Insomnia: The Politics of Sleep in Contemporary Capitalism

by Alexei Penzin, Matthew Fuller (Editor), Andrew Goffey (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350002753
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/23/2026
Series:	Lines
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alexei Penzin is a Reader in Philosophy and Art Theory at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and an Associated Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. He has published numerous articles in such journals as Rethinking Marxism, Mediations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Crisis and Critique, e-flux, as well as in many edited collections. His essay Rex Exsomnis was part of the dOCUMENTA13 series (2012). Penzin edited and authored an afterword for the Russian translation of The Grammar of Multitude by Paolo Virno (2013), and co-edited the English translation of the book Art and Production by Boris Arvatov, one of the key theorists of the Soviet Avant-garde (2017). He is one of the founding members of the group Chto Delat (“What is to be done?”), an internationally recognized collective of artists, writers and academics. Penzin is also a member of editorial boards of the journal Stasis (Saint-Petersburg) and the Moscow Art Magazine. Currently, he is preparing a monograph on sleep and capitalist modernity for Bloomsbury Academic.

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is co-author of Evil Media (2012), Editor of Software Studies: a Lexicon (2008) and co-editor of the Journal Computational Culture.

Andrew Goffey is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communications at Middlesex University, UK.

Table of Contents

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