When Thinking Stops

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's Art as Production (2017).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction. “I used to say I had troubles sleeping, then I realized I had more troubles with wakefulness” Chapter 1. A Symptomatic Exclusion of Sleep in Philosophy1.1. A Critique of Oneiro-centricism and a New Space for Research1.2. Isolation and Potentiality: Two Primary Models1.3. Descartes: Sleep, Madness and Sceptical Argument1.4. “…Life could not maintain itself for an instant”: Sleep and Dream in Kant1.5. Hegel: Sleep, Subjectivity and the Absolute1.6. Freud: “…essentially a problem of physiology.”Chapter 2. Sleep and Subjectivity2.1. The "Ontological Meaning of Sleep" (Lévinas)2.2. The Singularity of the Sleeper in Some (Uncommon) Examples of Contemporary Thought2.3. Sleep, Wakefulness and Vigilance Chapter 3. Rex Exsomnis: A Political Theology of Sleep and Vigilance3.1. “The Great Awakening”3.2. A Vigilance Complex in Philosophy?3.3. Non-Sleeping Sovereign (Rex Exsomnis)3.4 "…sans (t)rêve et sans merci": Sleep and Awakening in Walter Benjamin’s WritingsChapter 4. Sleep in Capitalist Modernity4.1. The Question of Sleep in Das Kapital and the Concept of the “Natural Barrier” in the Grundrisse4.2. Non-Sleeping Society4.3. The Limit of the Social4.4. Cultures of Sleep and Industries of NightChapter 5. (An)aesthetics of Sleep5.1. “Sleeping Beauty”: A Political Theology in Fairy Tale5.2. Sleeping Sonata: Art of Sleep Under Communism5.3. “Is the Worker Asleep?” From Warhol to Contemporary Art5.4. Sleep as the Possibility of ArtworkConclusion. Vigilance of Being Itself? An Ontological HypothesisBibliographyIndex