle against sleep, as does Aeschylus’s watchman on the roof, as Christ’s companions forget to do. Whoever relinquishes vigilance relinquishes attention and intention, every kind of tension and anticipation; he enters into the unraveling of plans and aims, of expectations and calculations. It is this loosening that gathers together—actually or symbolically—the fall into sleep. This fall is the fall of a tension, it is a relaxation that is not content with an inferior, limited degree of tension but that sinks down toward an infinitesimal proximity to degree zero: until that underlying closeness to simple inertia that we know in the bodies of sleeping infants, which we sometimes recognize when on the edge of sleep we can feel that we are beginning to stop feeling the basic energy of our bodies. We feel the suspense of feeling. We feel ourselves falling, we feel the fall.

      * * *

      We fall from sleep into sleep: sleep is itself a force that precedes itself and that carries

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