Insomnia: The Politics of Sleep in Contemporary Capitalism

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.

Alexei Penzin is Reader in Art, University of Wolverhampton, UK and Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Moscow, Russia. He is also one of the founding members of the Russian group Chto Delat (＂What is to be done?＂), an internationally recognized collective of artists, writers and academics (www.chtodelat.org). Penzin is on the editorial boards of Moscow Art Magazine and Stasis Journal. He is author of Capitalism and Religion (2017) and editor of Boris Artvatov’sArt as Production (2017).