Transgression and Taboo: The ‘Sleep of Reason’ and the Politics of Release?

Abstract

In this chapter I approach the politics of sleep in a somewhat different corporeal light, one in which corporeal matters of unconsciousness, if not unruliness, transgression and taboo, the dormative and the normative, loom large. Sleep, after all, as the foregoing chapters attest, may very well be disciplined or governed in various ways, but this still leaves largely open and unexplored the degree to which sleep in the final instance, qua corporeal state of unconsciousness, is amenable to discipline and governance in this way, or to put it slightly differently, the degree to which sleep as a loss of waking consciousness ultimately befuddles, confounds, defies, exceeds or in some other way resists any such attempts at discipline or governance. Sleep, that is to say, as a more or less radical albeit reversible form or severance, withdrawal or release, if not refusal or resistance, to the conscious waking rational world and the normative demands and dictates of society both ‘outside’ and ‘within’ ourselves.KeywordsLight PollutionEarly Modern PeriodRational WorldAmbulance CrewCivilise ConductThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.