Jean-Luc Nancy
The Fall of Sleep
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?