The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy by Simon Morgan Wortham (review)

In The Poetics of Sleep, Simon Morgan Wortham, author of numerous books on Derrida, including The Derrida Dictionary and Derrida: Writing Events, undertakes the task of claiming sleep as a field of considerable intellectual relevance. The book begins by engaging work on sleeping and dreaming in neurobiology, and offers a discussion that in part addresses the relegation of sleep to the domain of the physiological—an object of Wortham’s criticism throughout are certain crudely physiological understandings of sleep that reject entirely any psychic dynamic in dreams. Yet Wortham’s chief focus is on a philosophical discourse of sleep, one that has informed our most contemporary thought on the topic both directly and otherwise.

Beginning with Plato, who claims that “Asleep … a man is useless” (3), Wortham notes a proclivity to think of sleep as other, as subordinate in various ways to the normal, waking consciousness of a willful subject. Sleep has generated an anxiety which has led to the desire to limit, restrain, or even eliminate it, and it is largely this process of the othering of sleep that Wortham’s book is concerned with. Wortham’s substantive engagement with individual thinkers begins with Aristotle, and it is characteristic of the largely deconstructive approach he takes throughout. Aristotle partitions waking life from sleeping life on the basis of sense perception, which is present in the former and recedes in the latter. Yet he also suggests that the organ of sense perception appropriates sleep as something other than itself for its own purposes. Wortham notes, “in a move that is absolutely crucial within Aristotle’s argument and indeed the philosophical legacy it bequeaths, ‘sense-perception’ does not just apply to one side of the binary opposition between waking and sleep, but instead organizes both terms” (19). On this reading of Aristotle, sleep supplements sense perception, and Wortham teases out the implications of this supplementarity, noting a deconstructable relation already at work between sleeping and waking life. He proceeds to address thinkers including Kant, Hegel, Freud, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, and examines their various engagements with sleep. By demonstrating the plasticity of the concept “sleep,” and its intricate relation to notions of subjectivity, Wortham shows how a host powerful thinkers and styles of thought have dealt with its indeterminacy. In discussing the diverse ways in which it has been thought of in relation to the somatic, and the diverse ways in which it has been thought of in relation to consciousness, Wortham illustrates how variously sleep has been constructed.

Wortham calls his project a “poetics” of sleep to identify his line of inquiry as one that takes process, production, and making as its starting point. In emphasizing the creativity that inheres in philosophical practice, he effectively questions some basic assumptions of the thinkers he addresses. Wortham thus conceptualizes his project as a meeting ground of the philosophical and the poetic. He notes, “The term ‘poetics’ … is to be found at a certain crossroads, between philosophy and literature perhaps …”(15). Wortham thus claims to draw no sharp distinction between the two; indeed his work features an engagement with Beckett, Blanchot, and Celan, alongside a philosophical lineage that runs, as his title specifies, from Aristotle to Nancy, or one might even say, from Plato to neuroscience.

Wortham’s book fruitfully and suggestively explores an understudied topic, and his logic throughout is intricate yet rarely opaque. In claiming a space for sleep that encompasses but is not limited to discussions of dreaming, Wortham effectively illustrates a certain dismissal or subordination of sleep, and shows how protean the concept has been. In drawing attention to various omissions or dismissals of sleep, to a marginalized figure like the somnambulist, or even to marginal comments—like a crossed out footnote in Kant’s Anthropology—Wortham looks to claim a space for sleep by reading it from the margins. Wortham’s familiarity with the Derridean corpus enables him to draw on a variety of deconstructive ideas...