Benjamin Parris. Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care

Abstract

The argument of Parris’s Vital Strife could have been simple: the surrender of Seneca’s irate Hercules to the assuaging therapies of sleep is an intertextual thread drawn in different directions but nonetheless uniting a variety of early modern texts from Jasper Heywood’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules furens (1561) to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. But it is complicated by Parris’s insufflation of intertextuality with pneuma, the breath or spirit in Stoic metaphysics which interfuses man with fellow humans, nature and the cosmos and is therefore claimed to have ethical and biopolitical significance. Part of that significance, according to Parris, is early modernity’s subversive championing of sleep against the stringent calls of Renaissance humanism for the permanent wakefulness, watch or vigil which characterized the scripturally authorized model of the pastoral king. To extol sleep was to undermine prevailing socio-political structures as well as, more abstrusely, to hoist the standard of biological normativity, here in its particular instantiation in stoic oikeôsis or care of oneself and consequently, on the panpsychic view of things, of one’s fellow humans, nature, etc.: ‘Insomnia becomes, in early modern literature, an ethical problem that makes the care for physical life a biopolitical concern’ (79).