The fall of sleep / Jean-Luc Nancy; translated by Charlotte Mandell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nancy, Jean-Luc.

Standardized Title:

Tombe de sommeil. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sleep--Psychological aspects.

Sleep.

Dreams--Psychological aspects.

Dreams.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (63 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Translator's Note

The Fall of Sleep

To Fall Asleep

I'm Falling Asleep

Self from Absence to Self

Equal World

"To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub..."

Lullaby

The Soul That Never Sleeps

The Knell [Glas] of a Temporary Death

The Blind Task of Sleep

Notes.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786612699115

9780823238422

0823238423

9780823260201

0823260208

9781282699113

1282699113

9780823231195

0823231194

OCLC:

647876457