The Fall of Sleep Jean-Luc Nancy, Translated by Charlotte Mandell $16.00 ISBN: 9780823231188 Book (Paperback) Fordham University Press 5 x 8 88 pages October 2009 Quantity:

“A truly original examination of the most universally overlooked human experience.”—Sarah Clift, "A beguiling set of reflections on a topic that has to be among those most resistant to philosophy and philosophizing: sleep. After reading Nancy, one will think differently about this enigmatic fact of life and how we talk about it."—Ian Balfour, York University "The Fall of Sleep is Nancy's most lyrical, most beautiful work. It is also acute in tracing the limits of a phenomenology of sleep: for sleep is the disappearance of the self. Yet that dark self is also the Kantian thing in itself. So proposes Nancy in his noumenology of sleep. . ."—Kevin Hart, The University of Virginia "A quarter-century ago Jean-Luc Nancy remarked that 'Sleep, perhaps, has never been philosophical.' Philosophy, after all, ruins sleep. In The Fall of Sleep Nancy explores the singularities of sleep as (among other things) an experience of freedom and a sojourn for lovers. The book is exemplary of Nancy's practice of finite thinking-thinking without concepts, categories, and other philosophical machinery. And in the bargain we have another superb translation by Charlotte Mandell."—Gerald L. Bruns, Notre Dame "What happens to the subject when sleep descends? If philosophy has always supposed consciousness, what happens in the 'fall of sleep,' when intention, will, deliberation and its correlates are suspended? Nancy traces, not an absence of subjectivity, but another formation of the 'I' in this meditative text—part thesis and part reverie, as much a nocturne as a treatise—and guides us toward the province of Morpheus."—Charles Shepherdson, University at Abany, State University of New York 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). CHARLOTTE MANDELL has translated over twenty books, including several books for Fordham: Peter Szendy’s Listen: A History of Our Ears and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening. Her most recent translation is The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell.

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