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?

JEAN-LUC NANCY is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. Among the most recent of his many books to be published in English are Corpus, Listening, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, and Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body (all Fordham).