THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY: sleep as a trope in sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics

Robert Hughes

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Sleep is shown to be important for our understanding of Sloterdijk’s project as an index of his subject’s larger, hidden complex of inertias, habits, and corporeal requirements and processes that dominate subjective life and that exist outside the mastery of ego and consciousness. The essay explores this thesis by considering a series of figures that appear in Sloterdijk’s writings and interviews: the philosopher Heraclitus with his dismissive remarks on sleep, the insomniac Emil Cioran, the sleepwalker in Romantic thought. As the essay develops, it shows how, given such a subject formation, anthropotechnics is properly conceived as a management of the subject’s automatic processes to trick or repurpose or redirect them to work in concert or coincidence with the anthropotechnical project, rather than against it.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)142-155
Number of pages14
JournalAngelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
Volume26
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Keywords

  • Sloterdijk
  • anthropotechnics
  • corporeality
  • sleep
  • subject

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Cultural Studies
  • Philosophy
  • Literature and Literary Theory

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