How to Sleep

Matthew Fuller has composed a revelatory and brilliantly original book. This richly insightful and multifaceted work will be indispensable reading for anyone concerned with the increasingly urgent problem of sleep. -- Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA
Where do you fall when you fall asleep? Out of consciousness and into a state of quasi-death, or into an unconscious form of activity? Do you withdraw from the world or get projected upon it differently? Who is the subject of sleep? Like love, sleep makes us creative and vulnerable at the same time. It is a democratic state, yet inaccessible to phenomenological accounts: it does not even make sense to state: “I am asleep”, and yet sleep deprivation is torture. Arguing passionately that sleep is both our posthuman, animal core and a form of power, this original volume performs a series of sleep acts, ranging from insomnia, apnea, narcolepsy, to sleep-walking, doziness, cataplexy and plain not wanting to wake up. In a brilliant combination of aphorisms, meditations, snippets of self-help and shreds of critical analysis, the book explores the bio-politics of sleep, as well as its social, psychological and aesthetic aspects. This is Matthew Fuller at his best: witty, theoretically sharp and thoroughly enjoying his inimitable flair for paradoxes. -- Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, The Netherlands